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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
Lead
Knowledge
History
Happens
Commonplaces
Earth
Comprehensible
Everything
Interpreting
Must
Commonplace
Men
Conviction

More quotes by Hannah Arendt

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Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.
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Thinking withdraws radically and for its own sake from this world and its evidential nature, whereas science profits from a possible withdrawal for the sake of specific results.
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If the ability to tell right from wrong should have anything to do with the ability to think, then we must be able to 'demand' its exercise in every sane person no matter how erudite or ignorant.
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Action without a name, a who attached to it, is meaningless.
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What will happen once the authentic mass man takes over, we do not know yet, although it may be a fair guess that he will have more in common with the meticulous, calculated correctness of Himmler than with the hysterical fanaticism of Hitler, will more resemble the stubborn dullness of Molotov than the sensual vindictive cruelty of Stalin.
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Imperialism was born when the ruling class in capitalist production came up against national limits to its economic expansion.
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Legends have always played a powerful role in the making of history. ... Without ever relating facts reliably, yet always expressing their true significance, they offered a truth beyond realities, a remembrance beyond memories.
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Thought and action must never part company.
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To be free in an age like ours, one must be in a position of authority. That in itself would be enough to make me ambitious.
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The concept of unlimited expansion that alone can fulfill the hope for unlimited accumulation of capital, and brings about the aimless accumulation of power, makes the foundation of new political bodies - which up to the era of imperialism always had been the upshot of conquest - well-nigh impossible.
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A functionary, when he really is nothing more than a functionary, is really a very dangerous gentleman.
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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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... the will always wills to do something and thus implicitly holds in contempt sheer thinking, whose whole activity depends on doing nothing.
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Kant ... was also quite aware that the urgent need of reason is both different from and more than mere quest and desire for knowledge. Hence, the distinguishing of the two faculties, reason and intellect, coincides with a distinction between two altogether different mental activities, thinking and knowing.
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The defiance of established authority, religious and secular, social and political, as a world-wide phenomenon may well one day be accounted the outstanding event of the last decade.
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To act, in its most general sense, means to take an initiative, to begin... to set something into motion.
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It is in the nature of a group and its power to turn against independence, the property of individual strength.
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Power is actualized only when word and deed have not parted company.
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By its very nature the beautiful is isolated from everything else. From beauty no road leads to reality.
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The blessing of life as a wholecan never be found in work.
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