Hannah Arendt Quotes on Knowledge
Arendt's late and unfinished The Life of the Mind (1978) was planned as a three-volume study of Thinking, Willing, and Judging — the three principal mental activities Arendt distinguished from the cognitive activities of the natural sciences and the practical activity of action that her earlier work had analyzed. Thinking is the dialogue of the soul with itself in solitude, ordinarily withdrawn from the world of appearances; Willing introduces the temporal structure of the I-can and supplies the philosophical analysis of human freedom; Judging — left only in lecture notes at Arendt's death — would have analyzed the faculty by which the spectator at the historical drama applies a Kantian aesthetic judgment to particulars without subsuming them under a determining concept. The framework remained programmatically incomplete but is the principal late statement of Arendt's philosophy of mind.
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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“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”
Letter to James Baldwin (21 November 1962) -
“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. -
“Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity , because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity.”
The Human Condition(1958) | The Human Condition (1958), part 3, chapter 16 -
“Revolutionaries do not make revolutions! The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and when they can pick it up. Armed uprising by itself has never yet led to revolution.”
Crises of the Republic(1969) | " Thoughts on Politics and Revolution: A Commentary "