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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

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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
Call
Appetite
Upon
Questions
Ever
Asking
Every
Capacity
Would
Civilization
Men
Meaning
Thinking
Lose
Unanswerable
Loses
Founded

More quotes by Hannah Arendt

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No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes. On the contrary, whatever the punishment, once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever have been.
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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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Luck serves ... as rationalization for every people that is not master of its own destiny.
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Exactly for the sake of what is new and revolutionary in every child, education must be conservative it must preserve this newness and introduce it as a new thing into an old world.
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His [Marx's] most explosive and indeed most original contribution to the cause of revolution was that he interpreted the compelling needs of mass poverty in political terms as an uprising, not for the sake of bread or wealth, but for the sake of freedom as well.
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Poetry, whose material is language, is perhaps the most human and least worldly of the arts, the one in which the end product remains closest to the thought that inspired it.
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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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Nietzsche ... has caused [philosophers] so much confusion.
Hannah Arendt
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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.
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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 will always wills to do something and thus implicitly holds in contempt sheer thinking, whose whole activity depends on doing nothing.
Hannah Arendt
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I'm completely against [feminism]. I have no desire to give up my privileges.
Hannah Arendt
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Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.
Hannah Arendt
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Only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.
Hannah Arendt
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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?
Hannah Arendt
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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.
Hannah Arendt
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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.
Hannah Arendt
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The saving grace of all really great gifts is that the persons who bear their burden remain superior to what they have done, at least as long as the source of creativity is alive.
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... the space left to freedom is very small.ends are inherent in human nature and the same for all.
Hannah Arendt
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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.
Hannah Arendt