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Hannah Arendt Quotes about Past

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The history of humanity is not a hotel where someone can rent a room whenever it suits him; nor is it a vehicle which we board or get out of at random. Our past will be for us a burden beneath which we can only collapse

The history of humanity is not a hotel where someone can rent a room whenever it suits him; nor is it a vehicle which we board or get out of at random. Our past will be for us a burden beneath which we can only collapse for as long as we refuse to understand the present and fight for a better future. Only then — but from that moment on — will the burden become a blessing, that is, a weapon in the battle for freedom.

Hannah Arendt
Fighting, Blessing, Past
"The Jewish Writings".

Legitimacy, when challenged, bases itself on an appeal to the past, while justification relates to an end that lies in the future. Violence can be justifiable, but it never will be legitimate.

Hannah Arendt
Lying, Past, Violence
Hannah Arendt (1972). “Crises of the Republic: Lying in Politics; Civil Disobedience; On Violence; Thoughts on Politics and Revolution”, p.161, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Kierkegaard, Marx, and Nietzsche are for us like guideposts to a past which has lost its significance.

Hannah Arendt
Past, Lost, Significance
Hannah Arendt (1968). “Between past and future: eight exercises in political thought”, Viking Adult

There are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say.

Hannah Arendt
Past, Able, Oblivion

The cultural treasures of the past, believed to be dead, are being made to speak, in the course of which it turns out that they propose things altogether different than what had been thought.

Hannah Arendt
Past, Different, Treasure
"Martin Heidegger at Eighty". "Heidegger and Modern Philosophy: Critical Essays". Book by Michael Murray, p. 294, 1978.

Culture is being threatened when all worldly objects and things, produced by the present or the past, are treated as mere functions for the life process of society, as though they are there only to fulfill some need, and for this functionalization it is almost irrelevant whether the needs in question are of a high or a low order.

Hannah Arendt
Past, Order, Needs
Hannah Arendt (1968). “Between past and future: eight exercises in political thought”, Viking Adult

The individual who has been liberated by reason is always running head-on into a world, a society, whose past in the shape of 'prejudices' has a great deal of power; he is forced to learn that past reality is also a reality.

Hannah Arendt
Running, Past, Reality
Hannah Arendt (1974). “Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt P

It is in the very nature of things human that every act that has once made its appearance and has been recorded in the history of mankind stays with mankind as a potentiality long after its actuality has become a thing of the past.

Hannah Arendt
Past, Long, Appearance
Hannah Arendt (2006). “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil”, p.238, Penguin

If a given science accidentally reached its goal, this would by no means stop the workers in the field, who would be driven past their goal by the sheer momentum of the illusion of unlimited progress.

Hannah Arendt
Mean, Past, Goal
Hannah Arendt (1981). “The Life of the Mind”, p.71, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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

... we may remember what the Romansthought a cultivated person ought to be: one who knows how to choose his company among men, among things, among thoughts, in the present as well as in the past.

Hannah Arendt
Past, Men, May

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