Books that changed the world

Online version:

Ideas in the flow of civilization

The Bible

Homer: Iliad, Odyssey

Aesop: Fables

Plato: Symposium, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Republic, Statesman, Laws, Timaeus

Aristotle: Organon, History of animals, Physics, On the heavens, Meteorologics, Mechanics, Ethics, Politics, Rhetoric, Poetics

The Greek playwrights: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Menander

Greek and Roman historians: Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Polybius, Sallust, Livy, Plutarch, Tacitus

St. Augustine: Confessions, City of God

St. Thomas Aquinas: Summa Theologica

Niccolò Machiavelli: The prince

Thomas Paine: Common sense

Adam Smith: Wealth of nations

Mary Wollstonecraft: Vindication of the rights of women

Thomas Malthus: Essay on the principle of population

Henry David Thoreau: "Civil disobedience"

Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom's cabin

Karl Marx: Das kapital

Alfred T. Mahan: The influence of sea power upon history. Sir Halford J. Mackinder: "The geographical pivot of history"

Adolf Hitler: Mein kampf

Hippocrates: Aphorisms

Theophrastus: On the history of plants, On the causes of plants

Archimedes: On the sphere and cylinder

Lucretius: De rerum natura

Pliny the elder: Natural history

Nicolaus Copernicus: De revolutionibus orbium coelestium

Andreas Vesalius: De humani corporis fabrica

William Harvey: De motu Cordis

Sir Isaac Newton: Principia mathematica

Edward Jenner: An inquiry into the causes and effects of the variolae vaccinae

Charles Darwin: Origin of species

Sigmund Freud: The interpretation of dreams

Albert Einstein: Relativity, the special and general theories

Rachel Carson: Silent spring