Between Past and Future Quotes

“Courage is indispensible because in politics not life but the world is at stake.”
― Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future

“The relatively new trouble with mass society is perhaps even more serious, but not because of the masses themselves, but because this society is essentially a consumers’ society where leisure time is used no longer for self-perfection or acquisition of more social status, but for more and more consumption and more and more entertainment…To believe that such a society will become more “cultured” as time goes on and education has done its work, is, I think, a fatal mistake. The point is that a consumers’ society cannot possibly know how to take care of a world and the things which belong exclusively to the space of worldly appearances, because its central attitude toward all objects, the attitude of consumption, spells ruin to everything it touches.”
― Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future

“The modern age, with its growing world-alienation, has led to a situation where man, wherever he goes, encounters only himself. All the processes of the earth and the universe have revealed themselves either as man-made or as potentially man-made. These processes, after having devoured, as it were, the solid objectivity of the given, ended by rendering meaningless the one over-all process which originally was conceived in order to give meaning to them, and to act, so to speak, as the eternal time-space into which they could all flow and thus be rid of their mutual conflicts and exclusiveness. This is what happened to our concept of history, as it happened to our concept of nature. In the situation of the radical world-alienation, neither history nor nature is at all conceivable. This twofold loss of the world— the loss of nature and the loss of human artifice in the widest sense, which would include all history, has left behind it a society of men who, without a common world which would at once relate and separate them, either live in desperate lonely separation or are pressed together into a mass. For a mass-society is nothing more than that kind of organized living which automatically establishes itself among human beings who are still related to one another but have lost the world once common to all of them.”
― Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future

“We first become aware of freedom or its opposite in our intercourse with others, not in the intercourse with ourselves.”
― Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future

“Freedom of opinion is a farce unless factual information is guaranteed and the facts themselves are not in dispute. In other words, factual truth informs political thought just as rational truth informs philosophical speculation.”
― Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future

“The crisis of authority in education is most closely connected with the crisis of tradition, that is with the crisis in our attitude toward the realm of the past.”
― Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future

“At the heart of Roman politics, from the beginning of the republic until virtually the end of the imperial era, stands the conviction of the sacredness of foundation, in the sense that once something has been founded it remains binding for all future generations. To be engaged in politics meant first and foremost to preserve the founding of the city of Rome.”
― Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future

“Moreover, the human brain which supposedly does our thinking is as terrestrial, earthbound, as any other part of the human body. It was precisely by abstracting from these terrestrial conditions, by appealing to a power of imagination and abstraction that would, as it were, lift the human mind out of the gravitational field of the earth and look down upon it from some point in the universe, that modern science reached its most glorious and, at the same time, most baffling achievements. In 1929, shortly before the arrival of the”
― Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future

“Marx, when he leaped from philosophy into politics, carried the theories of dialectics into action, making political action more theoretical, more dependent upon what we today would call an ideology, than it ever had been before. Since, moreover, his springboard was not philosophy in the old metaphysical sense, but as specifically Hegel's philosophy of history as Kierkegaard's springboard had been Descartes' philosophy of doubt, he superimposed the "law of history" upon politics and ended by losing the significance of both, of action no less than of thought, of politics no less than of philosophy, when he insisted that both were mere functions of society and history.”
― Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future

“Kafka’s parable reads as follows:3 He has two antagonists: the first presses him from behind, from the origin. The second blocks the road ahead. He gives battle to both. To be sure, the first supports him in his fight with the second, for he wants to push him forward, and in the same way the second supports him in his fight with the first, since he drives him back. But it is only theoretically so. For it is not only the two antagonists who are there, but he himself as well, and who really knows his intentions? His dream, though, is that some time in an unguarded moment—and this would require a night darker than any night has ever been yet—he will jump out of the fighting line and be promoted, on account of his experience in”
― Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future

“La parábola de Kafka dice así:[3] [Él] Tiene dos enemigos: el primero le amenaza por detrás, desde los orígenes. El segundo le cierra el camino hacia adelante. Lucha contra ambos. En realidad, el primero le apoya en su lucha contra el segundo, quiere impulsarle hacia adelante, y de la misma manera el segundo le apoya en su lucha contra el primero, le empuja hacia atrás. Pero esto es solamente teórico. Porque aparte de los adversarios, también existe él, ¿y quién conoce sus intenciones? Siempre sueña que en un momento de descuido —para ello hace falta una noche inimaginablemente oscura— pueda escabullirse del frente de batalla y ser elevado, por su experiencia de lucha, por encima de los combatientes, como árbitro.”
― Hannah Arendt, Entre el pasado y el futuro: Ocho ejercicios sobre la reflexión política (IMPRESCINDIBLES)

“the undeniable loss of tradition in the world does not at all entail a loss of the past, for tradition and past are not the same, as the believers in tradition on one side and the believers in progress on the other would have us believe. . . .”
― Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future

“Every act, seen from the perspective not of the agent but of the process in whose framework it occurs and whose automatism it interrupts, is a ‘miracle’—that is, something which could not be expected. . . . It is in the very nature of every new beginning that it breaks into the world as an ‘infinite improbability,’ and yet it is precisely this infinitely improbable which actually constitutes the very texture of everything we call real. Our who existence, rests, after all, on a chain of miracles.”
― Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future

“El problema consiste en que, si la mente es incapaz de dar paz e inducir a la reconciliación, de inmediato se ve envuelta en los conflictos que le son propios.”
― Hannah Arendt, Entre el pasado y el futuro: Ocho ejercicios sobre la reflexión política (IMPRESCINDIBLES)

“Tocqueville, que dice: «Toda vez que el pasado dejó de arrojar su luz sobre el futuro, la mente del hombre vaga en la oscuridad».[”
― Hannah Arendt, Entre el pasado y el futuro: Ocho ejercicios sobre la reflexión política (IMPRESCINDIBLES)

“Los ensayos que se publican en este libro son versiones revisadas y ampliadas de los que aparecieron en”
― Hannah Arendt, Entre el pasado y el futuro: Ocho ejercicios sobre la reflexión política (IMPRESCINDIBLES)