Death Quotes by Hannah Arendt

17 Death quotes by Hannah Arendt

Arendt’s analysis of death intertwines with her thoughts on power, freedom, and the public sphere. Across seventeen excerpts you’ll see how she dissects mortality through a lens of responsibility and human agency.

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In order to go on living one must try to escape the death involved in perfectionism.

Hannah Arendt

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With the rise of Christianity, faith replaced thought as the bringer of immortality.

Hannah Arendt

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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…

Hannah Arendt

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Immortality is what nature possesses without effort and without anybody's assistance, and immortality is what the mortals must therefore try to achieve…

Hannah Arendt

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“Only a man who does not survive his one supreme act remains the indisputable master of his identity and possible greatness because…

Hannah Arendt

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It belongs among the refinements of totalitarian government in our century that they don't permit their opponents to die a great, dramatic…

Hannah Arendt

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For no matter what learned scientists may say, race is, politically speaking, not the beginning of humanity but its end, not the…

Hannah Arendt

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Basically we are always educating for a world that is or is becoming out of joint, for this is the basic human…

Hannah Arendt

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I'm more than ever of the opinion that a decent human existence is possible today only on the fringes of society, where…

Hannah Arendt

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There is no lasting happiness outside the prescribed cycle of painful exhaustion and pleasurable regeneration, and whatever throws this cycle out of…

Hannah Arendt

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Our Last Will and Testament, providing for the only future of which we can be reasonably certain, namely our own death, shows…

Hannah Arendt

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The chief reason warfare is still with us is neither a secret death-wish of the human species, nor an irrepressible instinct of…

Hannah Arendt

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If the world is to contain a public space, it cannot be erected for one generation and planned for the living only;…

Hannah Arendt

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“This is mortality: to move along a rectilinear line in a universe where everything, if it moves at all, moves in a…

Hannah Arendt

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The concentration camps, by making death itself anonymous (making it impossible to find out whether a prisoner is dead or alive), robbed…

Hannah Arendt

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“On the other hand, the conditions of human existence—life itself, natality and mortality, worldliness, plurality, and the earth—can never “explain” what we…

Hannah Arendt

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“Indeed, the most intense feeling we know of, intense to the point of blotting out all other experiences, namely, the experience of…

Hannah Arendt

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“It means, first, that everything that appears in public can be seen and heard by everybody and has the widest possible publicity. For us,…

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Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one…

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What really distinguishes this generation in all countries from earlier generations ... is its determination to act, its joy in action, the assurance of…

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The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is a more violent world.

Hannah Arendt

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“Nationalism always preserved this initial intimate loyalty to the government and never quite lost its function of preserving a precarious balance between nation and…

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There is all the difference in the world between the criminal's avoiding the public eye and the civil disobedience's taking the law into his…

Hannah Arendt

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“What imperialists actually wanted was expansion of political power without the foundation of the body politic. Imperialist expansion had been touched off by a…

Hannah Arendt

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the greater the bureaucratization of public life, the greater will be the attraction of violence. In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left…

Hannah Arendt

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Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.

Hannah Arendt

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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…

Hannah Arendt

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Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to…

Hannah Arendt

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We have almost succeeded in leveling all human activities to the common denominator of securing the necessities of life and providing for their abundance.

Hannah Arendt

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