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 ARENDTNo punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it—the quality of temptation.
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In 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.
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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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If the ability to tell right from wrong should have anything to do with the ability to think, then we must be able to ‘demand’ its exercise in every sane person no matter how erudite or ignorant.
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It is only to stress the fact that the difference between a clandestine literature and no literature equals the difference between one and zero.
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No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes.
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A life spent entirely in public, in the presence of others, becomes, as we would say, shallow.
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Justice demands seclusion, it permits sorrow rather than anger, and it prescribes the most careful abstention from all the nice pleasures of putting oneself in the limelight.
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Whatever can be taken away from a lasting enjoyment for its own sake cannot possibly be the proper object of desire.
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Hitlerism exercised its strong international and inter-European appeal during the thirties because racism, although a state doctrine only in Germany, had been a powerful trend in public opinion everywhere.
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For politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same.
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The only possible metaphor one may conceive of for the life of the mind is the sensation of being alive. Without the breath of life, the human body is a corpse; without thinking, the human mind is dead.
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It is quite gratifying to feel guilty if you haven’t done anything wrong: how noble! Whereas it is rather hard and certainly depressing to admit guilt and to repent.
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Society is the form in which the fact of mutual dependence for the sake of life and nothing else assumes public significance and where the activities connected with sheer survival are permitted to appear in public.
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The third world is not a reality, but an ideology.
HANNAH ARENDT