Hannah Arendt
"He had been an ambitious young man who was fed up with his job as a traveling salesman… From a humdrum life without significance and consequence, the wind had blown him into History"
“The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.”
"Eichmann was not Iago and not Macbeth, and nothing would have been farther from his mind than to be a villain like Richard III. Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all… He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing… It was sheer thoughtlessness that made him to become one of the greatest monsters in history"