Fear is an emotion indispensable for survival.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Fear, Anxiety, Survival
Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future, making it predictable and reliable to the extent that this is humanly possible.
—Hannah Arendt
The human condition is such that pain and effort are not just symptoms which can be removed without changing life itself; they are the modes in which life itself, together with the necessity to which it is bound, makes itself felt. For mortals, the “easy life of the gods” would be a lifeless life.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Effort
There is all the difference in the world between the criminal’s avoiding the public eye and the civil disobedience’s taking the law into his own hands in open defiance. This distinction between an open violation of the law, performed in public, and a clandestine one is so glaringly obvious that it can be neglected only by prejudice or ill will.
—Hannah Arendt
Topics: Protest
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
Martin Heidegger German Existential Philosopher
Immanuel Kant Prussian German Philosopher
Erich Fromm German Social Philosopher
Friedrich Nietzsche German Philosopher, Scholar
Adolf Hitler German Fascist Dictator
Moses Mendelssohn German Jewish Philosopher
Arthur Schopenhauer German Philosopher
Roland Barthes French Literary Theorist
Albert Einstein German-born Theoretical Physicist
Friedrich Schiller German Poet