"It is quite gratifying to feel guilty if you haven't done anything wrong: how noble! Whereas it is rather hard and certainly depressing to admit guilt and to repent. The youth of Germany is surrounded, on all sides and in all walks of life, by men in positions of authority and in public office who are very guilty indeed but who feel nothing of the sort. The normal reaction to this state of affairs should be indignation, but indignation would be quite risky—not a danger to life and limb but definitely a handicap in a career. Those young German men and women who every once in a while—on the occasion of all the Diary of Anne Frank hubbub and of the Eichmann trial—treat us to hysterical outbursts of guilt feelings are not staggering under the burden of the past, their fathers' guilt; rather they are trying to escape from the pressure of very present and actual problems into a cheap sentimentality."
Quote Details
Added by wikiquote-import-bot
Unverified quote
0 likes
Original Language: English
Available Languages (1)
Sources
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), Ch. XV.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Guilt
Revision History
No revisions have been submitted for this quote.
Categories
Guilt
52 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Guilt →
Related Quotes
"[O]nly in a metaphorical sense can one say he feels guilty for what not he but his father or his people have done. (M…"
"It is the older generation who foster in a child an early and most unnecessary sense of guilt, of sinfulness and of w…"
"Capitalism is presumably the first case of a blaming, rather than a repenting cult. ... An enormous feeling of guilt …"
"The soul must accept guilt in order to destroy existing evil, lest it incur the greater guilt of idyllic withdrawal, …"
"Guilt. It's this mechanism we use to control people. It's an illusion. It's a kind of social control mechanism and it…"
"Guilt has to be understood not only as a way of checking one’s own destructiveness, but as a mechanism for safeguardi…"
"In England a man is presoomed to be innocent till he's proved guilty an' they take it f 'r granted he's guilty. In th…"
"Guilt has very quick ears to an accusation."
"No disease of the imagination is so difficult to cure, as that which is complicated with the dread of guilt: fancy an…"
"You know, I experimented with feeling guilty about the wholesome thing, but it seemed like too much work. I mean, I w…"