Hannah Arendt Quotes on Knowledge
Hannah Arendt was a 20th-century German-American political theorist whose work shaped post-war thinking about totalitarianism, political action, and moral responsibility. This page collects quotes attributed to Hannah Arendt on the topic of knowledge, drawn from across the philosopher's works.
Quotes
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Attributed to Hannah Arendt:
“There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous.”
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Attributed to Hannah Arendt:
“Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.”
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“Letter to James Baldwin (21 November 1962)”
In politics , love is a stranger, and when it intrudes upon it nothing is being achieved except hypocrisy. All the characteristics you stress in the Negro people: their beauty, their capacity for joy, their warmth, and their humanity, are well-known characteristics of all oppressed people. They grow out of suffering and they are the proudest possession of all pariahs. Unfortunately, they have neve -
“On Revolution (1963), ch. 2”
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. -
“Kein Mensch hat das Recht zu gehorchen.”
No one has the right to obey . Paradoxical aphorism asserting the responsibility of everyone to engage in critical thinking in response to unjustly oppressive commands or demands against rationality or humanity , implying automatic obedience to tyranny as a betrayal of both, and referencing Immanuel Kant 's philosophical perspectives, in a radio interview with Joachim Fest (9 November 1964); also -
“Men in Dark Times (1968)”
Political questions are far too serious to be left to the politicians. -
“In a head-on clash between violence and power , the outcome is hardly in doubt. Nowhere is the self-defeating factor in the victory of violence over power more evident than in the use of terror to maintain domination, about whose weird successes and eventual failures we know perhaps more than any generation before us. Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it.”
On Violence (1970) -
“The New Yorker (12 September 1970)”
The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.