Share
×
Inspirational Quotes
Authors
Professions
Topics
Tags
Quote
To act, in its most general sense, means to take an initiative, to begin... to set something into motion.
Hannah Arendt
Share
Change background
T
T
T
Change font
Original
TAGS & TOPICS
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
Something
Initiative
Motion
Begin
General
Means
Sense
Take
Mean
More quotes by Hannah Arendt
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.
Hannah Arendt
If men were ever to lose the appetite for meaning we call thinking, they would lose the capacity for asking all the unanswerable questions upon which every civilization is founded.
Hannah Arendt
The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.
Hannah Arendt
The conviction that everything that happens on earth must be comprehensible to man can lead to interpreting history by commonplaces.
Hannah Arendt
As citizens, we must prevent wrongdoing because the world in which we all live, wrong-doer, wrong sufferer and spectator, is at stake.
Hannah Arendt
Bureaucracy, the rule of nobody.
Hannah Arendt
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.
Hannah Arendt
Luck serves ... as rationalization for every people that is not master of its own destiny.
Hannah Arendt
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.
Hannah Arendt
The way God has been thought of for thousands of years is no longer convincing if anything is dead, it can only be the traditional thought of God.
Hannah Arendt
Kant ... discovered the scandal of reason, that is the fact that our mind is not capable of certain and verifiable knowledge regarding matters and questions that it nevertheless cannot help thinking about.
Hannah Arendt
[About Eichmann:] It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us - the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.
Hannah Arendt
A theology which is not based on revelation as a given reality but treats God as an idea would be as mad as a zoology which is no longer sure of the physical, tangible existence of animals.
Hannah Arendt
Every end in history necessarily contains a new beginning.
Hannah Arendt
And the distinction between violent and non-violent action is that the former is exclusively bent upon the destruction of the old, and the latter is chiefly concerned with the establishment of something new.
Hannah Arendt
thinking beings have an urge to speak, speaking beings have an urge to think.
Hannah Arendt
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.
Hannah Arendt
With the rise of Christianity, faith replaced thought as the bringer of immortality.
Hannah Arendt
Even though we have lost yardsticks by which to measure, and rules under which to subsume the particular, a being whose essence is a beginning may have enough of origin within himself to understand without preconceived categories and to judge without the set of customary rules which is morality.
Hannah Arendt
Truthfulness has never been counted among the political virtues, and lies have always been regarded as justifiable tools in political dealings.
Hannah Arendt
