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Between Past and Future QUOTES

Between Past and Future QUOTES

1 " 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

2 " Courage is indispensible because in politics not life but the world is at stake. "

― Hannah Arendt , Between Past and Future

3 " 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

4 " 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

5 " 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

6 " 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 , Between Past and Future