Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Penguin Classics, 2006 edition)

Their wordsJustice does not permit anything of the sort; it demands seclusion, it permits sorrow rather than anger, and it prescribes the most careful abstention from all the nice pleasures of putting oneself in the limelight.

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Their wordsEvil in the Third Reich had lost the quality by which most people recognize it - the quality of temptation.

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Their wordsYet every custom has its origin in some single act.

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Their wordsThe story of the Danish Jews is sui generis, and the behavior of the Danish people and their government was unique among all the countries of Europe - whether occupied, or a partner of the Axis, or neutral and truly independent.

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Their wordsOn 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.

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Their wordsThe question of a court's jurisdiction must be decided before the trial begins; and once a court has been declared competent, it must also pass judgment.

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Their wordsIt is in the very nature of things human that every act that has once made its appearance and has been recorded in the history of mankind stays with mankind as a potentiality long after its actuality has become a thing of the past.

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Their wordsThis, of course, is not to deny that there is such a thing as political responsibility which, however, exists quite apart from what the individual member of the group has done and therefore can neither be judged in moral terms nor be brought before a criminal court.

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Their wordsEvery government assumes political responsibility for the deeds and misdeeds of its predecessor and every nation for the deeds and misdeeds of the past.

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Their wordsThe 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.

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Their wordsFrom the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together, for it implied - as had been said at Nuremberg over and over again by the defendants and their counsels - that this new type of criminal, who is in actual fact hostis generis humani, commits his crimes under circumstances that make it well-nigh impossible for him to know or to feel that he is doing wrong.

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