Natalie

“For the lesson of such stories is simple and within everybody's grasp. Politically speaking, it is that under conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not, just as the lesson of the countries to which the Final Solution was proposed is that "it could happen" in most places but it did not happen everywhere. Humanly speaking, no more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.”
― Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

“It belongs among the refinements of totalitarian governments in our century that they don't permit their opponents to die a great, dramatic martyr's death for their convictions. A good many of us might have accepted such a death. The totalitarian state lets its opponents disappear in silent anonymity. It is certain that anyone who had dared to suffer death rather than silently tolerate the crime would have sacrificed his life in vain.”
― Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

“Evil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it - the quality of temptation. Many Germans and many Nazis, probably an overwhelming majority of them, must have been tempted not to murder, not to rob, not to let their neighbors go off to their doom...and not to become accomplices in all these crimes by benefiting from them. But, God knows, they had learned how to resist temptation.”
― Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

“This story took no more than perhaps ten minutes to tell, and when it was over - the senseless, needless destruction of twenty-seven years in less than twenty-four hours - one thought foolishly: everyone, everyone should have his day in court.”
― Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil