Hannah Arendt Quotes about Evil

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Evil thrives on apathy and cannot exist without it.

Evil thrives on apathy and cannot exist without it.

Hannah Arendt

Evil, Apathy, Thrive

Politically, the weakness of the argument has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil.

Hannah Arendt

Evil, Weakness, Argument

Hannah Arendt (2009). “Responsibility and Judgment”, p.36, Schocken

There is a strange interdependence between thoughtlessness and evil.

Hannah Arendt

Evil, Strange, Interdependence

It is indeed my opinion now that evil is never “radical,” that it is only extreme, and that it possess neither depth nor any demonic dimension. It can overgrow and lay waste the whole world precisely because it spreads like fungus on the surface. It is “thought-defying,” as I said, because thought tries to reach some depth, to go to the roots, and the moment it concerns itself with evil, it is frustrated because there is nothing. That is its “banality.” Only the good has depth and can be radical.

Hannah Arendt

Roots, Evil, Frustrated

Hannah Arendt (2000). “The Portable Hannah Arendt”, Penguin Group USA

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.

Hannah Arendt

Evil, Suffering, Together

Hannah Arendt (1981). “The Life of the Mind”, p.204, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Since one cannot educate adults, the word "education" has an evil sound in politics; there is a pretense of education, when the real purpose is coercion without the use of force.

Hannah Arendt

Real, Evil, Sound

Hannah Arendt, Jerome Kohn (2006). “Between Past and Future”, p.148, Penguin

You think that you can judge what's good or evil from whether you enjoy doing it or not. You think that evil is what always appears in the form of a temptation, while good is what you never spontaneously want to do. I think this is all total rubbish, if you don't mind my saying so.

Hannah Arendt

Thinking, Evil, Judging

As witnesses not of our intentions but of our conduct, we can be true or false, and the hypocrite's crime is that he bears false witness against himself. What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.

Hannah Arendt

Integrity, Hypocrite, Evil

'On Revolution' (1963) ch. 2

Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.

Hannah Arendt

Hypocrite, Evil, Hypocrisy

'On Revolution' (1963) ch. 2

Could the activity of thinking as such, the habit of examining whatever happens to come to pass or to attract attention, regardless of results and specific content, could this activity be among the conditions that make men abstain from evil-doing?

Hannah Arendt

Men, Thinking, Evil

Hannah Arendt (1981). “The Life of the Mind”, p.21, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

[About Eichmann:] It was as though in those last minutes he was summing up the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us - the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.

Hannah Arendt

Taught Us, Long, Evil

Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil ch. 15 (1963)