Hannah Arendt Quotes

Force is legitimate where gentleness avails not.

The power that is supported by force alone will have cause often to tremble.

Force cannot change right.

A man with a club is a law-maker.

Sovereignty and the right to rule cannot be conferred on anyone no matter who ... as a result of an academic discussion. Sovereignty is acquired by force and power and violence.

Voting is merely a labor-saving device for ascertaining on which side force lies and bowing to the inevitable... It is neither more nor less than a paper representative of the bayonet, the bully, and the bullet.

The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual, crime.

Counting heads is not an ideal way to govern, at least it is better than breaking them.

… morality ends where the gun begins.

Governmental power is the faculty to beat into submission all those who would dare to disobey the orders issued by the authorities. … Every governmental action is backed by constables, prison guards, and executioners. However beneficial a governmental action may appear, it is ultimately made possible only by the government's power to compel its subjects to do what many of them would not do if they were not threatened by the police and the penal courts.

Ambition fortifies the will of man to become ruler over other men: it operates with deception, cajolery, and violence, it is the action of impurity upon impurity.

We dare not supress thoughts, but when they are expressed through violence, like the idea that power comes from the barrel of a gun, they must be dealt with and met accordingly.

A culture of intimidation has no justification in any administration.

In this world, all power rests upon force.

She would of been a good woman," said The Misfit, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.

Struggle is the father of all things, virtue lies in blood, leadership is primary and decisive

The decisive means for politics is violence.

The more you think you have to use physical force to control life, the less you control life.

If two irreconcilable elements are struggling with each other, the solution lies in force. There has never been any other solution in history, and there never will be.

Only force rules. Force is the first law

Leadership is obliged to justify itself daily.

Force when aggressively applied is "violence" and is, therefore, morally unjustifiable, but when it is used in the furtherance of a legitimate cause, it has its moral justification. The elimination of force at all costs in Utopian.

any compulsion tries to justify itself.

Every government on earth is the personification of violence and force, and yet the doctine of non-resistance is as old as human thought - even more than this, the instinct is as old as life upon the earth.

Men think they may justly do that for which they have a precedent.