Die Freiheit, frei zu sein Quotes

“Wherever men, women, or children are to be found, whether they be old or young, rich or poor, high or low…ignorant or learned, every individual is seen to be strongly actuated by a desire to be seen, heard, talked of, approved and respected by the people about him and within his knowledge.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Freedom to Be Free: From Thinking Without a Banister

“Liberties in the sense of civil rights are the results of liberation, but they are by no means the actual content of freedom, whose essence is admission to the public realm and participation in public affairs.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Freedom to Be Free: From Thinking Without a Banister

“Just as the most lasting result of imperialist expansion was the export of the idea of the nation-state to the four corners of the earth, so the end of imperialism under the pressure of nationalism has led to the dissemination of the idea of revolution all over the globe.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Freedom to Be Free: From Thinking Without a Banister

“Machiavelli knew enough to say the following: “There is nothing more difficult to carry out, nor more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to handle, than to initiate a new order of things.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Freedom to Be Free: From Thinking Without a Banister

“different, demonstrates clearly, I think, not only that the conquest of poverty is a prerequisite for the foundation of freedom, but also that liberation from poverty cannot be dealt with in the same way as liberation from political oppression.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Freedom to Be Free: From Thinking Without a Banister

“This new notion of freedom, resting upon liberation from poverty, changed both the course and goal of revolution. Liberty now had come to mean first of all “dress and food and the reproduction of the species,” as the sans-culottes consciously distinguished their own rights from the lofty and, to them, meaningless language of the proclamation of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. Compared to the urgency of their demands, all deliberations about the best form of government suddenly appeared irrelevant and futile. “La République? La Monarchie? Je ne connais que la question sociale,” said Robespierre.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Freedom to Be Free: From Thinking Without a Banister

“If you wish to found a republic, you first must pull the people out of a condition of misery that corrupts them. There are no political virtues without pride, and no one can have pride who is wretched.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Freedom to Be Free: From Thinking Without a Banister

“Whatever the French Revolution did and did not achieve—and it did not achieve human equality—it liberated the poor from obscurity, from nonvisibility. What has seemed irrevocable ever since is that those who were devoted to freedom could remain reconciled to a state of affairs in which freedom from want—the freedom to be free—was a privilege of the few.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Freedom to Be Free: From Thinking Without a Banister

“First, freedom from fear is a privilege that even the few have enjoyed in only relatively short periods of history, but freedom from want has been the great privilege that has distinguished a very small percentage of mankind throughout the centuries.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Freedom to Be Free: From Thinking Without a Banister

“The men of the first revolutions, though they knew well enough that liberation had to precede freedom, were still unaware of the fact that such liberation means more than political liberation from absolute and despotic power; that to be free for freedom meant first of all to be free not only from fear but also from want.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Freedom to Be Free: From Thinking Without a Banister

“Needless to add, where men live in truly miserable conditions this passion for freedom is unknown.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Freedom to Be Free: From Thinking Without a Banister

“Revolutions always appear to succeed with amazing ease in their initial stages, and the reason is that those who supposedly “make” revolutions do not “seize power” but rather pick it up where it lies in the streets.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Freedom to Be Free: From Thinking Without a Banister

“No revolution, no matter how wide it opened its gates to the masses and the downtrodden—les malheureux, les misérables, les damnés de la terre as we know them from the grand rhetoric of the French Revolution—was ever started by them. And no revolution was ever the result of conspiracies, secret societies, or openly revolutionary parties. Speaking generally, no revolution is even possible where the authority of the body politic is intact, which, under modern conditions, means where the armed forces can be trusted to obey the civil authorities. Revolutions are not necessary but possible answers to the devolution of a regime, not the cause but the consequence of the downfall of political authority.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Freedom to Be Free: From Thinking Without a Banister

“No revolution, no matter how wide it opened its gates to the masses and the downtrodden—les malheureux, les misérables, les damnés de la terre as we know them from the grand rhetoric of the French Revolution—was ever started by them.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Freedom to Be Free: From Thinking Without a Banister

“The complexity comes when revolution is concerned with both liberation and freedom, and, since liberation is indeed a condition of freedom—though freedom is by no means a necessary result of liberation—it is difficult to see and say where the desire for liberation, to be free from oppression, ends, and the desire for freedom, to live a political life, begins.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Freedom to Be Free: From Thinking Without a Banister

“The fact that the word revolution originally meant restoration is more than a mere oddity of semantics.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Freedom to Be Free: From Thinking Without a Banister

“The word ‘revolutionary’ can be applied only to revolutions whose aim is freedom.”
― Hannah Arendt, The Freedom to Be Free: From Thinking Without a Banister