The world’s most famous military treatise, in an acclaimed translation
The perfect books for the true book lover, Penguin's Great Ideas series features twelve more groundbreaking works by some of history's most prodigious thinkers. Each volume is beautifully packaged with a unique type-driven design that highlights the bookmaker's art. Offering great literature in great packages at great prices, this series is ideal for those readers...

Need to seize a country? Have enemies you must destroy? In this handbook for despots and tyrants, the Renaissance statesman Machiavelli sets forth how to accomplish this and more, while avoiding the awkwardness of becoming generally hated and despised. "Men ought either to be well treated or crushed, because they can avenge themselves of lighter injuries, of more serious ones they cannot; therefore the injury that is to be done to a man ought to be...

In A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf imagines that Shakespeare had a sister: a sister equal to Shakespeare in talent, equal in genius, but whose legacy is radically different. This imaginary woman never writes a word and dies by her own hand, her genius unexpressed. But if only she had found the means to create, urges Woolf, she would have reached the same heights as her immortal sibling. In this classic essay, Virginia Woolf takes on the establishment,...

Originally written only for his personal consumption, Marcus Aurelius's Meditations has become a key text in the understanding of Roman Stoic philosophy. This Penguin Classics edition is translated with notes by Martin Hammond and an introduction by Diskin Clay. Written in Greek by an intellectual Roman emperor without any intention of publication, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius offer a wide range of fascinating spiritual reflections and exercises...

In his celebrated masterpiece, Symposium, Plato imagines a high-society dinner-party in Athens in 416 BC. The guests--including the comic poet Aristophanes and Plato's mentor Socrates--each deliver a short speech in praise of love. The sequence of dazzling speeches culminates in Socrates' famous account of the views of Diotima, a prophetess who taught him that love is our means of trying to attain goodness, and a brilliant sketch of Socrates himself...

"Karl Marx's 1848 text is reframed in this revised Norton Critical Edition in the context of twenty-first-century theoretical debates, capitalist globalization, the information technology revolution, and contemporary struggles up to and including the 2011 "Arab Spring." Simultaneously extolled in its day as truth incarnate and the inspiration for a life-and-death struggle for humankind's liberation and condemned as the vilest of propaganda on behalf...

John Stuart Mill's Utilitarianism is one of the most important, controversial, and suggestive works of moral philosophy ever written. Mill defends the view that all human action should produce the greatest happiness overall, and that happiness itself is to be understood as consisting in 'higher' and 'lower' pleasures. This volume uses the 1871 edition of the text, the last to be published in Mill's lifetime. The text is preceded by a comprehensive...

A compilation of several Lincoln speeches, including the Gettysburg address, the "House divided" speech, and his two inaugural addresses.

Appearing as part of his Table-Talk series, a conversational series written on topics concerning every day issues, William Hazlitt wrote "On the Pleasure of Hating" in 1823 during a bitter period of his life, amidst rising controversy over his previous works, as well as the dissolution of his marriage. Disgusted with the flowery romantic literature which was flourishing in that post-French Revolution period, Hazlitt drew inspiration from the works...