Hannah Arendt Quotes About Crime

Quotes about: Crime

• 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

• Where all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing.

  Hannah Arendt

  Discovery, Guilt, Doing Nothing

  Hannah Arendt (1970). “On Violence”, p.71, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• When we think of a criminal, we imagine someone with criminal motives. And when we look at Eichmann, he doesn't actually have any criminal motives. Not what is usually understood by "criminal motives." He wanted to go along with the rest. He wanted to say "we," and going-along-with-the-rest and wanting-to-say-we like this were quite enough to make the greatest of all crimes possible. The Hitlers, after all, really aren't the ones who are typical in this kind of situation--they'd be powerless without the support of others.

  Hannah Arendt

  Thinking, Support, Typical

• 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

• Slavery's crime against humanity did not begin when one people defeated and enslaved its enemies (though of course this was bad enough), but when slavery became an institution in which some men were 'born' free and others slave, when it was forgotten that it was man who had deprived his fellow-men of freedom, and when the sanction for the crime was attributed to nature.

  Hannah Arendt

  Men, People, Humanity

  Hannah Arendt (1968). “Imperialism: Part Two Of The Origins Of Totalitarianism”, p.189, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

• 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.

  Hannah Arendt

  Punishment, Criminals, Firsts

  Hannah Arendt (2006). “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil”, p.238, Penguin

• No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes.

  Hannah Arendt

  Punishment, Criminals, Crime

  Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil epilogue (1963)

• Expulsion and genocide, though both are international offenses, must remain distinct; the former is an offense against fellow-nations, whereas the latter is an attack upon human diversity as such, that is, upon a characteristic of the "human status" without which the very words "mankind" or "humanity" would be devoid of meaning.

  Hannah Arendt

  Diversity, Humanity, Would Be

  Hannah Arendt (2006). “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil”, p.235, Penguin

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