Karen Hughes and Hannah Arendt

Karen Hughes:

Hughes acknowledges that her challenge is more than words. She talks about funding to bring in more foreign students, to improve American proficiency in foreign language and the teaching of English overseas, to enhance the U.S. presence on Arab television and radio.

Yet as she runs through some of the thorniest issues policy-makers face, from allegations of torture to skepticism over America's goals in Iraq, Hughes says again and again that if critics better understood U.S. policies they would be supportive....

"(A) lot of it is sort of building a deeper understanding of what we're doing, why we're doing it and what we're really working toward," Hughes said.

Hannah Arendt (1971):

Some years ago, reporting the trial of Eichmann in Jerusalem, I spoke of the "banality of evil" and meant with this no theory or doctrine but something quite factual, the phenomenon of evil deeds, committed on a gigantic scale, which could not be traced to any particularity of wickedness, pathology, or ideological conviction in the doer, whose only personal distinction was perhaps extraordinary shallowness. However monstrous the deeds were, the doer was neither monstrous nor demonic, and the only specific characteristic one could detect in his past as well as in his behavior during the trial and the proceeding police examination was something entirely negative: it was not stupidity but a curious, quite authentic inability to think.