Hannah Arendt, ch. 2 of On Revolution (1963).
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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.

— Hannah Arendt on Hypocrisy

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "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." in the context of "Hannah Arendt, ch. 2 of On Revolution (1963)." to mean that wisdom is timeless.

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Source: Wikiquote: "Hypocrisy" (A) The 'What it means' explanation text was generated by Google Gemini Flash (accessed January 18, 2026). https://gemini.google.com/app
Hannah Arendt

About Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt (14 October 1906 – 4 December 1975) was a German-American political theorist whose work deals with the nature of power, authority, and totalitarianism.