Plato
“Allegory of the Cave,” from the Republic (Jowett translation)
Apology (Jowett translation)
Crito (The Death of Socrates) (Jowett translation)
Marcus Aurelius
Selections from Meditations ( George Long translation)
Sir Thomas More
Selections from Utopia (Gilbert Burnet translation)
Francis Bacon
Love, Marriage, Truth, Of Youth and Age, Of Studies
La Rochefoucauld
Selections from Maxims (J. Willis Bund and J. Hain Friswell translation)
Jonathan Swift
Patrick Henry
Speech to the Virginia House of Burgess
Jean de Crevecoeur
From Letter III, “What is an American,” Letters from an American Farmer
Frederick Douglass
Selections from Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Henry David Thoreau
John Stuart Mill
Selections from The Subjection of Women
Thomas Henry Huxley
The Method of Scientific Investigation
Karl Marx and Friederich Engels