To think and to be fully alive are the same. Hannah Arendt More Quotes by Hannah Arendt More Quotes From Hannah Arendt If we don't know our own history, we are deemed to live it. Hannah Arendt wisdomwiseknows 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 fact that no substitute for this final arbiter in international affairs has yet appeared on the political scene. Hannah Arendt simplewardeath 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. Hannah Arendt violentsomething-newaction Love, by its very nature, is unworldly, and it is for this reason rather than its rarity that it is not only apolitical but antipolitical, perhaps the most powerful of all antipolitical forces. Hannah Arendt powerfullovepeace By its very nature the beautiful is isolated from everything else. From beauty no road leads to reality. Hannah Arendt isolatedbeautifulreality Truthfulness has never been counted among the political virtues, and lies have always been regarded as justifiable tools in political dealings. Hannah Arendt politicaltoolslying Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power's disappearance. Hannah Arendt poweroppositespeace Bureaucracy, the rule of nobody. Hannah Arendt bureaucracy As witnesses not of our intentions but of our conduct, we can be true or false, and the hypocrite's crime is that he bears false witness against himself. 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 only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core. Hannah Arendt hypocriteevilintegrity Nothing we use or hear or touch can be expressed in words that equal what is given by the senses. Hannah Arendt medicineperceptionphilosophy Caution in handling generally accepted opinions that claim to explain whole trends of history is especially important for the historian of modern times, because the last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility. Hannah Arendt effortkeysresponsibility 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 warpeacelying You think that you can judge what's good or evil from whether you enjoy doing it or not. You think that evil is what always appears in the form of a temptation, while good is what you never spontaneously want to do. I think this is all total rubbish, if you don't mind my saying so. Hannah Arendt judgingevilthinking To expect truth to come from thinking signifies that we mistake the need to think with the urge to know. Hannah Arendt mistakeneedsthinking That Hegelian dialectics should provide a wonderful instrument for always being right, because they permit the interpretations of all defeats as the beginning of victory, is obvious. One of the most beautiful examples of this kind of sophistry occurred after 1933 when the German Communists for nearly two years refused to recognize that Hitler's victory had been a defeat for the German Communist Party. Hannah Arendt partybeautifulyears Our problem today is not how to expropriate the expropriators but, rather, how to arrange matters so that the masses, dispossessed by industrial society in capitalist and socialist systems, can regain property. For this reason alone, the alternative between capitalism and socialism is false-not only because neither exists anywhere in its pure state anyhow, but because we have here twins, each wearing different hats. Hannah Arendt alternativesdifferentwisdom Few girls are as well shaped as a good horse. Hannah Arendt girlbeautyfunny Men who no longer can make sure of the reality which they feel and experience through talking about it and sharing it with their fellow-men, live in the same nightmare of loneliness and uncertainty which, in a normal world, is the terrible fate of insanity. Hannah Arendt fatelonelinessreality Nihilism is but the other side of conventionalism; its creed consists of negations of the current so-called positive values, to which it remains bound. Hannah Arendt creedsnihilismsides No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes. Hannah Arendt punishmentcriminalscrime
