Quotes About Action

Hannah Arendt

Plurality is the condition of human action because we are all the same, that is, human, in such a way that nobody is ever the same as anyone else who ever lived, lives, or will live.

C'est par le verbe et l'acte que nous nous insérons dans le monde humain, et cette insertion est comme une seconde naissance dans laquelle nous confirmons et assurons le fait brut de notre apparition physique originelle .

The instrumentalization of action and the degradation of politics into a means for something else has of course never really succeeded in eliminating action, in preventing its being one of the decisive human experiences, or in destroying the realm of human affairs altogether.

Humanity is never acquired in solitude, and never by giving one's work to the public. It can be achieved only by one who has thrown his life and his person into the 'venture of the public realm.

Fluindo na direcção da morte, a vida do homem arrastaria consigo, inevitavelmente, todas as coisas humanas para a ruína e a destruição, se não fosse a faculdade humana de interrompê-las e iniciar algo novo, faculdade inerente à acção como perene advertência de que os homens, embora devam morrer, não nascem para morrer, mas para começar.

The universal demand for happiness and the widespread unhappiness in our society (and these are but two sides of the same coin) are among the most persuasive signs that we have begun to live in a labor society which lacks enough laboring to keep it contented. For only the animal laborans, and neither the craftsman nor the man of action, has ever demanded to be 'happy' or thought that mortal men could be happy.

Speaking is also a form of action.

In order to make room for one's own action, something that was there before must be removed or destroyed, and things as they were before are changed.

Hannah Arendt

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

Je?eli stosujemy przemoc jako ?rodek maj?cy prowadzi? do celu, cel ten czasami si? zmienia lub nigdy nie zostaje osi?gni?ty.

What will be at stake here is the Will as the spring of action, that is, as the power of spontaneously beginning . . . . No doubt every man, by virtue of his birth, is a new beginning, and his power of beginning may well correspond to this fact of the human condition. It is in line with these Augustinian reflections that the will has sometimes, and not only with Augustine, been considered to be the actualization of the principium individuationis.

Therefore, nothing happens in the world by chance. This having been established, it seems to follow that whatever is done in the world is done partly by divine agency and partly by our will.

In other words, the deliberate denial of factual truth—the ability to lie—and the capacity to change facts—the ability to act—are interconnected; they owe their existence to the same source: imagination.

What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than to think what we are doing.

Whoever takes upon himself political responsibility will always come to the point where he says with Hamlet: The time is out of joint: O cursed spite That ever I was born to set it right! To set the time aright means to renew the world, and this we can do because we all arrived at one time or another as newcomers in a world which was there before us and will still be there when we are gone, when we shall have left its burden to our successors.

Simple forgeries from the viewpoint of scholarship appeared to receive the sanction of history itself when the whole marching reality of the movements stood behind them and pretended to draw from them the necessary inspiration for action.

Il rimedio all'imprevedibilità della sorte,alla caotica incertezza del futuro è la facoltà do fare e mantenere promesse

Qui si devono giudicare le sue azioni, non le sofferenze degli ebrei, non il popolo tedesco o l'umanità, e neppure l'antisemitismo e il razzismo

Under the conditions of total terror not even fear can any longer serve as an advisor of how to behave, because terror chooses its victims without reference to individual actions or thoughts, exclusively in accordance with the objective necessity of the natural or historical process. Under the totalitarian conditions, fear probably is more widespread than ever before; but fear has lost its practical usefulness when actions guided by it can no longer help to avoid the dangers that man fears.

The universal demand for happiness and the widespread unhappiness in our society (and these are but two sides of the same coin) are among the most persuasive signs that we have begun to live in a labor society which lacks enough laboring to keep it contented. For only the animal laborans, and neither the craftsman nor the man of action, has ever demanded to be happy or thought that mortal men could be happy.

In the simplicity of everyday life one rule reigns supreme: Each good action, even for a 'bad cause,' adds some real goodness to the world; each bad action even for the most beautiful of all ideals makes our common world a little worse.

On politics] And a people that can no longer believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.