6 quotes
Humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.
Eichmann in Jerusalem : A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963)
The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely to think from the standpoint of somebody else.
Eichmann in Jerusalem : A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963)
The essence of totalitarian government, and perhaps the nature of every bureaucracy, is to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men, and thus to dehumanise them.
Eichmann in Jerusalem : A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963)
The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.
Eichmann in Jerusalem : A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963)
What stuck in the minds of these men who had become murderers was simply the notion of being involved in something historic, grandiose, unique ("a great task that occurs once in two thousand years"), which must therefore be difficult to bear.
Eichmann in Jerusalem : A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963)
No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes. On the contrary, whatever the punishment, once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever have been.
Eichmann in Jerusalem : A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963)