Who really said it

The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil

Q: Did Hannah Arendt say "The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil"?

Yes. This is a genuine Arendt line, from her final work The Life of the Mind, Vol. 1: Thinking (1977–78). Her original sentence reads "The sad truth of the matter is that most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be or do either evil or good" — the version circulating online lightly compresses it, but the thought and nearly the exact words are hers.

Written by Hannah Arendt 1906–1975 · German-born American political theorist

Verified In copyright

This is a genuine Arendt line, from her final work The Life of the Mind, Vol. 1: Thinking (1977–78). Her original sentence reads “The sad truth of the matter is that most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be or do either evil or good” — the version circulating online lightly compresses it, but the thought and nearly the exact words are hers.

Last verified 16 Jul 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Verified quote & credit

“The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil” Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, vol. 1: Thinking (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978). Original wording: "The sad truth of the matter is that most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be or do either evil or good."

Can you use it?

Still under copyright (rights held by The Estate of Hannah Arendt and her publisher Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (now HarperCollins)). A short, credited quote is generally fine for talks, teaching, and internal decks; for commercial, published, or large-scale reuse, get permission.

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In context

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Provenance

The source

Work: The Life of the Mind, Vol. 1: Thinking
Passage: Part III, ch. 18, “The Two-in-One”
First published: 1977–1978 (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich); the “Thinking” section first ran in The New Yorker, 5 Dec 1977
Original wording: “…never made up their minds to be or do either evil or good”

The sad truth of the matter is that most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be or do either evil or good.

Arendt’s original, per her posthumously published The Life of the Mind. The popular internet version — “most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil” — is a shortened paraphrase of this sentence.

Wikiquote: Hannah Arendt (sourced quotations)

How we verified this

Wikiquote lists the line among its sourced Arendt quotations, citing The Life of the Mind (1978), “Thinking” — wording it as “…never made up their minds to be or do either evil or good.”
The quotation reference WIST pins it to Vol. 1 “Thinking,” Part 3, ch. 18 “The Two-in-One,” and notes it first appeared in a 1977 New Yorker essay (“Thinking — III,” 5 Dec 1977).
QuotePark carries the same original wording, attributed to The Life of the Mind (1978), “Thinking.”
Goodreads circulates the compressed popular wording, also crediting The Life of the Mind.

In copyright

The Life of the Mind was first published in 1977–1978, editing by Mary McCarthy after Arendt’s 1975 death. As a work first published well after 1930, it remains under U.S. copyright; the line is not in the public domain.

Fact-check

Right author, drifted wording

Unusually for a “famous name” quote, the attribution here is correct — Arendt really wrote it. What drifted is the wording.

The popular internet version paraphrase

The most-shared line — “most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil” — compresses Arendt’s fuller sentence. Her original (per WIST and Wikiquote) reads “…never made up their minds to be or do either evil or good,” and opens “The sad truth of the matter is…”

The idea — and nearly the exact words — are genuinely Arendt’s, from The Life of the Mind; only the phrasing was tidied in circulation.

Context

Thinking as a defense against evil

Arendt wrote this in The Life of the Mind, the book she was still finishing when she died. It grew directly out of her reporting on the 1961 Eichmann trial and her controversial idea of the “banality of evil” — the observation that great wrongs are often committed not by monsters but by unreflective people who simply never stop to think.

In this passage she argues that most evil comes not from those who deliberately choose it but from people who never make the choice at all — who fail to engage in the inner dialogue she calls thinking. It is a claim about absence rather than malice: the failure to think, she suggests, is itself a moral condition.

Most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be or do either evil or good.

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Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Character Doubt

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Wikiquote: Hannah Arendten.wikiquote.org

Sourced Arendt quotations, listing this line with its original wording and citing The Life of the Mind (1978).

WIST Quotations: Hannah Arendtwist.info

Detailed citation: Vol. 1 “Thinking,” Part 3, ch. 18, plus the 1977 New Yorker essay origin.

QuotePark: The Life of the Mindquotepark.com

Quotes from the book, including the original full-length wording of this line.

Goodreads: The Life of the Mind quotesgoodreads.com

Where the compressed popular version circulates, attributed to the book.

The Life of the Mind (Wikipedia)en.wikipedia.org

Background on Arendt’s unfinished final work, its 1977–78 publication and Mary McCarthy’s editing.

Hannah Arendt (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)plato.stanford.edu

Scholarly overview of Arendt’s thought, including thinking, judgment and the banality of evil.

About the author

Hannah Arendt

1906–1975 · German-born American political theorist

Hannah Arendt was a German-born American political theorist whose work on totalitarianism, power, and moral judgment shaped 20th-century political thought. Reporting on Adolf Eichmann’s 1961 trial, she coined the phrase the banality of evil to describe how ordinary, unthinking people enable atrocity. This quote comes from The Life of the Mind, the ambitious study of thinking, willing and judging she left unfinished at her death in 1975.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source — Chicago

Hannah Arendt, The Life of the Mind, vol. 1, Thinking (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 180.

MLA (9th ed.)

Arendt, Hannah. The Life of the Mind, Vol. 1: Thinking. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978, p. 180.

APA (7th ed.)

Arendt, H. (1978). The life of the mind: Vol. 1. Thinking. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

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Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil’?” Last verified 16 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/the-sad-truth-is-that-most-evil-is-done-by-people-who-never