By Maria Popova
BrainPickings
“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.” -Hannah Arendt
“Every man has a right over his own life and war destroys lives that were full of promise,” Freud wrote to Einstein in their little-known correspondence about violence and human nature.
In her indispensable 1970 book On Violence (public library), the celebrated German-American political theorist Hannah Arendt (October 14, 1906–December 4, 1975) considers the evolving role of warfare in the context of the twentieth century.
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