3 Quotes by Anne C. Heller

There are no monsters, except those set into the world by men.

In some ways the book, Arendt’s majestic effort to penetrate beneath the horrors of her age, is a meditation on loneliness, on metaphysical rootlessness, on not belonging – a theme that resonates at least as powerfully now as it did then. In it, she tries to understand what she admits defies understanding: the demonic wish to make men superfluous to others and themselves.

But mostly she intended the phrase to mark Eichmann as a specimen of the new “mass man,” a universal, postindustrial, semi-Marxian type who was characteristically lonely, rootless, socially adrift, economically expendable, and susceptible to both nihilism and authoritarianism.