Hannah Arendt - Truth Quotes

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One truth that is unfamiliar to the Jewish people, though they are beginning to learn it, is that you can only defend yourself as the person you are attacked as.

Hannah Arendt
The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth, and truth be defamed as lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world — and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end — is being destroyed.

Hannah Arendt
There always comes a point beyond which lying becomes counterproductive. This point is reached when the audience to which the lies are addressed is forced to disregard altogether the distinguishing line between truth and falsehood in order to be able to survive.

Hannah Arendt
What science and the quest for knowledge are after is irrefutable truth; that is, propositions that human beings are not free to reject — that are compelling. They are of two kinds, as we have known since Leibnitz: truths of reasoning and truths of fact.

Hannah Arendt
The trouble with lying and deceiving is that their efficiency depends entirely upon a clear notion of the truth that the liar and deceiver wishes to hide.

Hannah Arendt
For the trouble with lying and decieving is that their efficiency depends entirely upon a clear notion of the truth that the liar and deceiver wishes to hide. In this sense, truth, even if it does not prevail in public, possesses an ineradicable primacy over all falsehoods.

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

Hannah Arendt
Legends have always played a powerful role in the making of history.... Without ever relating facts reliably, yet always expressing their true significance, they offered a truth beyond realities, a remembrance beyond memories.

Hannah Arendt
The need of reason is not inspired by the quest for truth but by the quest for meaning. And truth and meaning are not the same. The basic fallacy, taking precedence over all specific metaphysical fallacies, is to interpret meaning on the model of truth.

Hannah Arendt
The sad truth of the matter is that most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be or do either good or evil.

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

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

Hannah Arendt
Conceptually, we may call truth what we cannot change; metaphorically, it is the ground on which we stand and the sky that stretches above us.

Hannah Arendt
The most striking difference between ancient and modern sophists is that the ancients were satisfied with a passing victory of argument at the expense of truth, whereas the moderns want a more lasting victory at the expense of reality.

Hannah Arendt