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The most striking difference between ancient and modern sophists is that the ancients were satisfied with a passing victory of argument at the expense of truth, whereas the moderns want a more lasting victory at the expense of reality.
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
Truth
Satisfied
Ancients
Ancient
Striking
Argument
Expense
Victory
Expenses
Difference
Passings
Differences
Whereas
Modern
Lasting
Sophists
Reality
Passing
Moderns
More quotes by 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
Courage is indispensible because in politics not life but the world is at stake.
Hannah Arendt
Ideas, as distinguished from events, are never unprecedented.
Hannah Arendt
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.
Hannah Arendt
Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within.
Hannah Arendt
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.
Hannah Arendt
Although tyranny...may successfully rule over foreign peoples, it can stay in power only if it destroys first of all the national institutions of its own people.
Hannah Arendt
Action without a name, a who attached to it, is meaningless.
Hannah Arendt
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.
Hannah Arendt
Kant ... stated that he had found it necessary to deny knowledge ... to make room for faith, but all he had denied was knowledge of things that are unknowable, and he had not made room for faith but for thought.
Hannah Arendt
It is quite gratifying to feel guilty if you haven't done anything wrong: how noble! Whereas it is rather hard and certainly depressing to admit guilt and to repent.
Hannah Arendt
The strength of even the strongest individual can always be overpowered by the many, who often will combine for no other purpose than to ruin strength precisely because of its peculiar independence.
Hannah Arendt
Factual truth is always related to other people: it concerns events and circumstances in which many are involved it is established by witnesses and depends upon testimony it exists only to the extent that it is spoken about, even if it occurs in the domain of privacy. It is political by nature.
Hannah Arendt
the rule of Nobody ... is what the political form known as bureaucracy truly is.
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
Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity.
Hannah Arendt
Absence of thought is indeed a powerful factor in human affairs, statistically speaking the most powerful, not just in the conduct of the many but in the conduct of all.
Hannah Arendt
It is a secret from nobody that the famous random event is most likely to arise from those parts of the world where the old adageThere is no alternative to victory retains a high degree of plausibility.
Hannah Arendt
Only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.
Hannah Arendt
power can be thought of as the never-ending, self-feeding motor of all political action that corresponds to the legendary unending accumulation of money that begets money.
Hannah Arendt
