The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.
Philosophers
Hannah Arendt
Born in 1906, Hannah Arendt fled Nazi Germany for the U.S. The Origins of Totalitarianism dissected modern domination; the Eichmann trial yielded "the banality of evil." Her warning sharpens as democracies weaken.
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Hannah Arendt's Other Quotes
The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
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.
The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition.
No one has the right to obey.
Related Quotes
It is not living that matters, but living rightly.
-- Socrates
No one desires evil.
-- Socrates
Ethics is the ground of being of human community — the way of aidagara (betweenness) between person and person.
-- Tetsuro Watsuji
Do not impose on others what you yourself do not desire.
-- Confucius
Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous.
-- Confucius
A person may cause evil to others not only by his actions but by his inaction, and in either case he is justly accountable to them for the injury.
-- John Stuart Mill