20 quotes by Hannah Arendt

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Their most read quotes

Action without a name, a ''who'' attached to it, is meaningless.

Humankind

3.2 · 36 votes

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Death not merely ends life, it also bestows upon it a silent completeness, snatched from the hazardous flux to which all things human are subject.

Death

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Economic growth may one day turn out to be a curse rather than a good, and under no conditions can it either lead into freedom or constitute a proof for its existence.

Economy

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In contrast to revenge, which is the natural, automatic reaction to transgression and which, because of the irreversibility of the action process can be expected and even calculated, the act of forgiving can never be predicted; it is the only reaction tha

Forgiveness

200 reads

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Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but anti-political, perhaps the most powerful of all anti-political human forces.

Love

4.3 · 30 votes

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Government and Politics
No civilization would ever have been possible without a framework of stability, to provide the wherein for the flux of change. Foremost among the stabilizing factors, more enduring than customs, manners and traditions, are the legal systems that regulate
4.7 · 43 votes · 7 reads
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Society
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 co
4.5 · 53 votes · 18 reads
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Thought and Reason
Nothing we use or hear or touch can be expressed in words that equal what we are given by the senses.
3.0 · 26 votes · 118 reads
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Thought and Reason
Opinions are formed in a process of open discussion and public debate, and where no opportunity for the forming of opinions exists, there may be moods -moods of the masses and moods of individuals, the latter no less fickle and unreliable than the former
3.0 · 31 votes · 131 reads
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Time
Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future, making it predictable and reliable to the extent that this is humanly possible.
3.8 · 18 votes · 95 reads
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Government and Politics
The chief reason warfare is still with us is neither a secret death-wish of the human species, nor an irrepressible instinct of aggression, nor, finally and more plausibly, the serious economic and social dangers inherent in disarmament, but the simple fa
3.4 · 44 votes · 98 reads
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Various
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
3.6 · 9 votes · 186 reads
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Government and Politics
The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
4.9 · 19 votes · 197 reads
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Thought and Reason
The trouble with lying and deceiving is that their efficiency depends entirely upon a clear notion of the truth that the liar and deceiver wishes to hide. In this sense, truth, even if it does not prevail in public, possesses an ineradicable primacy over
3.7 · 7 votes · 111 reads
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Art and Culture
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.
4.9 · 60 votes · 125 reads
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Virtues
Total loyalty is possible only when fidelity is emptied of all concrete content, from which changes of mind might naturally arise.
3.7 · 28 votes · 95 reads
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Defects
We have almost succeeded in leveling all human activities to the common denominator of securing the necessities of life and providing for their abundance.
3.8 · 11 votes · 133 reads
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Defects
What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but o
4.1 · 26 votes · 173 reads
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Nature
What really distinguishes this generation in all countries from earlier generations... is its determination to act, its joy in action, the assurance of being able to change things by one's own efforts.
3.0 · 16 votes · 166 reads
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Thought and Reason
Wherever the relevance of speech is at stake, matters become political by definition, for speech is what makes man a political being.
4.5 · 12 votes · 107 reads
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