# Hannah Arendt's most famous quotes

The banality of evil, the ideal subject of totalitarian rule and the revolutionary who turns conservative the day after: Hannah Arendt's most quoted lines, from The Origins of Totalitarianism, Eichmann in Jerusalem and The Life of the Mind.

- 39 votes · 12 items
- Apr 15, 2021 · araceli_tintayp
- https://even.best/en/l/4659/hannah-arendt-s-most-famous-quotes

## Top 12

1. **The fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.** (4 · ▲4 ▼0) — Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), on Eichmann's last words.
2. **The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, but terribly and terrifyingly normal.** (4 · ▲4 ▼0) — Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), epilogue.
3. **The essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs out of men.** (4 · ▲4 ▼0) — Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963).
4. **Once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever have been.** (4 · ▲4 ▼0) — Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), epilogue.
5. **Political questions are far too serious to be left to the politicians.** (3 · ▲4 ▼1) — Men in Dark Times (1968).
6. **He was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché.** (3 · ▲3 ▼0) — Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), chapter III, on Eichmann.
7. **The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or Communist, but people for whom fact and fiction no longer differ…** (3 · ▲3 ▼0) — The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951).
8. **The sad truth of the matter is that most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be or do either evil or good.** (2 · ▲2 ▼0) — The Life of the Mind (1978), 'Thinking'.
9. **The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.** (2 · ▲2 ▼0) — The New Yorker, 12 September 1970.
10. **Under conditions of terror, most people will comply but some people will not.** (1 · ▲2 ▼1) — Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), chapter XIV.
11. **Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.** (1 · ▲2 ▼1) — Attributed: found in a 1989 dictionary of quotations, without the exact work.
12. **Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent.** (-2 · ▲0 ▼2) — On Violence (1970).

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