Her book on the trial Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil poses the frightening thought that the worst killers among us may not be monsters but simply the folks who look and act the most like the rest of us.
Sakharov's thinking here echoes Hannah Arendt's concept of the "banality of evil," which focussed on the willful rejection of thought and depth.
His role in the mass extermination of Jews epitomized "the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil" that had spread across Europe at the time.
What Drakulić discovered, in other words, is what Hannah Arendt, at the trial of Adolf Eichmann, in Jerusalem, some forty years earlier, called "the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil".
Those observations bring to mind Hannah Arendt's famous description of "the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil" she observed in Adolf Eichmann, the high-ranking Nazi who helped orchestrate the Holocaust.
Banal crime; the banality of evil.
As Max Fisher reported for The Atlantic, the Nigerian-American novelist Teju Cole, responded to the Kony campaign on Twitter with "Seven thoughts on the banality of sentimentality".
While she's doing a press conference to promote the film, she's overwhelmed both by the vanity and banality of the discussion and by her irrepressible thoughts about her mother — and by other sorts of fantasies, involving her ex.
Bassam recoils from the hedonistic pursuits of the West, yet finds himself drawn to them; losing his virginity to a prostitute, he wonders, "How many years will she be given by the Creator before she will burn?" Imagining the mind of a terrorist, Dubus runs into a familiar problem: Bassam's thoughts are a case study in the banality of evil.
And my initial thoughts about Thanksgiving that it's just a manufactured break in the banality of existence didn't really change as a result of my weekend of living as a Pilgrim.
However, his major novels Madame Bovary (1857; Eng. trans. Madame Bovary) and L'Éducation sentimentale (1869; Sentimental Education)—fuse his poetic gifts with discourses closer to everyday experience to evoke the thoughts and feelings of trivial lives frittered away in hopeless attempts to transcend the banality of the modern world.
