Quotes by Hannah Arendt

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I don't believe that there may exist some process of thought lacking of personal experience. All thought is meditation (Nachdenken), thinking as a result of something.

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It is indeed my opinion now that evil in never "radical," that is only extreme, and that it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension. It can overgrow and lay waste the whole world precisely because it spreads like a 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 itslef with evil, it is frustrated because there is nothing. That is its "banality." Only the good has depth and can be radical.

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" He was not stupid. It was sheer thoughtlessness. That such remoteness from reality and such thoughtlessness can wreak more havoc than all the evil instincts taken together which, perhaps, are inherent in man - that was, in fact, the lesson one could learn in Jerusalem. But it was a lesson, neither an explanation of the phenomenon nor a theory about it.

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The deeds were monstrous, but the doer--at least, the very effective one now on trial--was quite ordinary, commonplace, and neither monstrous nor demonic.