Hannah Arendt Quotes
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Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity.
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The only grandeur of imperialism lies in the nation's losing battle against it.
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It is my contention that civil disobediences are nothing but the latest form of voluntary association, and that they are thus quite in tune with the oldest traditions of the country.
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Economic growth may one day turn out to be a curse rather than a good, and under no conditions can it either lead into freedom or constitute a proof for its existence.
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Bureaucracy, the rule of nobody.
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The presence of others who see what we see and hear what we hear assures us of the reality of the world and ourselves.
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These are the fifties, you know. The disgusting, posturing fifties.
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Thinking withdraws radically and for its own sake from this world and its evidential nature, whereas science profits from a possible withdrawal for the sake of specific results.
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The new always happens against the overwhelming odds of statistical laws and their probability, which for all practical, everyday purposes amounts to certainty; the new therefore always appears in the guise of a miracle.
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The ultimate end of human acts is eudaimonia, happiness in the sense of living well, which all men desire; all acts are but different means chosen to arrive at it.
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The need of reason is not inspired by the quest for truth but by the quest for meaning. And truth and meaning are not the same. The basic fallacy, taking precedence over all specific metaphysical fallacies, is to interpret meaning on the model of truth.
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Death not merely ends life, it also bestows upon it a silent completeness, snatched from the hazardous flux to which all things human are subject.
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The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
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War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford.
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No civilization would ever have been possible without a framework of stability, to provide the wherein for the flux of change. Foremost among the stabilizing factors, more enduring than customs, manners and traditions, are the legal systems that regulate our life in the world and our daily affairs with each other.
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The chief reason warfare is still with us is neither a secret death-wish of the human species, nor an irrepressible instinct of aggression, nor, finally and more plausibly, the serious economic and social dangers inherent in disarmament, but the simple fact that no substitute for this final arbiter in international affairs has yet appeared on the political scene.
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The saving grace of all really great gifts is that the persons who bear their burden remain superior to what they have done, at least as long as the source of creativity is alive.
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Action without a name, a who attached to it, is meaningless.
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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.
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Politically, the weakness of the argument has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil.
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The good things in history are usually of very short duration, but afterward have a decisive influence on what happens over long periods of time.
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If we do not know our own history, we are doomed to live it as though it were our private fate.
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Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
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This is the precept by which I have lived: Prepare for the worst; expect the best; and take what comes.