Hannah Arendt Quotes
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With the rise of Christianity, faith replaced thought as the bringer of immortality.
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Fear is an emotion indispensable for survival.
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The business of thinking ... undoes every morning what it had finished the night before.
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... the loss of belief in future states is politically, though certainly not spiritually, the most significant distinction betweenour present period and the centuries before. And this loss is definite. For no matter how religious our world may turn again, or how much authentic faith still exists in it, or how deeply our moral values may be rooted in our religious systems, the fear of hell is no longer among the motives which would prevent or stimulate the actions of a majority.
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Hitler never intended to defend ‘the West’ against Bolshevism but always remained ready to join ‘the Reds’ for the destruction of the West, even in the middle of the struggle against Soviet Russia.
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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.
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Every thought is strictly speaking an after-thought.
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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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If this practice [of totalitarianism] is compared with […] [the desert] of tyranny, it seems as if a way had been found to set the desert itself in motion, to let loose a sand storm that could cover all parts of the inhabited earth. The conditions under which we exist today in the field of politics are indeed threatened by these devastating sand storms.
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It is obvious: if you do not accept something that assumes the form of ‘destiny,’ you not only change its ‘natural laws’ but also the laws of the enemy playing the role of fate.
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The end of rebellion is liberation, while the end of revolution is the foundation of freedom.
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I'm more than ever of the opinion that a decent human existence is possible today only on the fringes of society, where one then runs the risk of starving or being stoned to death. In these circumstances, a sense of humor is a great help.
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Entirely new concepts are very rare in politics.
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It is in the nature of a group and its power to turn against independence, the property of individual strength.
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One must think with the body and the soul or not think at all.
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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.
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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.
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The blessing of life as a wholecan never be found in work.
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The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.
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In politics, love is a stranger, and when it intrudes upon it nothing is being achieved except hypocrisy.
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It is, in fact, far easier to act under conditions of tyranny than it is to think.
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When an old truth ceases to be applicable, it does not become any truer by being stood on its head.
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If it is true ... that no one has a life worth thinking about whose life story cannot be told, does it not then follow that life could be, even ought to be, lived as a story, that what one has to do in life is to make the story come true?
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... we may remember what the Romansthought a cultivated person ought to be: one who knows how to choose his company among men, among things, among thoughts, in the present as well as in the past.