Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

by Hannah Arendt

Good can be radical; evil can never be radical, it can only be extreme, for it possesses neither depth nor any demonic dimension yet and this is its horror!-it can spread like a fungus over the surface of the earth and lay waste the entire world. Evil comes from a failure to think. It defies thought for as soon as thought tries to engage itself with evil and examine the premises and principles from which it originates, it is frustrated because it finds nothing there. That is the banality of evil.

he apologized, saying, “Officialese [Amtssprache] is my only language.” But the point here is that officialese became his language because he was genuinely incapable of uttering a single sentence that was not a cliché.

The trick used by Himmler—who apparently was rather strongly afflicted with these instinctive reactions himself —was very simple and probably very effective; it consisted in turning these instincts around, as it were, in directing them toward the self. So that instead of saying: What horrible things I did to people!, the murderers would be able to say: What horrible things I had to watch in the pursuance of my duties, how