Latest Quotes

“You do violence with your values and words of good and evil, you valuators; and this is your hidden love and the gleaming, trembling and flowing-over of your souls. But a stronger force grows out of your values and a new overcoming; upon it egg and eggshell break. And whoever must be a creator in go…”

— Fredriech Nietzche, Nietzsche: Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy)

“I think that the white man has a great deal of nerve to refer to any black people as merchants of hate in the face of the hell that black people have caught in this country at the hands of the white man, even at a time when the whites are admitting that they have brutalized black people for four hun…”

— Malcolm X, The End of White World Supremacy: Four Speeches

“Look at the American Revolution in 1776. That revolution was for what? For land. Why did they want land? Independence. How was it carried out? Bloodshed. Number one, it was based on land, the basis of independence. And the only way they could get it was bloodshed.”

— Malcom X, Message to the Grass Roots

“The real rift between black and white is not healed when it is being translated into an even less reconcilable conflict between collective innocence and collective guilt.”

— Hannah Arendt, A Special Supplement: Reflections on Violence

“Where all are guilty, however, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are always the best possible safeguard against the discovery of the actual culprits.”

— Hannah Arendt, A Special Supplement: Reflections on Violence

“To resort to violence in view of outrageous events or conditions is enormously tempting because of the immediacy and swiftness inherent in it. It goes against the grain of rage and violence to act with deliberate speed; but this does not make it irrational. On the contrary, in private as well as pub…”

— Hannah Arendt, A Special Supplement: Reflections on Violence

“Without knowing it they had tested the system; they intended no more than to challenge the ossified university system, and down came the system of governmental power together with that of the huge party bureaucracies—‘une sorte de desintégration de toutes les hiérarchies.’ It was a textbook case of…”

— Hannah Arendt, A Special Supplement: Reflections on Violence

“In a contest of violence against violence the superiority of the government has always been absolute; but this superiority lasts only so long as the power structure of the government is intact—that is, so long as commands are obeyed and the army or police forces are prepared to risk their lives and…”

— Hannah Arendt, A Special Supplement: Reflections on Violence

“It is one of the most obvious distinctions between power and violence that power always stands in need of numbers, whereas violence relying on instruments up to a point can manage without them. A legally unrestricted majority rule, that is, a democracy without a constitution, can be very formidable…”

— Hannah Arendt, A Special Supplement: Reflections on Violence

“All political institutions are manifestations and materializations of power; they petrify and decay as soon as the living power of the people ceases to uphold them. This is what Madison meant when he said, ‘all governments rest on opinion,’ a statement that is no less true for the various forms of m…”

— Hannah Arendt, A Special Supplement: Reflections on Violence

“If you ask a member of this generation two simple questions: ‘How do you wish the world to be in fifty years?’ and ‘What do you want your life to be like five years from now?’ the answers are quite often preceded by a ‘Provided that there is still a world,’ and ‘Provided I am still alive.”

— Hannah Arendt, A Special Supplement: Reflections on Violence

“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 could argue, to whom one could present grievances, on whom the pressures of power could be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of governm…”

— Hannah Arendt, A Special Supplement: Reflections on Violence

“The simple fact about progress is that the future of mankind has nothing to offer the individual life, except death.”

— Hannah Arendt, A Special Supplement: Reflections on Violence

“Will we recover? Yes. For violence, like Achilles’ lance, can heal the wounds that it has inflicted.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre, Preface to Frantz Fanon’s “Wretched of the Earth”

“You will have to fight, or rot in concentration camps.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre, Preface to Frantz Fanon’s “Wretched of the Earth”

“You, who are so liberal and so humane, who have such an exaggerated adoration of culture that it verges on affectation, you pretend to forget that you own colonies and that in them men are massacred in your name.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre, Preface to Frantz Fanon’s “Wretched of the Earth”

“Our victims know us by their scars and by their chains, and it is this that makes their evidence irrefutable.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre, Preface to Frantz Fanon’s “Wretched of the Earth”

“Irrepressible violence is neither sound and fury, nor the resurrection of savage instincts, nor even the effect of resentment: it is man re-creating himself. The rebel's weapon is the proof of his humanity.”

— Jean-Paul Sartre, Preface to Frantz Fanon’s “Wretched of the Earth”

“The technical development of implements of violence has now reached the point where no political goal could conceivably correspond to their destructive potential or justify their actual use in armed conflict.”

— Hannah Arendt, A Special Supplement: Reflections on Violence

“Let’s just go with the numbers, let’s go with the history, 100 percent of revolutions of victims fighting their oppressors, from victims fighting their bullies, 100 percent have been successful through fighting back, through bloodshed. ‘Zero have been successful just over simply protesting. It has n…”

— Gavin Eugene Long, CBS News: Baton Rouge Gunman Was Former Marine