The climax of terror is reached when the police state begins to devour its own children, when yesterday's executioner becomes today's victim. — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
Generally speaking, violence always arises out of impotence. It is the hope of those who have no power. — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is a more violent world. — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
the fateful equating of power with violence, of the political with government, and of government with a necessary evil has begun. — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
The extreme form of power is All against One, the extreme form of violence is One against All. — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
“For it is evident that those who regard the whole earth as their future territory will stress the organ of domestic violence… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
Violence can always destroy power; out of the barrel of a gun grows the most effective command, resulting in the most instant… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its peculiar… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
Legitimacy, when challenged, bases itself on an appeal to the past, while justification relates to an end that lies in the future.… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
The more dubious and uncertain an instrument violence has become in international relations, the more it has gained in reputation and appeal… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
the greater the bureaucratization of public life, the greater will be the attraction of violence. In a fully developed bureaucracy there is… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
“The extreme form of power is All against One, the extreme form of violence is One against All. And this latter is… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
“These definitions coincide with the terms which, since Greek antiquity, have been used to define the forms of government as the rule… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
“It means, first, that everything that appears in public can be seen and heard by everybody and has the widest possible publicity. For us,… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share
Without being forgiven, released from the consequences of what we have done, our capacity to act would, as it were, be confined to one… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share
What really distinguishes this generation in all countries from earlier generations ... is its determination to act, its joy in action, the assurance of… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share
The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is a more violent world. — Hannah Arendt Copy Share
“Nationalism always preserved this initial intimate loyalty to the government and never quite lost its function of preserving a precarious balance between nation and… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share
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… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share
“What imperialists actually wanted was expansion of political power without the foundation of the body politic. Imperialist expansion had been touched off by a… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share
the greater the bureaucratization of public life, the greater will be the attraction of violence. In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share
Death not merely ends life, it also bestows upon it a silent completeness, snatched from the hazardous flux to which all things human are… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share
Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share
We have almost succeeded in leveling all human activities to the common denominator of securing the necessities of life and providing for their abundance. — Hannah Arendt Copy Share
“Totalitarian politics—far from being simply antisemitic or racist or imperialist or communist—use and abuse their own ideological and political elements until the basis of… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share
“It is like the distinction between war and peace: just as war takes place for the sake of peace, thus every kind of activity,… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share
