Hannah Arendt Quotes

Long experience has taught me this about the status of mankind with regard to matters requiring thought: the less people know and understand about them, the more positively they attempt to argue concerning them, while on the other hand to know and understand a multitude of things renders men cautious in passing judgment upon anything new.

In philosophy, when we make use of false principles, we depart the farther from the knowledge of truth and wisdom exactly in proportion to the care with which we cultivate them, and apply ourselves to the deduction of diverse consequences from them, thinking that we are philosophizing well, while we are only departing the farther from the truth; from which it must be inferred that they who have learned the least of all that has been hitherto distinguished by the name of philosophy are the most fitted for the apprehension of truth.

Intellectual modesty is humility as to what I know; intellectual humility is modesty as to what I do not know

He who thinks little errs much.

Why do I want to believe what I believe?... Science, to put it somewhat vulgarly, is a technique to keep yourself from kidding yourself.

When people begin to philosophize they seem to think it necessary to make themselves artificially stupid.

Descartes spent far too much time in bed subject to the persistent hallucination that he was thinking. You are not free from a similar disorder.

Belief is in ignorance. If you know, you know. And it is good that if you don’t know, know that you don’t know — the belief can deceive you. The belief can create an atmosphere in your mind, where, without knowing, you start thinking that you know. Belief is not trust, and the more strongly you say that you believe totally, the more you are afraid of the doubt within you.

Too few of today’s academics have time for earnest questions and various attempts at answering them. The scholar is now proudly an “expert,” dealing in certitudes and performances of epistemic mastery. This is especially true among the extremely online academic set, where leaning on one’s status or credentials for epistemic authority — prefacing an opinion with “as a scholar of” or “as an expert in,” perhaps putting “Dr.” or “Ph.D.” in one’s Twitter display name — is de rigueur.

Knowing that we don't know it's humility; thinking that we know what we don't know, is sickness.

Plenty of pundits have really high IQs, but they don't have any discipline in how they look at the world, and so it leads to a lot of bullshit, basically.

... there is no shame in not knowing. The problem arises when irrational thought and attendant behavior fill the vacuum left by ignorance.

The man who thinks he knows something does not yet know as he ought to know.

Rule of thumb: if you think something is clever and sophisticated beware-it is probably self-indulgence.

The genuine rationalist does not think that he or anyone else is in possession of the truth; nor does he think that mere criticism as such helps us achieve new ideas. But he does think that, in the sphere of ideas, only critical discussion can help us sort the wheat from the chaff.

For the mind does not require filling like a bottle, but rather, like wood, it only requires kindling to create in it an impulse to think independently and an ardent desire for the truth.

I'm suspicious of too much certainty in the pursuit of understanding just because I think people are limited in their understanding.

To accept reason is impossible if you don't already possess it.

I have this real moron thing I do? It's called thinking.

The "passion for incredulity" can produce as much self-deception as the uncritical will to believe.

There are genuine mysteries in the world that mark the limits of human knowing and thinking. Wisdom is fortified, not destroyed, by understanding its limitations. Ignorance does not make a fool as surely as self-deception.

There is a distinct difference between having an open mind and having a hole in your head from which your brain leaks out.

The beliefs which we have most warrant for have no safeguard to rest on but a standing invitation to the whole world to prove them unfounded. If the challenge is not accepted, or is accepted and the attempt fails, we are far enough from certainty still; but we have done the best that the existing state of human reason admits of; we have neglected nothing that could give the truth a chance of reaching us.

A thinking mind is not swallowed up by what it comes to know. It reaches out to grasp something related to itself and to its present knowledge (and so knowable in some degree) but also separate from itself and from its present knowledge (not identical with these). In any act of thinking, the mind must reach across this space between known and unknown, linking one to the other but also keeping visible to difference. It is an erotic space.

Am I an intellectual? I don't think so. Less than people sometimes think, I have to say. But more than some others think.