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

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Revolutionaries do not make revolutions. The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and then they can pick it up.
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We are free to change the world and start something new in it.
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The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.
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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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Mathematics, the non-empirical science par excellence . . . the science of sciences, delivering the key to those laws of nature and the universe which are concealed by appearances.
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Rage is by no means an automatic reaction to misery and suffering as such no one reacts with rage to an incurable disease or to an earthquake or, for that matter, to social conditions that seem to be unchangeable. Only where there is reason to suspect that conditions could be changed and are not does rage arise.
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Political questions are far too serious to be left to the politicians.
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In order to go on living one must try to escape the death involved in perfectionism.
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The business of thinking ... undoes every morning what it had finished the night before.
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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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Power is actualized only when word and deed have not parted company.
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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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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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Bureaucracy, the rule of nobody.
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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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No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has determined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus tyranny.
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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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Few girls are as well shaped as a good horse.
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The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.
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the fateful equating of power with violence, of the political with government, and of government with a necessary evil has begun.
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