Anne C. Heller

“In some ways the book, Arendt’s majestic effort to penetrate beneath the horrors of her age, is a meditation on loneliness, on metaphysical rootlessness, on not belonging — a theme that resonates at least as powerfully now as it did then. In it, she tries to understand what she admits defies understanding: the demonic wish to make men superfluous to others and themselves.”
― Anne C. Heller, Hannah Arendt: A Life in Dark Times

“But mostly she intended the phrase to mark Eichmann as a specimen of the new “mass man,” a universal, postindustrial, semi-Marxian type who was characteristically lonely, rootless, socially adrift, economically expendable, and susceptible to both nihilism and authoritarianism.”
― Anne C. Heller, Hannah Arendt: A Life in Dark Times