\"Don\"t hope that events will turn out the way you want, welcome events in whichever way they happen\" How can we cope when life\"s events seem beyond our control?...

\"When silence or tricks of language contribute to maintaining an abuse that must be reformed or a suffering that can be relieved, then there is no other solution but to speak out\" Written when execution by guillotine was still legal in France, Albert Camus\" devastating attack on the \"obscene exhibition\" of capital punishment remains one of the mos...

\"It is possible for man to snatch the world from the darkness of absurdity\" How should we think and act in the world? These writings on the human condition by one of the twentieth century\"s great philosophers explore the absurdity of our notions of good and evil, and show instead how we make our own destiny simply by being. GREAT IDEAS....

\"It is impossible to live the pleasant life without also living sensibly, nobly and justly\" The ancient Greek philosopher and teacher Epicurus argued that pleasure - not sensual hedonism, but the absence of pain or fear - is the highest goal of life. His hugely influential lessons on happiness are a call to appreciate the joy of being alive....

\"Far from being the pious injunction of a Utopian dreamer, the command to love one\"s enemy is an absolute necessity for our survival\" Advocating love as strength and non-violence as the most powerful weapon there is, these sermons and writings from the heart of the civil rights movement show Martin Luther King\"s rhetorical power at its most fiery ...

\"We live within a spectacle of empty clothes and unworn masks\" In this series of remarkable pieces from across his career, John Berger celebrates and dissects the close links between art and society and the individual. Few writers give a more vivid and moving sense of how we make art and how art makes us....

\"People can only be free in relation to one another.\" Three exhilarating and inspiring essays in which the great twentieth-century political philosopher argues that there can be no freedom without politics, and no politics without freedom. One of twenty new books in the bestselling Penguin Great Ideas series....

\"One swallow does not make a summer; neither does one day. Similarly neither can one day, or a brief space of time, make a man blessed and happy\" What does it mean to be a good person?...

\"When the last fire goes out, time too will be finished\" Italo Calvino was one of the most joyful and imaginative writers of the twentieth century. Here he muses on what the things we leave behind - whether waxworks or ancient graffiti, enigmatic maps or a crumbling Roman column - tell us about the greater truths of the world, space and time....

\"We have left dry land and put out to sea! We have burned the bridge behind us - what is more, we have burned the land behind us!\" Nietzsche\"s devastating demolition of religion would have seismic consequences for future generations....

\"Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life\" The two works brought together here, \"The Decay of Lying\" and \"The Critic as Artist\", are Oscar Wilde\"s wittiest and most profound writings on aesthetics, in which he proposes that criticism is the highest form of creation and that lying, the telling of a beautiful untruth, is the ultimate aim of...

\"What Japan was she owed to the samurai. They were not only the flower of the nation, but its root as well.\" Inazo Nitobe\"s book, the most influential ever written on Bushido, or the samurai Way of the Warrior, argues that the philosophy of Bushido is the true key to understanding \"the soul of Japan\"....

\"Everywhere you will find that the wealth of the wealthy springs from the poverty of the poor\" Fuelled by anger at injustice and optimism about humankind\"s ability to make a better, truly communal society, the anarchist writings of Peter Kropotkin have influenced radicals the world over, from nineteenth-century workers to today\"s activists....

Tagore was a fierce opponent of British rule in India. In this work he discusses the resurgence of the East and the challenge it poses to Western supremacy, calling for a future beyond nationalism, based instead on cooperation and racial tolerance. Great Ideas. Throughout history, some books have changed the world....

\"We shall live at last as free men on our own soil, and die peacefully in our own homes\" Theodor Herzl\"s passionate advocacy of the founding of a Jewish state grew out of his conviction that Jews would never be assimilated into the populations in which they lived....