Hannah Arendt - Violence Quotes

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Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power's disappearance.

Hannah Arendt
Violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it.

Hannah Arendt
Totalitarianism is never content to rule by external means, namely, through the state and a machinery of violence; thanks to its peculiar ideology and the role assigned to it in this apparatus of coercion, totalitarianism has discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within.

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

Hannah Arendt
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
Legitimacy, when challenged, bases itself on an appeal to the past, while justification relates to an end that lies in the future. Violence can be justifiable, but it never will be legitimate.

Hannah Arendt
While violence can destroy power, it can never become a substitute for it.

Hannah Arendt
The more dubious and uncertain an instrument violence has become in international relations, the more it has gained in reputation and appeal in domestic affairs, specifically in the matter of revolution.

Hannah Arendt
The extreme form of power is All against One, the extreme form of violence is One against All.

Hannah Arendt
The fateful equating of power with violence, of the political with government, and of government with a necessary evil has begun.

Hannah Arendt
Generally speaking, violence always arises out of impotence. It is the hope of those who have no power.

Hannah Arendt