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[About Eichmann:] It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us - the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.

Hannah Arendt

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Hannah Arendt
Age: 69 †
Born: 1906
Born: October 14
Died: 1975
Died: December 4
Author
Essayist
Historian
Philosopher
Political Scientist
Political Theorist
Sociologist
University Teacher
Writer
Hanover
Germany
Johanna Hannah Arendt
Johanna Hannah Cohn Arendt
Hannah Arendt Bluecher
Hanna Arendt
Johanna Arendt
Evil
Minutes
Thought
Taught
Summing
Human
Courses
Fearsome
Humans
Course
Defying
Long
Word
Banality
Though
Wickedness
Lasts
Lesson
Last
Lessons

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The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
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thinking beings have an urge to speak, speaking beings have an urge to think.
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The chief qualification of a mass leader has become unending infallibility he can never admit an error.
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The strength of even the strongest individual can always be overpowered by the many, who often will combine for no other purpose than to ruin strength precisely because of its peculiar independence.
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There is a strange interdependence between thoughtlessness and evil.
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I've begun so late, really only in recent years, to truly love the world... Out of gratitude, I want to call my book on political theories Amor Mundi .
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Absence of thought is indeed a powerful factor in human affairs, statistically speaking the most powerful, not just in the conduct of the many but in the conduct of all.
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These are the fifties, you know. The disgusting, posturing fifties.
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where everybody is guilty, nobody is.
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Poetry, whose material is language, is perhaps the most human and least worldly of the arts, the one in which the end product remains closest to the thought that inspired it.
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Caution in handling generally accepted opinions that claim to explain whole trends of history is especially important for the historian of modern times, because the last century has produced an abundance of ideologies that pretend to be keys to history but are actually nothing but desperate efforts to escape responsibility.
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Every end in history necessarily contains a new beginning.
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The saving grace of all really great gifts is that the persons who bear their burden remain superior to what they have done, at least as long as the source of creativity is alive.
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To act, in its most general sense, means to take an initiative, to begin... to set something into motion.
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Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.
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Bureaucracy, the rule of nobody.
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every thought is strictly speaking an after-thought.
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Legends have always played a powerful role in the making of history. ... Without ever relating facts reliably, yet always expressing their true significance, they offered a truth beyond realities, a remembrance beyond memories.
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The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.
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Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future, making it predictable and reliable to the extent that this is humanly possible.
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