10 Quotes by Hannah Arendt about evil
- Author Hannah Arendt
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For goodness that is beyond virtue, and hence beyond temptation, ignorant of the argumentative reasoning by which man fends off temptations and, by this very process, comes to know the ways, of wickedness, is also incapable of learning the arts of persuading and arguing.
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Good can be radical; evil can never be radical, it can only be extreme, for it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension yet--and this is its horror--it can spread like a fungus over the surface of the earth and lay waste the entire world. Evil comes from a failure to think.
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Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it—the quality of temptation.
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- Author Hannah Arendt
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Evil thrives on apathy and cannot survive without it.
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The greater the bureaucratization of public life, the greater will be the attraction of violence. In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one could argue, to whom one could present grievances, on whom the pressures of power could be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have a tyranny without a tyrant.
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- Author Hannah Arendt
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the greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons
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It is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong, because you can remain the friend of the sufferer; who would want to be the friend of and have to live together with a murderer? Not even another murderer.
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Evil thrives on apathy and cannot exist without it.
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Politically, the weakness of the argument has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil.
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