Luck serves ... as rationalization for every people that is not master of its own destiny.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that attributing outcomes to luck is a way for people to avoid taking responsibility for their lives.
Hannah Arendt implies that individuals who blame luck for their circumstances are relinquishing control over their own destiny. This perspective challenges the notion of luck by emphasizing the importance of personal agency and accountability in shaping oneβs future. It highlights the philosophical debate on free will versus determinism, urging individuals to recognize their role in determining the course of their lives rather than attributing their success or failure to chance.
In practice
During a motivational speech, to emphasize the importance of taking ownership of one's life.
A life spent entirely in public, in the presence of others, becomes, as we would say, shallow. While it retains its visibility, it loses its quality of rising into sight from some darker ground which must remain hidden if it is not to lose its depth in a very real, non-subjective sense.
Politically speaking, tribal nationalism [patriotism] always insists that its own people are surrounded by 'a world of enemies' - 'one against all' - and that a fundamental difference exists between this people and all others. It claims its people to be unique, individual, incompatible with all others, and denies theoretically the very possibility of a common mankind long before it is used to destroy the humanity of man.
We are wont to see friendship solely as a phenomenon of intimacy in which the friends open their hearts to each other unmolested by the world and its demands...Thus it is hard for us to understand the political relevance of friendship...But for the Greeks the essence of friendship consisted in discourse...The converse (in contrast to the intimate talk in which individuals speak about themselves), permeated though it may be by pleasure in the friendβs presence, is concerned with the common world.
Our tradition of political thought had its definite beginning in the teachings of Plato and Aristotle. I believe it came to a no less definite end in the theories of Karl Marx.
Even though we have lost yardsticks by which to measure, and rules under which to subsume the particular, a being whose essence is a beginning may have enough of origin within himself to understand without preconceived categories and to judge without the set of customary rules which is morality.
It is the nature of beginning that something new is started which cannot be expected from whatever may have happened before. This character of startling unexpectedness is inherent in all beginnings.
Corporations are totalitarian institutions. Board of directors at the top of managers give orders, everyone follows orders..... At the very bottom of command, if you are lucky you can rent yourself to it and get a job , and if you are sufficiently propagandized you may even buy some of the junk they produce and so on.
Every nation ridicules other nations, and all are right.
One thing was certain, that the white kitten had had nothing to do with it-- it was the black kitten's fault entirely.
I have no race prejudices, and I think I have no color prejudices or caste prejudices nor creed prejudices. Indeed I know it. I can stand any society. All that I care to know is that a man is a human being-that is enough for me; he can't be any worse.
I'll tell you all my secrets but I lie about my past.
The civilized man has a moral obligation to be skeptical. . . . Any man who for one moment abandons or suspends the questioning spirit has for that moment betrayed humanity.
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