Hannah Arendt Quotes
It was mathematics, the non-empirical science par excellence, wherein the mind appears to play only with itself, that turned out to be the science of sciences, delivering the key to those laws of nature and the universe that are concealed by appearances.
Quotes to Explore
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In order to go on living one must try to escape the death involved in perfectionism.
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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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For excellence, the presence of others is always required.
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Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power's disappearance.
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Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.
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Under conditions of terror, most people will comply but some people will not.
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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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Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.
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Wherever the relevance of speech is at stake, matters become political by definition, for speech is what makes man a political being.
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Total loyalty is possible only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content, from which changes of mind might naturally arise.
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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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Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.
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Poets are the only people to whom love is not only a crucial, but an indispensable experience, which entitles them to mistake it for a universal one.
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We have almost succeeded in leveling all human activities to the common denominator of securing the necessities of life and providing for their abundance.
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Loving life is easy when you are abroad. Where no one knows you and you hold your life in your hands all alone, you are more master of yourself than at any other time.
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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.
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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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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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The human condition is such that pain and effort are not just symptoms which can be removed without changing life itself; they are the modes in which life itself, together with the necessity to which it is bound, makes itself felt. For mortals, the easy life of the gods would be a lifeless life.
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Nothing we use or hear or touch can be expressed in words that equal what is given by the senses.
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Our problem today is not how to expropriate the expropriators but, rather, how to arrange matters so that the masses, dispossessed by industrial society in capitalist and socialist systems, can regain property. For this reason alone, the alternative between capitalism and socialism is false-not only because neither exists anywhere in its pure state anyhow, but because we have here twins, each wearing different hats.
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The chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility; he can never admit an error.
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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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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.