Hannah Arendt Quotes

Ever since Kant divorced reason from reality, his intellectual descendants have been diligently widening the breach.

Immanuel Kant lived with knowledge as with his lawfully wedded wife, slept with it in the same intellectual bed for forty years and begot an entire German race of philosophical systems.

The Copernican revolution brought about by Kant was, I think, the most important single turning point in the history of philosophy.

No real blood flows in the veins of the knowing subject constructed by Locke, Hume, and Kant, but rather the diluted extract of reason as a mere activity of thought.

Kant was probably the worst writer ever heard of on earth before Karl Marx. Some of his ideas were really quite simple, but he always managed to make them seem unintelligible. I hope he is in Hell.

Kant's style is so heavy that after his pure reason, the reader longs for unreasonableness.

So, when on one side you hoist in Locke's head, you go over that way; but now, on the other side, hoist in Kant's and you come back again; but in very poor plight. Thus, some minds for ever keep trimming boat. Oh, ye foolish! throw all these thunder-heads overboard, and then you will float light and right.

[Kant] was like many people: in intellectual matters he was skeptical, but in moral matters he believed imjplicitly in the maximx that he had imbibed at his mother's knee.

Kant's position is extremely subtle - so subtle, indeed, that no commentator seems to agree with any other as to what it is.

The 'I think' which Kant said must be able to accompany all my objects, is the 'I breathe' which actually does accompany them.

Logical positivists have never taken psychology into account in their epistemology, but they affirm that logical beings and mathematical beings are nothing but linguistic structures.

Before I met Ayn Rand, I was a logical positivist, and accordingly, I didn't believe in absolutes, moral or otherwise. If I couldn't prove a proposition with facts and figures, it was without merit.

Philosophy likes to keen common sense on the run.

How I understand the philosopher - as a terrible explosive, endangering everthing... my concept of the philosopher is worlds removed from any concept that would include even a Kant, not to speak of academic "ruminants" and other professors of philosophy.

Metaphysics is the science of proving what we don't understand.

Science's tools will never prove or disprove God's existence.

Metaphysics is the attempt of the mind to rise above the mind.

It is easy to see, though it scarcely needs to be pointed out, since it is involved in the fact that Reason is set aside, that faith is not a form of knowledge; for all knowledge is either a knowledge of the eternal, excluding the temporal and historical as indifferent, or it is pure historical knowledge. No knowledge can have for its object the absurdity that the eternal is the historical.

All parts of knowledge have their origin in metaphysics, and finally, perhaps, revolve into it.

[To] interpret Parmenides as a Kant before Kant ... this is exactly what we must do.

Philosophy just puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything.-Since everything lies open to view there is nothing to explain

The only thing that is good without qualification is a good will.

The few existing writings against Kantian philosophy are the most important documents in the case history of sound common sense.

Reality the iconoclast once more. Heaven will solve our problems, but not, I think, by showing us subtle reconciliations between all our apparently contradictory notions. The notions will all be knocked from under our feet. We shall see that there never was any problem.

Reason is incompetent to answer any fundamental question about God, or morality, or the meaning of life.