Truth Quotes by Hannah Arendt

19 Truth quotes by Hannah Arendt

Arendt’s political philosophy makes truth a matter of public duty and personal integrity. Nineteen reflections explore how lies shape societies and why honest discourse matters, providing a solid foundation for anyone probing the ethics of speech.

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Thinking does not lead to truth; truth is the beginning of thought.

Hannah Arendt

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Scientific and philosophic truth have parted company.

Hannah Arendt

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When an old truth ceases to be applicable, it does not become any truer by being stood on its head.

Hannah Arendt

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To expect truth to come from thinking signifies that we mistake the need to think with the urge to know.

Hannah Arendt

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The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.

Hannah Arendt

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Factual truth is always related to other people [...]. It is political by nature.

Hannah Arendt

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Lacking the truth, [we] will however finds instants of truth, and these instants are in fact all we have available to us…

Hannah Arendt

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The trouble with lying and deceiving is that their efficiency depends entirely upon a clear notion of the truth that the liar…

Hannah Arendt

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There will always be One against All, one person against all others. [This is so] not because One is terribly wise and…

Hannah Arendt

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The need of reason is not inspired by the quest for truth but by the quest for meaning. And truth and meaning…

Hannah Arendt

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Legends have always played a powerful role in the making of history. ... Without ever relating facts reliably, yet always expressing their…

Hannah Arendt

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The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted…

Hannah Arendt

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“The most striking difference between ancient and modern sophists is that the ancients were satisfied with a passing victory of the argument…

Hannah Arendt

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There always comes a point beyond which lying becomes counterproductive. This point is reached when the audience to which the lies are…

Hannah Arendt

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Factual truth is always related to other people: it concerns events and circumstances in which many are involved; it is established by…

Hannah Arendt

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Promises are the uniquely human way of orderin The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make…

Hannah Arendt

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... whatever men do or know or experience can make sense only to the extent that it can be spoken about. There…

Hannah Arendt

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“It is like the distinction between war and peace: just as war takes place for the sake of peace, thus every kind…

Hannah Arendt

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“Plato, in his famous fight against the ancient Sophists, discovered that their “universal art of enchanting the mind by arguments” (Phaedrus 261)…

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…

Hannah Arendt

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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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