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Legitimacy, when challenged, bases itself on an appeal to the past, while justification relates to an end that lies in the future. Violence can be justifiable, but it never will be legitimate.

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
Past
Appeals
Never
Relate
Justifiable
Bases
Relates
Lies
Legitimacy
Violence
Challenged
Lying
Legitimate
Future
Justification
Ends
Appeal

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Bureaucracy, the rule of nobody.
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Equality...is the result of human organization. We are not born equal.
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There is a strange interdependence between thoughtlessness and evil.
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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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Psychologically speaking, one may say that the hypocrite is too ambitious not only does he want to appear virtuous before others, he wants to convince himself.
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every thought is strictly speaking an after-thought.
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It is in the very nature of things human that every act that has once made its appearance and has been recorded in the history of mankind stays with mankind as a potentiality long after its actuality has become a thing of the past.
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Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future, making it predictable and reliable to the extent that this is humanly possible.
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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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The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth, and truth be defamed as lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world - and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end - is being destroyed.
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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 good things in history are usually of very short duration, but afterward have a decisive influence on what happens over long periods of time.
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Politically, the weakness of the argument has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil.
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The blessing of life as a wholecan never be found in work.
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While strength is the natural quality of an individual seen in isolation, power springs up between men when they act together and vanishes the moment they disperse.
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If it is true ... that no one has a life worth thinking about whose life story cannot be told, does it not then follow that life could be, even ought to be, lived as a story, that what one has to do in life is to make the story come true?
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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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Truthfulness has never been counted among the political virtues, and lies have always been regarded as justifiable tools in political dealings.
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It belongs among the refinements of totalitarian government in our century that they don't permit their opponents to die a great, dramatic martyr's death for their convictions.
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