Hannah Arendt Quotes - Page 11

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If the world is to contain a public space, it cannot be erected for one generation and planned for the living only; it must transcend the life-span of mortal men…. There is perhaps no clearer testimony to the loss of the public realm in the modern age than the almost complete loss of authentic concern with immortality, a loss somewhat overshadowed by the simultaneous loss of the metaphysical concern with eternity.

Hannah Arendt

Loss, Men, Space

Hannah Arendt (2013). “The Human Condition: Second Edition”, p.55, University of Chicago Press

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The role played by education in all political utopias from ancient times onward shows how natural it seems to start a new world with those who are by birth and nature new. So far as politics is concerned, this involves of course a serious misconception: instead of joining with one's equals in assuming the effort of persuasion and running the risk of failure, there is dictatorial intervention, based upon the absolute superiority of the adult, and the attempt to produce the new as a fait accompli, that is, as though the new already existed.

Hannah Arendt

Running, Political, Effort

Hannah Arendt (1968). “Between past and future: eight exercises in political thought”, Viking Adult

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Men in plural […] can experience meaningfulness only because they can talk with and make sense to each other and themselves.

Hannah Arendt

Men, Make Sense, Meaningfulness

Hannah Arendt (2013). “The Human Condition: Second Edition”, p.4, University of Chicago Press

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Kant ... was also quite aware that "the urgent need" of reason is both different from and "more than mere quest and desire for knowledge." Hence, the distinguishing of the two faculties, reason and intellect, coincides with a distinction between two altogether different mental activities, thinking and knowing.

Hannah Arendt

Thinking, Two, Knowing

Hannah Arendt (1981). “The Life of the Mind”, p.30, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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every thought is strictly speaking an after-thought.

Hannah Arendt

Thinking

Hannah Arendt (1981). “The Life of the Mind”, p.94, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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Immortality is what nature possesses without effort and without anybody's assistance, and immortality is what the mortals must therefore try to achieve if they want to live up to the world into which they were born, to live up to the things which surround them and to whose company they are admitted for a short while.

Hannah Arendt

Effort, Trying, World

Hannah Arendt (1968). “Between past and future: eight exercises in political thought”, Viking Adult

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I've begun so late, really only in recent years, to truly love the world... Out of gratitude, I want to call my book on political theories Amor Mundi .

Hannah Arendt

Gratitude, Book, Years

Hannah Arendt (1992). “Hannah Arendt/Karl Jaspers Correspondence, 1926-1969”, Harcourt

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Nietzsche ... has caused [philosophers] so much confusion.

Hannah Arendt

Confusion, Philosopher

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To be free in an age like ours, one must be in a position of authority. That in itself would be enough to make me ambitious.

Hannah Arendt

Inspirational, Age, Ambitious

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Basically we are always educating for a world that is or is becoming out of joint, for this is the basic human situation, in which the world is created by mortal hands to serve mortals for a limited time as home.

Hannah Arendt

Home, Hands, Limited Time

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The heritage of the American Revolution is forgotten, and the American government, for better and for worse, has entered into theheritage of Europe as though it were its patrimony--unaware, alas, of the fact that Europe's declining power was preceded and accompanied by political bankruptcy, the bankruptcy of the nation-state and its concept of sovereignty.

Hannah Arendt

Government, Europe, Political

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For no matter what learned scientists may say, race is, politically speaking, not the beginning of humanity but its end, not the origin of peoples but their decay, not the natural birth of man but his unnatural death.

Hannah Arendt

Men, Race, Humanity

Hannah Arendt (1968). “Imperialism: Part Two Of The Origins Of Totalitarianism”, p.49, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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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 own hands in open defiance. This distinction between an open violation of the law, performed in public, and a clandestine one is so glaringly obvious that it can be neglected only by prejudice or ill will.

Hannah Arendt

Eye, Ill Will, Hands

Hannah Arendt (1972). “Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics; Civil Disobedience; On Violence; Thoughts on Politics and Revolution”, p.85, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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His [Marx's] most explosive and indeed most original contribution to the cause of revolution was that he interpreted the compelling needs of mass poverty in political terms as an uprising, not for the sake of bread or wealth, but for the sake of freedom as well.

Hannah Arendt

Uprising, Political, Needs

Hannah Arendt (2000). “The Portable Hannah Arendt”, Penguin Group USA

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Exasperation with the threefold frustration of action -- the unpredictability of its outcome, the irreversibility of the process, and the anonymity of its authors -- is almost as old as recorded history. It has always been a great temptation, for men of action no less than for men of thought, to find a substitute for action in the hope that the realm of human affairs may escape the haphazardness and moral irresponsibility inherent in a plurality of agents.

Hannah Arendt

Frustration, Men, Temptation

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The human condition comprehends more than the condition under which life has been given to man. Men are conditioned beings because everything they come in contact with turns immediately into a condition of their existence. The world in which the vita activa spends itself consists of things produced by human activities; but the things that owe their existence exclusively to men nevertheless constantly condition their human makers.

Hannah Arendt

Men, World, Makers

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They must remember that they are constantly on the run, and that the world's reality is actually expressed by their escape.

Hannah Arendt

Running, Reality, World

Hannah Arendt (1970). “Men in Dark Times”, p.32, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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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 true significance, they offered a truth beyond realities, a remembrance beyond memories.

Hannah Arendt

Memories, Powerful, Reality

Hannah Arendt (1968). “Imperialism: Part Two Of The Origins Of Totalitarianism”, p.100, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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The concentration camps, by making death itself anonymous (making it impossible to find out whether a prisoner is dead or alive), robbed death of its meaning as the end of a fulfilled life. In a sense they took away the individual’s own death, proving that henceforth nothing belonged to him and he belonged to no one. His death merely set a seal on the fact that he had never existed.

Hannah Arendt

Alive, Facts, Impossible

Hannah Arendt (1968). “Totalitarianism: Part Three of The Origins of Totalitarianism”, p.174, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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Predictions of the future are never anything but projections of present automatic processes and procedures, that is, of occurrences that are likely to come to pass if men do not act and if nothing unexpected happens; every action, for better or worse, and every accident necessarily destroys the whole pattern in whose frame the prediction moves and where it finds its evidence.

Hannah Arendt

Moving, Men, Patterns

Hannah Arendt (1970). “On Violence”, p.13, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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Walter Benjamin knew that the break in tradition and loss of authority which occurred in his lifetime were irreparable, and he concluded that he had to discover new ways of dealing with the past. In this he became a master when he discovered that the transmissibility of the past had been replaced by the citability and that in place of its authority there had arisen a strange power to settle down, piecemeal, in the present and to deprive it of ‘peace of mind,’ the mindless peace of complacency.

Hannah Arendt

Loss, Past, Mind

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At any rate, nothing was more characteristic of him [Walter Benjamin] in the thirties than the little notebooks with black covers which he always carried with him and in which he tirelessly entered in the form of quotations what daily living and reading netted him in the way of "pearls" and "coral." On occasion he read from them aloud, showed them around like items from a choice and precious collection.

Hannah Arendt

Notebook, Reading, Choices

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These are the fifties, you know. The disgusting, posturing fifties.

Hannah Arendt

Disgusting, Knows

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Kant ... stated that he had "found it necessary to deny knowledge ... to make room for faith," but all he had "denied" was knowledge of things that are unknowable, and he had not made room for faith but for thought.

Hannah Arendt

Rooms, Deny, Made

Hannah Arendt (1978). “The Life of the Mind: Thinking. v. 2. Willing”, Harcourt

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Exactly for the sake of what is new and revolutionary in every child, education must be conservative; it must preserve this newness and introduce it as a new thing into an old world.

Hannah Arendt

Children, World, Sake

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Born: October 14, 1906
Died: December 4, 1975
Occupation: Philosopher
Cite this Page: Citation

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