Welcome to the Flowers for Socrates Library!
Our author/editors have worked together to provide compile this reading list of materials we feel are helpful in understanding many of the issues discussed on this blog. All texts are provided free of charge as a public service. Where possible, they have been provided in .pdf format and all are in public domain and/or used under a fair use license. Where noted, links are provided to select titles on Google Books. Although the titles are free, Google has restrictive terms of use that mean simply linking to the title (where you can download it for free) rather than hosting directly the better choice.
“I know no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society, but the people themselves: and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their controul with a wholsome discretion, the remedy is, not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion by education.” – Thomas Jefferson, letter to William C. Jarvis, Sept. 28, 1820.
Related: Free E-book Resources
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The Library
Legal Documents
U.S. Declaration of Independence
Various Works – Alphabetical by Author
Altemeyer, Bob – The Authoritarians
Aurelius, Marcus – Meditations
Cicero, Marcus Tullius – The Treatises of M.T. Cicero (Google Books)
Hamilton, Alexander with James Madison and John Jay – The Federalist
Hobbes, Thomas – Leviathan
Lessig, Lawrence – Republic, Lost
Machiavelli, Niccolò – The Prince
Mayer, Carl J. – “Personalizing the Impersonal: Corporations and the Bill of Rights“, originally published in the Hastings Law Journal Hastings College of Law at University of California, March, 1990; Volume 41, No. 3.
Tzu, Sun – The Art of War
Nicole Plyler Fisk
Gene Howington
FFS Guest Blogger
Joy of Fishes
Chuck Stanley
shortfinals
Terry Welshans
ann li-summers
wordcloud9
Flowers For Socrates 
“I cannot live without books; but fewer will suffice where amusement, and not use, is the only future object.”
– Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 10 June 1815
“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”
–Thomas Jefferson to Charles Yancey, 1816
As a suggestion for the library, it might be instructive to have links to documents garnered and made public under the Freedom Of Information Act — 5 U.S.C. § 552.
Only from reputable sources, of course; like top level domains ending in .gov.
Sort of like this one:
http://research.archives.gov/description/305036
where, “a series of proposals for actions against the Cuban government, that originated within the Department of Defense (DoD) and the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) of the United States government in 1962. The proposals, which called for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), or other operatives, to commit acts of terrorism in US cities and elsewhere . . .”
(Above fifty-five word summary from — http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods )
Commonly referred to as, “Operation Northwoods,” or, as the national archives titles it, “Plan for U.S. Military Intervention in Cuba Codenamed Northwoods, 1962.”
Gene,
Good stuff, and a great start!!
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