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Of all human activities, only labor, and neither action nor work, is unending, progressing automatically in accordance with life itself and outside the range of willful decisions or humanly meaningful purposes.
Hannah Arendt -
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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Men always want to be terribly influential, but I see that as somewhat external. Do I imagine myself being influential? No. I want to understand. And if others understand--in the same sense that I have understood--that gives me a sense of satisfaction, like feeling at home.
Hannah Arendt -
To be sure, nothing is more important to the integrity of the universities . . . than a rigorously enforced divorce from war-oriented research and all connected enterprises.
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 -
Exasperation with the threefold frustration of action -- the unpredictability of its outcome, the irreversibility of the process, and the anonymity of its authors -- is almost as old as recorded history. It has always been a great temptation, for men of action no less than for men of thought, to find a substitute for action in the hope that the realm of human affairs may escape the haphazardness and moral irresponsibility inherent in a plurality of agents.
Hannah Arendt -
Every thought is an afterthought.
Hannah Arendt -
There exists in our society widespread fear of judging…[B]ehind the unwillingness to judge lurks the suspicion that no one is a free agent, and hence doubt that anyone is responsible or could be expected to answer for what he has done…Who has ever maintained that by judging a wrong I presuppose that I myself would be incapable of committing it?
Hannah Arendt
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Truthfulness has never been counted among the political virtues, and lies have always been regarded as justifiable tools in political dealings.
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 -
Where everybody is guilty, nobody is.
Hannah Arendt -
Kierkegaard, Marx, and Nietzsche are for us like guideposts to a past which has lost its significance.
Hannah Arendt -
When we were told that by freedom we understood free enterprise, we did very little to dispel this monstrous falsehood. Wealth and economic well-being, we have asserted, are the fruits of freedom, while we should have been the first to know that this kind of happiness has been an unmixed blessing only in this country, and it is a minor blessing compared with the truly political freedoms, such as freedom of speech and thought, of assembly and association, even under the best conditions.
Hannah Arendt -
Scientific and philosophic truth have parted company.
Hannah Arendt
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No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes.
Hannah Arendt -
Nietzsche ... has caused [philosophers] so much confusion.
Hannah Arendt -
Lacking the truth, [we] will however finds instants of truth, and these instants are in fact all we have available to us to give some order to this chaos of horror.
Hannah Arendt -
The rule of Nobody ... is what the political form known as bureaucracy truly is.
Hannah Arendt -
The insight that peace is the end of war, and that therefore a war is the preparation for peace, is at least as old as Aristotle, and the pretense that the aim of an armament race is to guard the peace is even older, namely as old as the discovery of propaganda lies.
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 adage"There is no alternative to victory" retains a high degree of plausibility.
Hannah Arendt
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It belongs among the refinements of totalitarian government in our century that they don't permit their opponents to die a great, dramatic martyr's death for their convictions.
Hannah Arendt -
The fateful equating of power with violence, of the political with government, and of government with a necessary evil has begun.
Hannah Arendt -
For the possibilities of being different from what one is are infinite. Once one has negated oneself, however, there are no longer any particular choices.
Hannah Arendt -
What I cannot live with may not bother another man's conscience. The result is that conscience will stand against conscience.
Hannah Arendt