1. Seneca On the Shortness of Life
2. Marcus Aurelius Meditations
3. St Augustine Confessions of a Sinner
4. Thomas à Kempis The Inner Life
5. Niccolò Machiavelli The Prince
6. Michel de Montaigne On Friendship
7. Jonathan Swift A Tale of a Tub
8. Jean-Jacques Rousseau The Social Contract
9. Edward Gibbon The Christians and the Fall of Rome
10. Thomas Paine Common Sense
11. Mary Wollstonecraft A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
12. William Hazlitt On the Pleasure of Hating
13. Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels The Communist Manifesto
14. Arthur Schopenhauer On the Suffering of the World
15. John Ruskin On Art and Life
16. Charles Darwin On Natural Selection
17. Friedrich Nietzsche Why I am So Wise
18. Virginia Woolf A Room of One’s Own
19. Sigmund Freud Civilization and Its Discontents
20. George Orwell Why I Write
21. Confucius The First Ten Books
22. Sun-tzu The Art of War
23. Plato The Symposium
24. Lucretius Sensation and Sex
25. Cicero An Attack on an Enemy of Freedom
26. The Revelation of St John the Divine and The Book of Job
27. Marco Polo Travels in the Land of Kubilai Khan
28. Christine de Pizan The City of Ladies
29. Baldesar Castiglione How to Achieve True Greatness
30. Francis Bacon Of Empire
31. Thomas Hobbes Of Man
32. Sir Thomas Browne Urne-Burial
33. Voltaire Miracles and Idolatry
34. David Hume On Suicide
35. Carl von Clausewitz On the Nature of War
36. Søren Kierkegaard Fear and Trembling
37. Henry David Thoreau Where I Lived, and What I Lived For
38. Thorstein Veblen Conspicuous Consumption
39. Albert Camus The Myth of Sisyphus
40. Hannah Arendt Eichmann and the Holocaust
41. Plutarch In Consolation to his Wife
42. Robert Burton Some Anatomies of Melancholy
43. Blaise Pascal Human Happiness
44. Adam Smith The Invisible Hand
45. Edmund Burke The Evils of Revolution
46. Ralph Waldo Emerson Nature
47. Søren Kierkegaard The Sickness unto Death
48. John Ruskin The Lamp of Memory
49. Friedrich Nietzsche Man Alone with Himself
50. Leo Tolstoy A Confession
51. William Morris Useful Work v. Useless Toil
52. Frederick Jackson Turner The Significance of the Frontier in American History
53. Marcel Proust Days of Reading
54. Leon Trotsky An Appeal to the Toiling, Oppressed and Exhausted Peoples of Europe
55. Sigmund Freud The Future of an Illusion
56. Walter Benjamin The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
57. George Orwell Books v. Cigarettes
58. Albert Camus The Fastidious Assassins
59. Frantz Fanon Concerning Violence
60. Michel Foucault The Spectacle of the Scaffold
61. Lao Tzu Tao Te Ching
62. Writings from the Zen Masters
63. Thomas More Utopia
64. Michel de Montaigne On Solitude
65. William Shakespeare On Power
66. John Locke Of the Abuse of Words
67. Samuel Johnson Consolation in the Face of Death
68. Immanuel Kant An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’
69. Joseph de Maistre The Executioner
70. Thomas De Quincey Confessions of an English Opium Eater
71. Arthur Schopenhauer The Horrors and Absurdities of Religion
72. Abraham Lincoln The Gettysburg Address
73. Karl Marx Revolution and War
74. Fyodor Dostoyevsky The Grand Inquisitor
75. William James On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings
76. Robert Louis Stevenson An Apology for Idlers
77. W. E. B. Du Bois Of the Dawn of Freedom
78. Virginia Woolf Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid
79. George Orwell Decline of the English Murder
80. John Berger Why Look at Animals?