The extreme form of power is All against One, the extreme form of violence is One against All. — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter. — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
It is in the nature of a group and its power to turn against independence, the property of individual strength. — 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
While strength is the natural quality of an individual seen in isolation, power springs up between men when they act together and… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
All political institutions are manifestations and materializations of power; they petrify and decay as soon as the living power of the people… — 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
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
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
every political structure, new or old, left to itself develops stabilizing forces which stand in the way of constant transformation and expansion.… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
Manipulations of opinion, insofar as they are inspired by well-defined interests, have limited goals; their effect, however, if they happen to touch… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
The will to power, as the modern age from Hobbes to Nietzsche understood it, far from being a characteristic of the strong,… — Hannah Arendt Copy Share Image
Power corresponds to the human ability not just to act but to act in concert. Power is never the property of an… — 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
