Quote

Violence can always destroy power out of the barrel of a gun grows the most effective command, resulting in the most instant and perfect obedience. What never can grow out of it is power.

Hannah Arendt

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Hannah Arendt
Age: 69 †
Born: 1906
Born: October 14
Died: 1975
Died: December 4
Author
Essayist
Historian
Philosopher
Political Scientist
Political Theorist
Sociologist
University Teacher
Writer
Hanover
Germany
Johanna Hannah Arendt
Johanna Hannah Cohn Arendt
Hannah Arendt Bluecher
Hanna Arendt
Johanna Arendt
Grow
Barrel
Violence
Barrels
Grows
Obedience
Perfect
Effective
Power
Instant
Always
Command
Never
Gun
Destroy
Resulting

More quotes by Hannah Arendt

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Revolutionaries do not make revolutions. The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and then they can pick it up.
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Equality...is the result of human organization. We are not born equal.
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It is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong, because you can remain the friend of the sufferer who would want to be the friend of and have to live together with a murderer? Not even another murderer.
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every political structure, new or old, left to itself develops stabilizing forces which stand in the way of constant transformation and expansion. Therefore all political bodies appear to be temporary obstacles when they are seen as part of an eternal stream of growing power.
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Legends have always played a powerful role in the making of history. ... Without ever relating facts reliably, yet always expressing their true significance, they offered a truth beyond realities, a remembrance beyond memories.
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With the rise of Christianity, faith replaced thought as the bringer of immortality.
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The trouble with lying and deceiving is that their efficiency depends entirely upon a clear notion of the truth that the liar and deceiver wishes to hide.
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Nobody is the author or producer of his own life story ... somebody began it and is its subject in the twofold sense, namely, its actor and sufferer ... but nobody is the author.
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The business of thinking ... undoes every morning what it had finished the night before.
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It is a society of laborers which is about to be liberated from the ferrets of labor, and this society does no longer know of those other higher and more meaningful activities for the sake of which this freedom would deserve to be won.
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Kant ... discovered the scandal of reason, that is the fact that our mind is not capable of certain and verifiable knowledge regarding matters and questions that it nevertheless cannot help thinking about.
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In the era of imperialism, businessmen became politicians and were acclaimed as statesmen, while statesmen were taken seriously only if they talked the language of succcessful businessmen.
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By its very nature the beautiful is isolated from everything else. From beauty no road leads to reality.
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where everybody is guilty, nobody is.
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Revolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning.
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Scientific and philosophic truth have parted company.
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If we don't know our own history, we are deemed to live it.
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Every thought is an afterthought.
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Thought and action must never part company.
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The conviction that everything that happens on earth must be comprehensible to man can lead to interpreting history by commonplaces.
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