Unlimited Quote Collections
Organize your favorite quotes without limits. Create themed collections for every occasion with Premium.
" "Nobody knows what is going to happen because so much depends on an enormous number of variables, on simple hazard. On the other hand if you look at history retrospectively, then, even though it was contingent, you can tell a story that makes sense…. Jewish history, for example, in fact had its ups and downs, its, enmities and its friendships, as every history of all people has. The notion that there is one unilinear history is of course false. But if you look at it after the experience of Auschwitz it looks as though all of history—or at least history since the Middle Ages — had no other aim than Auschwitz…. This, is the real problem of every philosophy of history how is it possible that in retrospect it always looks as though it couldn’t have happened otherwise?
Hannah Arendt (14 October 1906 – 4 December 1975) was a German-American political theorist whose work deals with the nature of power, authority, and totalitarianism.
Biography information from Wikiquote
Organize your favorite quotes without limits. Create themed collections for every occasion with Premium.
Related quotes. More quotes will automatically load as you scroll down, or you can use the load more buttons.
"Ah, God, it was too sad and awful, the endless hide-and-go-seek game one played with the middle class.
If one could only be sure that one did not belong to it, that one was finer, nobler, more aristocratic. The truth was, she hated it shakily from above, not solidly from below, and her proletarian sympathies constituted a sort of snub that she ad- ministered to the middle class, just as a really smart woman will outdress her friends by relentlessly underdressing them. Scratch a socialist and you find a snob. The semantic test confirmed this. In the Marxist language, your opponent was always a "parvenu," an "upstart," an "adventurer," a politician was al- ways "cheap," and an opportunist "vulgar." But the proletariat did not talk in such terms; this was the tone of the F.F.V. What the socialist movement did for a man was to allow him- self the airs of a marquis without having either his title or his sanity questioned."
Filter search results by source, date, and more with our premium search tools.