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The conviction that everything that happens on earth must be comprehensible to man can lead to interpreting history by commonplaces.

Hannah Arendt

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Hannah Arendt
Age: 69 †
Born: 1906
Born: October 14
Died: 1975
Died: December 4
Author
Essayist
Historian
Philosopher
Political Scientist
Political Theorist
Sociologist
University Teacher
Writer
Hanover
Germany
Johanna Hannah Arendt
Johanna Hannah Cohn Arendt
Hannah Arendt Bluecher
Hanna Arendt
Johanna Arendt
Must
Commonplace
Men
Conviction
Lead
Knowledge
History
Happens
Commonplaces
Earth
Comprehensible
Everything
Interpreting

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Metaphysical fallacies contain the only clues we have to what thinking means to those who engage in it.
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I've begun so late, really only in recent years, to truly love the world... Out of gratitude, I want to call my book on political theories Amor Mundi .
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You think that you can judge what's good or evil from whether you enjoy doing it or not. You think that evil is what always appears in the form of a temptation, while good is what you never spontaneously want to do. I think this is all total rubbish, if you don't mind my saying so.
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It interrupts any doing, any ordinary activities, no matter what they happen to be. All thinking demands a stop-and-think.
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For no matter what learned scientists may say, race is, politically speaking, not the beginning of humanity but its end, not the origin of peoples but their decay, not the natural birth of man but his unnatural death.
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power can be thought of as the never-ending, self-feeding motor of all political action that corresponds to the legendary unending accumulation of money that begets money.
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Plurality of languages: [...] It is crucial 1. that there are many languages and that they differ not only in vocabulary, but also in grammar, and so in mode of thought and 2. that all languages are learnable.
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The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday purposes amounts to certainty the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle.
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Wherever the relevance of speech is at stake, matters become political by definition, for speech is what makes man a political being.
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The ultimate end of human acts is eudaimonia, happiness in the sense of living well, which all men desire all acts are but different means chosen to arrive at it.
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The climax of terror is reached when the police state begins to devour its own children, when yesterday's executioner becomes today's victim.
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The conflict between art and politics... cannot and must not be solved.
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One of the greatest advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive.
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Men in plural […] can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and themselves.
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Could the activity of thinking as such, the habit of examining whatever happens to come to pass or to attract attention, regardless of results and specific content, could this activity be among the conditions that make men abstain from evil-doing?
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The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
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Action without a name, a who attached to it, is meaningless.
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Since one cannot educate adults, the word education has an evil sound in politics there is a pretense of education, when the real purpose is coercion without the use of force.
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There are no parallels to the life of the concentration camps. All seeming parallels create confusion and distract attention from what is essential. Forced labor in prisons and penal colonies, banishment, slavery, all seem for a moment to offer helpful comparisons, but on closer examination lead nowhere.
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For excellence, the presence of others is always required.
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