[…]the simple-minded positivism that believes it has found a firm ground of certainty if it only excludes all mental phenomena from consideration and… - Hannah Arendt

Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism.

It is not murder which is forgiven but the killer, his person as it appears in circumstances and intentions. The trouble with the Nazi criminals was precisely that they renounced voluntarily all personal qualities, as if nobody were left to be either punished or forgiven. They protested time and again that they had never done anything out of their own initiative, that they had no intentions whatsoever, good or bad, and that they only obeyed orders.

boredom and urban cynicism had become so natural to them that an experience from which these qualities were absent seemed to be, in some way, defective.