A mixture of gullibility and cynicism had been an outstanding characteristic of mob mentality before it became an everyday phenomenon of masses.
Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts..., for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.
He was summing up the lessons that this long course in human wickedness had taught us—the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.
If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer.
Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.
Only crime and the criminal...confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.
Political questions are far too serious to be left to the politicians.
Real power begins where secrecy begins.
Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it.
The greatest evil perpetrated is the evil committed by nobodies, that is, by human beings who refuse to be persons.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist.
The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed…
The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
The sad truth of the matter is that most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be or do either evil or good.
Under conditions of tyranny it is far easier to act than to think.
