Hannah Arendt

The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.

Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.

The greatest evil is not done by evil people, but by people who simply don't care.

The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.

The most effective way to destroy people is to deny and obliterate their own understanding of their history.

Action, to be free, must be for something that is not yet.

The greatest crimes in history are not committed by 'madmen' but by 'normal' people who are too weak to resist the pressure of the moment.

The only way to escape the personal consequences of freedom is to give up the very freedom itself.

The aim of totalitarian education has never been to instill convictions but to destroy the capacity to form any.

The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.

Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it—the quality of temptation.

The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many others were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, but were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.

Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it—the quality of temptation. Many Germans and many Nazis, probably an overwhelming majority of them, must have lived in the conviction that what they were doing was right.

Under conditions of terror, most people will comply but some people will not.

Action, not contemplation, is the highest human faculty.

The only way to be free is to act.

The greatest evil is not radical, it is simply thoughtless.

The problem of evil is the problem of thoughtlessness.

Totalitarianism is an ideology, not a government.

The essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of tyranny, is to make terror a permanent institution.