Action Quote by Hannah Arendt

“Exasperation with the threefold frustration of action -- the unpredictability of its outcome, the irreversibility of the process, and the anonymity of its authors -- is almost as old as recorded history. It has always been a great temptation, for men of action no less than for men of thought, to find a substitute for action in the hope that the realm of human affairs may escape the haphazardness and moral irresponsibility inherent in a plurality of agents.”

Hannah Arendt

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Action Affair Agents Anonymity Exasperation Frustration History Humans Inherent Irresponsibility May Men Moral Outcomes Process Realms Substitutes Temptation Unpredictability

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“It means, first, that everything that appears in public can be seen and heard by everybody and has the widest possible publicity. For us, appearance—something that is being seen and heard by others as well as by ourselves—constitutes reality. Compared with the reality which comes from being seen and heard, even the greatest forces of intimate life—the passions of the…

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The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is a more violent world.

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“Nationalism always preserved this initial intimate loyalty to the government and never quite lost its function of preserving a precarious balance between nation and state on one hand, between the nationals of an atomized society on the other. Native citizens of a nation-state frequently looked down upon naturalized citizens, those who had received their rights by law and not by…

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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…

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“What imperialists actually wanted was expansion of political power without the foundation of the body politic. Imperialist expansion had been touched off by a curious kind of economic crisis, the overproduction of capital and the emergence of "superfluous" money, the result of oversaving, which could no longer find productive investment within national borders. For the first time, investment of power…

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the greater the bureaucratization of public life, the greater will be the attraction of violence. In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one can argue, to whom one can represent grievances, on whom the pressures of power can be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the…

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Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.

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Death not merely ends life, it also bestows upon it a silent completeness, snatched from the hazardous flux to which all things human are…

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Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to…

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We have almost succeeded in leveling all human activities to the common denominator of securing the necessities of life and providing for their abundance.

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For comedy action, I must know the language.

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Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should 'make…

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