Hannah Arendt Quotes - Page 11

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A functionary, when he really is nothing more than a functionary, is really a very dangerous gentleman.

Hannah Arendt

Gentleman, Dangerous

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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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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 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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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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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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The conflict between art and politics... cannot and must not be solved.

Hannah Arendt

Art, Conflict

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Our Last Will and Testament, providing for the only future of which we can be reasonably certain, namely our own death, shows thatthe Will's need to will is no less strong than Reason's need to think; in both instances the mind transcends its own natural limitations, either by asking unanswerable questions or by projecting itself into a future which, for the willing subject, will never be.

Hannah Arendt

Death, Strong, Thinking

Hannah Arendt (1981). “The Life of the Mind”, p.270, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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Just as the law in civilized countries assumes that the voice of conscience tells everybody, "Thou shalt not kill," even though man's natural desires and inclinations may at times be murderous, so the law of Hitler's land demanded that the voice of conscience tell everybody: "Thou shalt kill," although the organizers of the massacres knew full well that murder is against the normal desires and inclinations of most people. Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it - the quality of temptation.

Hannah Arendt

Country, Men, Law

"Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil" by Hannah Arendt, (Ch. VIII), 1963.

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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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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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It is a secret from nobody that the famous random event is most likely to arise from those parts of the world where the old adage"There is no alternative to victory" retains a high degree of plausibility.

Hannah Arendt

Secret, Victory, Events

Hannah Arendt (1970). “On violence”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P

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Even though we have lost yardsticks by which to measure, and rules under which to subsume the particular, a being whose essence is a beginning may have enough of origin within himself to understand without preconceived categories and to judge without the set of customary rules which is morality.

Hannah Arendt

Essence, Judging, May

Hannah Arendt, Ronald Beiner (1989). “Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy”, p.96, University of Chicago Press

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The end of rebellion is liberation, while the end of revolution is the foundation of freedom.

Hannah Arendt

Foundation, Revolution, Rebellion

Hannah Arendt (2006). “On Revolution”, p.119, Penguin

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

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