Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt

Johanna "Hannah" Arendt (October 14, 1906 – December 4, 1975) was a German American political theorist. She has often been described as a philosopher, although she refused that label on the grounds that philosophy is concerned with "man in the singular." She described herself instead as a political theorist because her work centers on the fact that "men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world." Arendt's work deals with the nature of power, and the subjects of politics, authority, and totalitarianism.

Read more about Hannah Arendt:  Life and Career, Works, Legacy, Commemoration, Selected Works

Famous quotes by hannah arendt:

    Poetry, whose material is language, is perhaps the most human and least worldly of the arts, the one in which the end product remains closest to the thought that inspired it.... Of all things of thought, poetry is the closest to thought, and a poem is less a thing than any other work of art ...
    Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)

    ... the will always wills to do something and thus implicitly holds in contempt sheer thinking, whose whole activity depends on ‘doing nothing.’
    Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)

    I don’t wanna live in a city where the only cultural advantage is that you can make a right turn on a red light.
    Freedom from labor itself is not new; it once belonged among the most firmly established privileges of the few. In this instance, it seems as though scientific progress and technical developments had been only taken advantage of to achieve something about which all former ages dreamed but which none had been able to realize.
    Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)

    Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would ... be confined to one single deed from which we could never recover; we would remain the victims of its consequences forever, not unlike the sorcerer’s apprentice who lacked the magic formula to break the spell.
    Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)

    No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has determined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus tyranny.
    Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)