Hannah Arendt Quotes

The devil made me do it.

Chacun exige d'e" tre innocent, a' tout prix, me" me si, pour cela, il faut accuser le genre humain et le ciel. Everyone insists on his or her innocence, at all costs, even if it means accusing the rest of the human race and heaven.

There are many scapegoats for our sins, but the most popular one is Providence.

One of the less attractive aspects of human nature is our tendency to hate the people we haven't treated very well; it's much easier than accepting guilt. If we can convince ourselves that the people we betrayed or enslaved were subhuman monsters in the first place, then our guilt isn't nearly so black as we secretly know that it is. Humans are very, very good at shifting blame and avoiding guilt.

We relinquished our freedom that day, and we were more than happy to see it go. From that moment on we lived in true freedom, the freedom to point to someone else and say “They told me to do it! It’s their fault, not mine.” The freedom, God help us, to say “I was only following orders.”-World War Z

Widespread personification of “society” is another verbal tactic that evades issues of individual responsibility. Such use of the term “society” is a more sophisticated version of the notion that “the devil made me do it.” Like much of the rest of the special vocabulary of the anointed, it is used as a magic word to make choice, behavior, and performance vanish into thin air.

Where all are guilty, no one is; confessions of collective guilt are the best possible safeguard against the discovery of culprits, and the very magnitude of the crime the best excuse for doing nothing.

I think it's too easy often to find a villain out of the headlines and to then repeat that villainy again and again and again. You know, traditionally, America has always looked to scapegoat someone as the boogie man.

It is human natures to find scapegoats. When things are going badly people try and find someone to blame.

The way they control a population is by pointing at somebody else - whether they're gay, Mexican, Jewish, black - and saying, 'They are different than you. They're the reason you're in the shape you're in. You're not responsible.' And when they exonerate you through vilifying and demonizing someone else, they control you.

We do not like to be robbed of an enemy; we want someone to hate when we suffer. It is so depressing to think that we suffer because we are fools; yet, taking mankind in the mass, that is the truth.

The scapegoat has always had the mysterious power of unleashing man's ferocious pleasure in torturing, corrupting, and befouling.

The devil is only a convenient myth invented by the real malefactors of our world.

The most effective way to silence our guilty conscience is to convince ourselves and others that those we have sinned against are indeed depraved creatures, deserving every punishment, even extermination. We cannot pity those we have wronged, nor can we be indifferent toward them. We must hate and persecute them or else leave the door open to self-contempt.

Usually, guys, when something bad happens, they punish someone else.

And once again I think about how people use the devil as an alias for the things they fear. The cause and effect is backward. The devil doesn't make anyone do anything. People just do things and blame the devil after.

We find or invent the cleverest means of attributing our sins to anything or anyone outside of ourselves.

The criminal is quite frequently not equal to his deed: he belittles and slanders it.

To find the cause of our ills in something outside ourselves, something specific that can be spotted and eliminated, is a diagnosis that cannot fail to appeal. To say that the cause of our troubles is not in us but in the Jews , and pass immediately to the extermination of the Jews, is a prescription likely to find a wide acceptance.

There is a powerful craving in most of us to see ourselves as instruments in the hands of others and thus free ourselves from the responsibility for acts which are prompted by our own questionable inclinations and impulses. Both the strong and the weak grasp at this alibi. The latter hide their malevolence under the virtue of obedience: they acted dishonorably because they had to obey orders. The strong, too, claim absolution by proclaiming themselves the chosen instrument of a higher power -- God, history, fate, nation, or humanity.

My enduring feeling about René Lévesque is that if he had chosen to hang me, even as he tightened the rope round my neck, he would have complained about how humiliating it was for him to spring the trapdoor. And then, once I was swinging in the wind, he would blame my ghost for having obliged him to murder, thereby imposing a guilt trip on a sweet, self-effacing, downtrodden Francophone.

I think that Donald Trump picked on people's fears, their anxieties and he gave them somebody to blame, and some folks just really turned out for him for that.

The rats are underneath the piles/ The Jew is underneath the lot.

This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune,--often the surfeit of our own behavior,--we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars: as if we were villains by necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers, by spherical predominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers, by an enforced obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on: an admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star.

Excuses sound best to the person that's making 'em up!