Public Domain Reader
The case for liberty, in the words the authors actually wrote.
Read the whole book, a tighter cut, or just the map. Every word is the author's own — never paraphrased.
We never paraphrase.
No summaries, no middleman, no one standing between you and the page. Every word you read is the author's own — whether you read the complete work or a shorter cut of it.
Three ways into every book
Outline
The map.
The book's structure and its key claims, in the author's own quoted words. See the whole shape in minutes.
Essential Cut
The author, with less of it.
The same prose, shorter. Whole passages removed at the author's own seams — nothing rewritten, nothing reordered.
Original
The complete work.
The full text, exactly as published. Always one tap away, always free.
Today's idea
Browse all →“Between a good and a bad economist this constitutes the whole difference--the one takes account of the visible effect; the other takes account both of the effects which are seen and also of those which it is necessary to foresee.”
— Frédéric Bastiat·That Which Is Seen
The library
Public-domain classics of liberty and sound money.
Leviathan
Thomas Hobbes
What Is Money?
Frédéric Bastiat
That Which Is Seen
Frédéric Bastiat
The Law
Frédéric Bastiat
Walden
Henry David Thoreau
The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin
Up From Slavery
Booker T. Washington
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass
Fiat Money Inflation in France
Andrew Dickson White
Civil Disobedience
Henry David Thoreau
The Social Contract
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
No Treason
Lysander Spooner
Second Treatise of Government
John Locke
On Liberty
John Stuart Mill
Common Sense
Thomas Paine
Old books. Free to read.
Every title here was published over a hundred years ago and belongs to all of us. These are the works that built the case for individual liberty, honest money, and self-government — read them in full, for free.
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