543 Quotes by Hannah Arendt
- Author Hannah Arendt
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The danger of exchanging the necessary insecurity of philosophical thought for the total explanation of an ideology and its [worldview], is not even so much the risk of falling for some usually vulgar, always uncritical assumption as of exchanging the freedom inherent in man's capacity to think for the straight-jacket of logic with which man can force himself almost as violently as he is forced by some outside power.
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In the eyes of the Jews, thinking exclusively in terms of their own history, the catastrophe that had befallen them under Hitler, in which a third of the people perished, appeared not as the most recent of crimes, the unprecedented crime of genocide, but, on the contrary, as the oldest crime they knew and remembered.
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There may have been something identical about the way she fell prey to fear and to longing, namely, the act of falling prey to something, of being trapped in a craving--that fixation on a single thing, when the empty gaze forgets multiplicity or, taken over by craving and passion, considers nothing else. But that longing may also have opened up empires for her, strange, colorful empires she was at home in and could love with the living bliss that never changes.
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It is in the very nature of things human that every act that has once made its appearance and has been recorded in the history of mankind stays with mankind as a potentiality long after its actuality has become a thing of the past. No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes.
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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.
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Într-o lume de neînțeles, mereu schimbătoare, masele atinseseră punctul în care puteau crede, în același timp, orice sau nimic, când ele gândeau că totul este posibil și că nimic nu e adevărat. Amestecul era destul de ciudat, întru-cât demonstra sfârșitul iluziei că naivitatea era o slăbiciune a spiritelor primitive nebănuitoare, iar cinismul reprezenta viciul unor minți superioare și rafinate.
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Das Böse ist immer nur extrem, aber niemals radikal, es hat keine Tiefe, auch keine Dämonie. Es kann die ganze Welt verwüsten, gerade weil es wie ein Pilz an der Oberfläche weiterwuchert. Tief aber und radikal ist immer nur das Gute.
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We have become so used to thinking of domestic politics in terms of party politics that we are inclined to forget that the conflict between [the party system and the council system] has always been a conflict between parliament, the source and seat of power of the party system, and the people, who have surrendered their power to their representatives.
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It was not, however, to these Fascist groups, numerically unimportant as they were, that the Third Republic owed its collapse. On the contrary, the plain, if paradoxical, truth is that their influence was never so slight as at the moment when the collapse actually took place. What made France fall was the fact that she had no more true Dreyfusards, no one who believed that democracy and freedom, equality and justice could any longer be defended or realized under the republic.
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