Daily Inspiration Quote by Hannah Arendt

Arendt’s sting here is her inversion of common sense: as violence loses its usefulness abroad, it perversely gains glamour at home. She isn’t praising revolution; she’s diagnosing a political fashion. Internationally, by the mid-20th century, violence had become a blunt, risky tool - total war, nuclear deterrence, decolonization conflicts, and superpower proxy fights all made outcomes harder to control and moral justifications harder to sustain. Violence looked less like a decisive instrument and more like a roulette wheel with civilian bodies as chips.

Yet that very uncertainty feeds its domestic reputation. When institutions feel clogged, slow, or captured, violence offers the fantasy of immediacy: the shortcut that bypasses persuasion, compromise, and legitimacy. Arendt’s subtext is that violence’s appeal rises not because it works, but because it performs. It supplies an aesthetic of seriousness - the sense that something “real” is finally happening - especially to those alienated from normal politics or suspicious of language itself. In revolutionary moments, that performance can masquerade as power.

The line also reflects Arendt’s signature distinction between power and violence. Power, for her, is collective, sustained, rooted in consent; violence is instrumental, fragile, and ultimately dependent on tools. So when violence becomes “dubious” as an instrument, its domestic allure signals a deeper crisis: people no longer believe shared action can produce change, so they reach for coercion as proof of agency.

Her warning lands with uncomfortable clarity: when violence becomes a substitute for politics rather than a last resort, it’s often a symptom of political failure - and a recipe for more of it.