From The Human Condition (205-06):
"The words of Pericles, as Thucydides reports them, are perhaps unique in their supreme confidence that men can enact and save their greatness at the same time and, as it were, by one and the same gesture, and that the performance as such will be enough to generate dynamis and not need the transforming reification of homo faber to keep it in reality. Pericles' speech, though it certainly corresponded to and articulated the innermost convictions of the people of Athens, has always been read with the sad wisdom of hindsight by men who knew that his words were spoken at the beginning of the end. Yet short-lived as this faith in dynamis (and consequently in politics) may have been - and it had already come to an end when the first political philosophies were formulated - its bare existence has sufficed to elevate action to the highest rank in the hierarchy of the vita activa and to single out speech as the decisive distinctive between human and animal life, both of which bestowed upon politics a dignity which even today has not altogether disappeared.
What is outstandingly clear in Pericles' formulations - and, incidentally, no less transparent in Homer's poems - is that the innermost meaning of the acted deed and the spoken word is independent of victory and defeat and must remain untouched by any eventual outcome, by their consequences for better or worse. Unlike human behavior - which the Greeks, like all civilized people, judged according to "moral standards," taking into account motives and intentions on the one hand and aims and consequences on the other - action can be judged only by the criterion of greatness because it is in its nature to break through the commonly accepted and reach into the extraordinary, where whatever is true in common and everyday life no longer applies because everything that exists is unique and sui generis. Thucycdides, or Pericles, knew full well that he had broken with the normal standards for everyday behavior when he found the glory of Athens in having left behind "everywhere everlasting remembrance [mnemeia aidia] of their good and their evil deeds." The art of politics teaches men how to bring forth what is great and radiant - ta megala kai lampra, in the words of Democritus; as long as the polis is there to inspire men to dare the extraordinary, all things are safe; if it perishes, everything is lost. Motives and aims, no matter how pure or how grandiose, are never unique; like psychological qualities, they are typical, characteristic of different types of persons. Greatness, therefore, or the specific meaning of each deed, can lie only in the performance itself and neither in its motivation nor its achievement."
