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Words of Wisdom

Hannah Arendt on Good and Evil

“The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.”
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Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) was a German-American political theorist who specialized in the nature of power and its practice within political systems. Born into a Jewish family, Arendt fled Germany in 1933 and then escaped Vichy France in 1941. After settling in the United States, she became the first female lecturer at Princeton and enjoyed a respected and well-traveled academic career until her death at age 69.


“The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.”

-Hannah Arendt, from The Life of the Mind (1978), “Thinking” (h/t Wikiquote)

Image credit: Wikicommons

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On January 1, 2016, one of the most infamous books of the 20th century — Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf — enters public domain and can be published by anyone in Germany for the first time since the end of World War II. Seventy years after the fall of the Nazis, people still debate allowing that particularly evil genii out of the bottle to influence young minds. Others argue that the genii’s been out of the bottle all along, either through underground sources or, more recently, the Internet. More controllable, however, have been the propaganda films of the Nazis, whose chief propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, announced in 1941 that, “Film is our most important medium for propaganda.” Felix Moeller’s new documentary Forbidden Films: The Hidden Legacy of Nazi Film examines this question of allowing new generations to see these banned films and, if so, how to show them without that evil history repeating itself.

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