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Online Library of Liberty The OLL is a curated collection of scholarly works that engage with vital questions of liberty.

Spanning the centuries from Hammurabi to Hume, and collecting material on topics from art and economics to law and political theory, the OLL provides you with a rich variety of texts to explore and consider.

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Liberty Matters: A Forum for the Discussion of Ideas About Liberty Reflections on Libraries, Liberty, and Black History (February 2021)

On my office wall there hangs an illustrated quotation from Frederick Douglass: “Once you learn to read you will be forever free.” Libraries--online or off--have always been places where voices have mingled across the lines of centuries, cultures, countries, and races. The interaction of those voices has always, to me, been the sound of freedom. This month, in lieu of our standard Liberty M...

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Explore the OLL Collection: Quotations About Liberty and Power Adam Smith on the legitimacy of using force to ensure justice (1759)

Adam Smith (1723-1790) argues that justice is the only virtue which may be imposed by force:

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Best of the OLL BOLL 33: Mary Wollstonecraft, “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman” (1792)

This is part of “The Best of the Online Library of Liberty” which is a collection of some of the most important material in the OLL. A thematic list with links to HTML versions of the texts is available here. This is a chapter from one of the founding texts of modern feminism which Wollstonecraft wrote during the French Revolution. She extends the idea of universal natural rights to include wom...

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Explore the OLL Collection: Images of Liberty and Power Thomas Jefferson in the Cyclopedia

Images of Thomas Jefferson in the Jeffersonian Cyclopedia (1900) The Jeffersonian Cyclopedia: A Comprehensive Collection of the Views of Thomas Jefferson. Classified and Arranged in Alphabetical Order Under Nine Thousand Titles, Relating to Government, Politics, Law, Education, Political Economy, Finance, Science, Art, Literature, Religious Freedom, Morals, etc. Edited by John P. Foley (New...

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