Hannah Arendt

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Hannah Arendt (October 14, 1906 – December 4, 1975) was a German political theorist.

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Eichmann, much less intelligent and without any education to speak of, at least dimly realized that it was not an order but a law which had turned them all into criminals. The distiction between an order and the Führer's word was that the latter's validity was not limited in time and space, which is the outstanding characteristic of the former.
- 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. From 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 councels - 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.
- Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, (1963)

The defiance of established authority, religious and secular, social and political, as a world-wide phenomenon may well one day be accounted the outstanding event of the last decade.
- "Civil Disobedience", Crisis of the Republic, (1972)

"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."