It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lessons that this long course in human wickedness had taught us – the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.
HANNAH ARENDTIn the Third Reich evil lost its distinctive characteristic by which most people had until then recognized it. The Nazis redefined it as a civil norm.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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Revolutions are the only political events which confront us directly and inevitably with the problem of beginning.
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The greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons.
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To be sure, we are still aware that thinking calls not only for intelligence and profundity but above all for courage.
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When all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing.
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Factuality itself depends for its continued existence upon the existence of the nontotalitarian world.
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And the distinction between violent and non-violent action is that the former is exclusively bent upon the destruction of the old, and the latter is chiefly concerned with the establishment of something new.
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Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.
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No human life, not even the life of the hermit in nature’s wilderness, is possible without a world which directly or indirectly testifies to the presence of other human beings.
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No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes.
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Loving life is easy when you are abroad. Where no one knows you and you hold your life in your hands all alone, you are more master of yourself than at any other time.
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Revolutionaries do not make revolutions! The revolutionaries are those who know when power is lying in the street and when they can pick it up. Armed uprising by itself has never yet led to revolution.
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There is no class that cannot be wiped out if a sufficient number of its members are murdered.
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The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
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Under the most diverse conditions and disparate circumstances, we watch the development of the same phenomena—homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth.
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What makes men obey or tolerate real power and, on the other hand, hate people who have wealth without power, is the rational instinct that power has a certain function and is of some general use.
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