The individual who has been liberated by reason is always running head-on into a world, a society, whose past in the shape… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
The good things in history are usually of very short duration, but afterward have a decisive influence on what happens over long… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
Our Last Will and Testament, providing for the only future of which we can be reasonably certain, namely our own death, shows… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
The role played by education in all political utopias from ancient times onward shows how natural it seems to start a new… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
It is in the very nature of a beginning to carry with itself a measure of complete arbitrariness. Not only is it… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
Predictions of the future are never anything but projections of present automatic processes and procedures, that is, of occurrences that are likely… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
It is in the very nature of things human that every act that has once made its appearance and has been recorded… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
“What has come to light is neither nihilism nor cynicism, as one might have expected, but a quite extraordinary confusion over elementary… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
Even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination, and ... such illumination may well come less… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
Love, in distinction from friendship, is killed, or rather extinguished, the moment it is displayed in public. — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
Kierkegaard, Marx, and Nietzsche are for us like guideposts to a past which has lost its significance. — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
The history of humanity is not a hotel where someone can rent a room whenever it suits him; nor is it a… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
The cultural treasures of the past, believed to be dead, are being made to speak, in the course of which it turns… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
“The point then is not that there is a lack of public admiration for poetry and philosophy in the modern world, but… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
Culture is being threatened when all worldly objects and things, produced by the present or the past, are treated as mere functions… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
the touchstone of a free act - from the decision to get out of bed in the morning or take a walk… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
There are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
Legitimacy, when challenged, bases itself on an appeal to the past, while justification relates to an end that lies in the future.… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
Jefferson, though the secret vote was still unknown at the time had at least a foreboding of how dangerous it might be… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future, making it predictable and reliable to the extent that this is humanly… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
Basically we are always educating for a world that is or is becoming out of joint, for this is the basic human… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
While strength is the natural quality of an individual seen in isolation, power springs up between men when they act together and… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
Caution in handling generally accepted opinions that claim to explain whole trends of history is especially important for the historian of modern… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
Walter Benjamin knew that the break in tradition and loss of authority which occurred in his lifetime were irreparable, and he concluded… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
“It means, first, that everything that appears in public can be seen and heard by everybody and has the widest possible publicity. For us,… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
What really distinguishes this generation in all countries from earlier generations ... is its determination to act, its joy in action, the assurance of… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is a more violent world. — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
“Nationalism always preserved this initial intimate loyalty to the government and never quite lost its function of preserving a precarious balance between nation and… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
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… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
“What imperialists actually wanted was expansion of political power without the foundation of the body politic. Imperialist expansion had been touched off by a… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
the greater the bureaucratization of public life, the greater will be the attraction of violence. In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
Death not merely ends life, it also bestows upon it a silent completeness, snatched from the hazardous flux to which all things human are… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
We have almost succeeded in leveling all human activities to the common denominator of securing the necessities of life and providing for their abundance. — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
