Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it—the quality of temptation.
HANNAH ARENDTIt 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.
More Hannah Arendt Quotes
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Evil thrives on apathy and cannot survive without it.
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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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The greatest enemy of authority, therefore, is contempt, and the surest way to undermine it is laughter.
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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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The third world is not a reality, but an ideology.
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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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There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking it-self is dangerous.
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Courage is indispensible because in politics not life but the world is at stake.
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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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Half of politics is “image-making”, the other half is the art of making people believe the image.
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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.
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Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.
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For abundance and endless consumption are the ideals of the poor: they are the mirage in the desert of misery.
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Colonization took place in America and Australia, the two continents that, without a culture and a history of their own, had fallen into the hands of Europeans.
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Comprehension, in short, means the unpremeditated, attentive facing up to, and resisting of, reality—whatever it may be or might have been.
HANNAH ARENDT