The Human Condition, 2nd Edition

Hannah Arendt

“The smallest act in the most limited circumstances bears the seed of… boundlessness, because one deed, and sometimes one word, suffices to change every constellation.”

The ever-brilliant Hannah Arendt on speech, action, and how we reinvent the world:

Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought

Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt on science, the value of space exploration, and how our cosmic ambitions illuminate the human condition:

Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy 1949-1975

Mary McCarthy

“An experience makes its appearance only when it is being said. And unless it is said it is, so to speak, non-existent.”

Hannah Arendt on nature vs. culture, what equality really means, and how our language confers reality upon our experience:

Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil

Hannah Arendt

“Under conditions of terror most people will comply but some people will not… No more is required, and no more can reasonably be asked, for this planet to remain a place fit for human habitation.”

Classic, immensely timely read on the normalization of evil and our only effective antidote to it:

Men in Dark Times

Hannah Arendt

“We humanize what is going on in the world and in ourselves only by speaking of it, and in the course of speaking of it we learn to be human.”

Hannah Arendt on the power and privilege of being a pariah and how we humanize each other:

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt

“The everywhere of thought is indeed a region of nowhere.”

Hannah Arendt on time, space, and where our thinking ego resides:

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt

“Nothing and nobody exists in this world whose very being does not presuppose a spectator.”

The brilliant Hannah Arendt on being vs. appearing and our impulse for self-display – triply timely today, forty years later, in the age of Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr:

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt

“Before we raise such questions as What is happiness, what is justice, what is knowledge, and so on, we must have seen happy and unhappy people, witnessed just and unjust deeds, experienced the desire to know and its fulfillment or frustration.”

Hannah Arendt on memory, the elasticity of time, and what free will really means – spectacular read:

On Violence (Harvest Book)

Hannah Arendt

“The greater the bureaucratization of public life, the greater will be the attraction of violence. In a fully developed bureaucracy there is nobody left with whom one could argue, to whom one could present grievances, on whom the pressures of power could be exerted. Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless we have a tyranny without a tyrant.”

The great Hannah Arendt on how bureaucracy triggers violence – timeless read, timelier than ever: