What really distinguishes this generation in all countries from earlier generations ... is its determination to act, its joy in action, the… — 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
Action, as distinguished from fabrication, is never possible in isolation; to be isolated is to be deprived of the capacity to act. — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
Predictions of the future are never anything but projections of present automatic processes and procedures, that is, of occurrences that are likely… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
Exasperation with the threefold frustration of action -- the unpredictability of its outcome, the irreversibility of the process, and the anonymity of… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
... the will always wills to do something and thus implicitly holds in contempt sheer thinking, whose whole activity depends on "doing nothing. — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
power can be thought of as the never-ending, self-feeding motor of all political action that corresponds to the legendary unending accumulation of… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
Every activity performed in public can attain an excellence never matched in privacy; for excellence, by definition, the presence of others is… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
Political institutions, no matter how well or badly designed, depend for continued existence upon acting men; their conservation is achieved by the… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
Of all human activities, only labor, and neither action nor work, is unending, progressing automatically in accordance with life itself and outside… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
In contrast to revenge, which is the natural, automatic reaction to transgression and which, because of the irreversibility of the action process… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
Action painting has to do with self-creation or self-definition or self-transcendence; but this dissociates it from self-expression, which assumes the acceptance of… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
And the distinction between violent and non-violent action is that the former is exclusively bent upon the destruction of the old, and… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
... the loss of belief in future states is politically, though certainly not spiritually, the most significant distinction betweenour present period and… — 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 Image
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 Image
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 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
“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 Image
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 Image
“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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image
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 Image