No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes.
HANNAH ARENDTBut this was a moral question, and the answer to it may not have been legally relevant.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.
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Good works, because they must be forgotten instantly, can never become part of the world; they come and go,leaving no trace. They truly are not of this world.
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What we usually call life is death, what we usually call death is life.
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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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Wisdom is a virtue of old age, and it seems to come only to those who, when young, were neither wise nor prudent.
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Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
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And if he suffers, he must suffer for what he has done, not for what he has caused others to suffer.
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Man cannot be free if he does not know that he is subject to necessity, because his freedom is always won in his never wholly successful attempts to liberate himself from necessity.
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The only antidote to the irreversibility of history is the faculty of forgiveness.
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Evil thrives on apathy and cannot survive without it.
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Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda.
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Compared with the mobilization of all opponents to the government as such, the capturing of lower middle-class votes was a temporary phenomenon.
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Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power’s disappearance.
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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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