<aside> 💡 In "The Freedom to be Free," Hannah Arendt explores the concept of freedom beyond the political and social norms. She argues that true freedom is not merely the absence of oppression or the ability to act according to one's will, but rather the capacity to start something new - to act and think without the constraints of tradition, rules, and societal expectations. Arendt emphasizes the importance of public space for this form of freedom to exist, as it provides a platform for collective action and power.

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• In the sphere of fabrication itself,m there is only one kind of object to which the unending chain of means and ends does not apply, and this is the work of art, the most useless and, at the same time, the most durable thing human hands can produce. Its very characteristic is its remoteness from the whole context of ordinary usage, so that in case of a former object, say a piece of furniture from a bygone age, is considered by a latter generation to be a ‘masterpiece’, it is put into a museum and thus carefully removed from any possible usage.
• Action, which all its uncertainties, is like an ever-present reminder that men, though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to begin something new. Initim ut esset hoomo creatus est - ‘that there be a beginning man was created’, said Augustine. With the creation of man, the principle of beginning came into the world - which, of course, is only another way of saying that with the creation of man, the principle of freedom appeared on earth.
• People can only be free in relation to one another, and so only in the realm of politics and action can they experience freedom positively, which is more than not being forced.
• One cannot speak about politics without also speaking about freedom; and one cannot speak about freedom without also speaking about politics.
• If one wants to prevent humans from acting in freedom, they must be prevented from thinking, willing and producing, because all these activities imply action, and thereby freedom in every sense, including the political.
• Freedom is conceived here not as an inner human existence in the world, and he founds this freedom in the face that man is himself a beginning in the world, an initium, insofar as he has not existed as long as the world itself, was not created simultaneously with it, but as a new beginning after the world had come into existence.
• What we call real is always a mesh of earthily-organic-human reality, which came into being qua reality through the advent of infinite improbabilities.
• Objectively, seen from the outside, the chances that tomorrow will proceed exactly as today are aways overwhelming - not quite so overwhelming, but in human proportions nearly as great as the chances that no earth would ever rise out of cosmic events, that no life would develop out of inorganic processes, and that no man would appear out of the evolution of animal life.
• The decisive difference between the ‘infinite improbabilities’ on which life on earth and the reality of nature rest, and the miraculous events within human affairs, is that in the latter case there is a miracle worker, which is to say that humans appear to have a highly misterious gift for making miracles happen. This gift is called action.
• European man has always known that freedom as a mode of being and a worldly reality can be destroyed, and that only seldom in history has it unfolded its full virtuosity. Now that we are acquainted with totalitarianism we must also suspect that not only being free but also the sheer gift of freedom, which was not produced by man but given to him, may be destroyed, too. This knowledge or suspicion weighs more heavily upon us now than ever before, for today, more depends on human freedom than before - on man’s ability to tip scales heavility weifhted towaed disaster, which always happens automatically and therefore always appears irresistible. This time, no less than the continued existence of men on earth may depend upon man’s gift of performing ‘miracles’, that is, brining about the infinitely improbable and establishing it as a worldly reality.
• Although the Bay of Pigs is often blamed on faulty information and malfunctioning secret services, the failure actually lies much deeper. The failure was in misunderstanding what it means when a poverty-stricken people in a backward country, in which corruption has reached the point of rottenness, are suddenly released, not from their poverty, but from the obscurity and hence incomprehensibility of their misery, what it means when they hear for the first time their condition being discussed in the open and find themselves invited to participate in that discussion, and what it means when they are brought to their capital, which they have never seen before, and told: these streets and these buildings and these squares, all these are yours, your possessions, and hence your pride.
• The word ‘revolutionary’ can only be applied to revolutions whose aim is freedom.
• Only those who know freedom from want can appreciate fully the meaning of freedom from fear, and only those who are free from both want and fear are in a position to conceive a passion for public freedom, to develop within themselves that ‘gout’ or taste for liberte and the peculiar taste for egalite that liberte carries within it.