Arendt Eichmann Quotes & Sayings

When we think of a criminal, we imagine someone with criminal motives. And when we look at Eichmann, he doesn't actually have any criminal motives. Not what is usually understood by "criminal motives." He wanted to go along with the rest. He wanted to say "we," and going-along-with-the-rest and wanting-to-say-we like this were quite enough to make the greatest of all crimes possible. The Hitlers, after all, really aren't the ones who are typical in this kind of situation
they'd be powerless without the support of others. — Hannah Arendt

What are we going to say if tomorrow it occurs to some African state to send its agents into Mississippi and to kidnap one of the leaders of the segregationist movement there? And what are we going to reply if a court in Ghana or the Congo quotes the Eichmann case as precedent? — Hannah Arendt

Have you ever read any Hannah Arendt?" I must look lost, because he explains further. "She's a political theorist."
" Anyway, she wrote this book about the trial of a Nazi lieutenant named Adolf Eichmann in the 1960s. Arendt was a Jew who left Germany during Hitler's reign, and during the trial this guy had to face up to all the atrocities he committed. Things only a monster could conceive of. However, he was examined by psychologists, and it was determined that he wasn't a psychopath, that in fact he was entirely normal. This left Arendt to determine that perfectly ordinary, everyday people were capable of crimes normally associated with only the most depraved, wicked members of society. She called it the banality of evil. — L. H. Cosway

And the German society of eighty million people had been shielded against reality and factuality by exactly the same means, the same self-deception, lies, and stupidity that had now become engrained in Eichmann's mentality. These lies changed from year to year, and they frequently contradicted each other; moreover, they were not necessarily the same for the various branches of the Party hierarchy or the people at large. But the practice of self-deception had become so common, almost a moral prerequisite for survival, that even now, eighteen years after the collapse of the Nazi regime, when most of the specific content of its lies has been forgotten, it is sometimes difficult not to believe that mendacity has become an integral part of the German national character. — Hannah Arendt

Arendt reasoned that anyone could have filled Eichmann's role and that his evil was "banal" precisely because insertion into a social hierarchy committed to such evil made it normal and legitimate. This is why, in her view, Eichmann was not a madman. His deeds were monstrous, but Eichmann himself was thoroughly ordinary. In Arendt's words: "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. — James Waller

The one that came really easy was the Japanese lover, because he's like a ghost in the book. He's always in the background like a spirit, like a shadow, almost. There's a very delicate line there. — Isabel Allende

When, a year later, the Madagascar project was declared to have become "obsolete," everybody was psychologically, or rather, logically, prepared for the next step: since there existed no territory to which one could "evacuate," the only "solution" was extermination. Not that Eichmann, the truth-revealer for generations to come, ever suspected the existence of such sinister plans. — Hannah Arendt

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. — Hannah Arendt

For, obviously, things were not as simple as the framers of laws had imagined them to be, and if it was of small legal relevance, it was of great political interest to know how long it takes an average person to overcome his innate repugnance toward crime, and what exactly happens to him once he had reached that point. To this question, the case of Adolf Eichmann supplied an answer that could not have been clearer and more precise. — Hannah Arendt

He wished he had never come to London. He wished he had never undertaken to revive English magic. He wished he had stayed at Hurtfew Abbey, reading and doing magic for his own pleasure. None of it, he thought, was worth the loss of forty books. — Susanna Clarke

The net effect of this language system was not to keep these people ignorant of what they were doing, but to prevent them from equating it with their old, "normal" knowledge of murder and lies. Eichmann's great susceptibility to catch words and stock phrases, combined with his incapacity for ordinary speech, made him, of course, an ideal subject for "language rules. — Hannah Arendt

True love doesn't exist, for, love is always true. If it is not true, then it is not love at all. — Ashmita Acharya

The Israeli court psychiatrist who examined Eichmann found him a "completely normal man, more normal, at any rate, than I am after examining him," the implication being that the coexistence of normality and bottomless cruelty explodes our ordinary conceptions and present the true enigma of the trial. — Hannah Arendt

I feel like the rap metal at the end of the 1990s destroyed rock music for everybody and suddenly everybody felt like they had to apologise for being in rock bands. People suddenly felt bad about wanting to reach massive audiences and the sense of theatre, that we have in our live show, became something to avoid. — Nate Ruess

No success was won without enthusiasm and perseverance. — Lailah Gifty Akita

He wanted to say that he yearned to accomplish something extraordinary, to be admired like a man riding at the head of a great procession. — Ken Liu

Riding broomsticks, consorting with unholy powers. Who has the time for such pleasantries anymore? Why, I haven't been on a date since the late eighties. — Max Gladstone

It's a long way from not having enough serotonin to thinking the world is "stale, flat and unprofitable"; even further to writing a play about a man driven by that thought. — Susanna Kaysen