Hannah Arendt Quotes
-
The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is a more violent world.
→ -
Every activity performed in public can attain an excellence never matched in privacy; for excellence, by definition, the presence of others is always required.
→ -
The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
→ -
Imperialism was born when the ruling class in capitalist production came up against national limits to its economic expansion.
→ -
Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it and by the same token save it from that ruin which, except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and young, would be inevitable.
→ -
Thought and action must never part company.
→ -
There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.
→ -
No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes.
→ -
There is all the difference in the world between the criminal's avoiding the public eye and the civil disobedience's taking the law into his own hands in open defiance. This distinction between an open violation of the law, performed in public, and a clandestine one is so glaringly obvious that it can be neglected only by prejudice or ill will.
→ -
The individual who has been liberated by reason is always running head-on into a world, a society, whose past in the shape of 'prejudices' has a great deal of power; he is forced to learn that past reality is also a reality.
→ -
Forgiveness is the only way to reverse the irreversible flow of history.
→ -
Freedom from labor itself is not new; it once belonged among the most firmly established privileges of the few. In this instance, it seems as though scientific progress and technical developments had been only taken advantage of to achieve something about which all former ages dreamed but which none had been able to realize.
→ -
Where all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing.
→ -
The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition.
→ -
Our tradition of political thought had its definite beginning in the teachings of Plato and Aristotle. I believe it came to a no less definite end in the theories of Karl Marx.
→ -
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.
→ -
Politically speaking, tribal nationalism [patriotism] always insists that its own people are surrounded by 'a world of enemies' - 'one against all' - and that a fundamental difference exists between this people and all others. It claims its people to be unique, individual, incompatible with all others, and denies theoretically the very possibility of a common mankind long before it is used to destroy the humanity of man.
→ -
War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford.
→ -
A functionary, when he really is nothing more than a functionary, is really a very dangerous gentleman.
→ -
I know exactly what I want to write. I do not write until I do. Usually I write it all down only once. And that goes relatively quickly, since it really depends only on how fast I type.
→ -
Legitimacy, when challenged, bases itself on an appeal to the past, while justification relates to an end that lies in the future. Violence can be justifiable, but it never will be legitimate.
→ -
Metaphysical fallacies contain the only clues we have to what thinking means to those who engage in it.
→ -
The monstrous sameness and pervasive ugliness so highly characteristic of the findings of modern psychology, and contrasting so obviously with the enormous variety and richness of overt human conduct, witness to the radical difference between the inside and the outside of the human body.
→ -
The climax of terror is reached when the police state begins to devour its own children, when yesterday's executioner becomes today's victim.
→ -
One must think with the body and the soul or not think at all.
→ -
With the rise of Christianity, faith replaced thought as the bringer of immortality.
→ -
When an old truth ceases to be applicable, it does not become any truer by being stood on its head.
→ -
Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever.
→ -
There is a strange interdependence between thoughtlessness and evil.
→ -
One of the greatest advantages of the totalitarian elites of the twenties and thirties was to turn any statement of fact into a question of motive.
→
Related Authors
-
Theodor Adorno Sociologist -
Simone de Beauvoir Writer -
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Philosopher -
Walter Benjamin Literary critic -
Friedrich Nietzsche Philologist -
-
Emmanuel Levinas Philosopher -
Martin Heidegger Philosopher -
Immanuel Kant Philosopher -
Mary McCarthy Author -
Karl Popper Philosopher -
Carl Schmitt Philosopher -
Karl Marx Philosopher -
Jean-Paul Sartre Philosopher -
Maurice Merleau-Ponty Philosopher -
Jurgen Habermas Philosopher -
Karl Jaspers Psychiatrist -
Jacques Derrida Philosopher -
Giorgio Agamben Philosopher -
Michel Foucault Philosopher