Enormity

Not until the war ended and journalists were able to enter Cambodia did the world really become aware of the enormity of Pol Pot’s oppression.

I had an obscure feeling that all was not over, and that he would still commit some signal crime, which by its enormity should almost efface the recollection of the past.

Hannah Arendt coined the phrase "the banality of evil" in her dispatches for The New Yorker from Adolf Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem in 1961. It was her attempt to square the mediocrity of the man with the enormity of his crimes.

Yet she appeared confident in innocence, and did not tremble, although gazed on and execrated by thousands; for all the kindness which her beauty might otherwise have excited, was obliterated in the minds of the spectators by the imagination of the enormity she was supposed to have committed.

Monsters of impurity, avaricious wretches, poisoners, have occupied the papal see. A learned bishop (Maret of the General Council) expresses himself with holy indignation in reference to the frightful enormities of the tenth century.

In 1650 Lieutenant William Jackson was in trouble for holding, among many other enormities, ‘community of all things’, including, apparently, wives.

I am in Amerika! I felt like weeping at the enormity of this fact. Amerika, the fabled, the mythic, the coveted. The knowledge that we had no visas, and therefore would not be allowed to set foot on land, dampened my enthusiasm only a little.

But the enormity of Clement's vision of papal grandeur only became clear once the public rooms were completed during the years that immediately followed.