Living deed, living word
“What first undermines and then kills political communities is loss of power and final impotence; and power cannot be stored up and kept in reserve for emergencies, like the instruments of violence, but exists only in its actualization. Where power is not actualized, it passes away, and history is full of examples that the greatest material riches cannot compensate for this loss. Power is actualized only where word and deed have not parted company, where words are not empty and deeds not brutal, where words are not used to veil intentions but to disclose realities, and deeds are not used to violate and destroy but to establish relations and create new realities.”
“Without action to bring into the play of the world the new beginning of which each man is capable by virtue of being born, “there is no new thing under the sun”; without speech to materialize and memorialize, however tentatively, the “new things” that appear and shine forth, “there is no remembrance”; without the enduring pemanence of a human artifact, there cannot “be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.” And without power, the space of appearance brought forth through action and speech in public will fade away as rapidly as the living deed and the living word.”
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
Quotes: Ecclesiastes
