Who said “No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of…”?

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Hannah Arendt. A published source records them saying or writing it.

SourceEichmann in Jerusalem : A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963)

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“No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes. On the contrary, whatever the punishment, once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever have been.”
— Hannah Arendt
VerifiedEichmann in Jerusalem : A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963) · evidenceCrime and Criminals

Cite this quote

For academic work, cite the original where you can: Eichmann in Jerusalem : A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963).

APA

Arendt, H. (n.d.). No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes. On the contrary, whatever the punishment, once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever have been. [Quotation]. Famous Quotations Network. Retrieved October 24, 2026, from https://www.famous-quotations.com/quotes/6790-no-punishment-has-ever-possessed-enough-power-of/

MLA

Arendt, Hannah. “No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes. On the contrary, whatever the punishment, once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever have been.” Famous Quotations Network, https://www.famous-quotations.com/quotes/6790-no-punishment-has-ever-possessed-enough-power-of/. Accessed 24 Oct. 2026.

Chicago

Arendt, Hannah. “No punishment has ever possessed enough power of deterrence to prevent the commission of crimes. On the contrary, whatever the punishment, once a specific crime has appeared for the first time, its reappearance is more likely than its initial emergence could ever have been.” Famous Quotations Network. Accessed October 24, 2026. https://www.famous-quotations.com/quotes/6790-no-punishment-has-ever-possessed-enough-power-of/.

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“The defiance of established authority, religious and secular, social and political, as a world-wide phenomenon may well one day be accounted the outstanding event of the last decade.”
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“Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy, but left to its own course it ends in power's disappearance.”
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“The trouble with lying and deceiving is that their efficiency depends entirely upon a clear notion of the truth that the liar and deceiver wishes to hide. In this sense, truth, even if it does not prevail in public, possesses an ineradicable primacy over all falsehoods.”
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“What makes it so plausible to assume that hypocrisy is the vice of vices is that integrity can indeed exist under the cover of all other vices except this one. Only crime and the criminal, it is true, confront us with the perplexity of radical evil; but only the hypocrite is really rotten to the core.”
VerifiedOn Revolution (1963), ch. 2 · evidenceDetails & citeHypocrisy
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