The Portable Library of Liberty

Random Quotation

Welcome to the Portable Library of Liberty. This collection of texts and audio files is drawn from the Online Library of Liberty, published by Liberty Fund, Inc.

What’s Inside:

This disk contains 1,001 titles in E-book PDF format which are self-contained and searchable. They are organized by titles, subject areas, and topics. (Learn more about this feature.)

This disk contains works by hundreds of authors from Ancient Sumeria to the present, and is organized by people, periods, and schools of thought. (Learn more about this feature.)

In addition, you can listen to interviews with 36 leading scholars from the Intellectual Portrait Series and 7 lectures on The Legacy of Friedrich Hayek.

You can browse quotations of the week from the past six years of the OLL Web site. You will also see a new random quote each time you return to this page. (Learn more about this feature.)

LF 50th logo50th Anniversary

This year, 2010, is the 50th anniversary of the founding of Liberty Fund by Pierre F. Goodrich. The Foundation develops, supervises, and finances its own educational activities to foster thought and encourage discourse on the nature of individual liberty, limited and constitutional government, and the free market. It does this by publishing classic works on liberty, organizing conferences, and hosting websites to promote understanding of individual liberty. (Learn more about Liberty Fund.)

There are four different types of texts which Liberty Fund has put online as part of the Online Library of Liberty:

  1. public domain texts published before 1923. These texts are no longer under copyright and are in the public domain. We have put them online in order to further the educational aims of Liberty Fund.
  2. texts to which the Liberty Fund has electronic rights, such as the books published by Liberty Fund in both print and online formats
  3. other texts to which Liberty Fund has acquired the electronic rights from third parties, such as the journal Literature of Liberty (from the Institute for Humane Studies)
  4. titles which are put online under license from third parties, such as the Glasgow Edition of the Works of Adam Smith (from Oxford University Press).

For titles in the first three categories listed above, no special permission from Liberty Fund is required for quoting material in papers and essays, or for limited photocopying and distribution for academic or other educational or non-profit purposes. The only requirements are that you include proper attribution on the first page of the document being distributed - e.g. for John Locke’s The Two Treatises of Government you would say either of the following:

  1. if using the OLL website - "This material originally appeared on the Online Library of Liberty hosted by Liberty Fund, Inc. URL: http://oll.libertyfund.org/title/222 and accessed on 2010-01-22." This information can be found in the "Citation" button on the title’s table of contents page.
  2. or if using the copy on the PLL DVD - "This material originally appeared in the Portable Library of Liberty published by Liberty Fund, Inc. URL: http://oll.libertyfund.org/title/222 and PLL v5 (generated 22 January, 2010)." This information can be found in the footer of the EBook PDF.

For titles in category two and three, any reprint of material "for profit", such as a chapter or a substantial section of an online book for inclusion in a book or other publication for sale, requires written permission from Liberty Fund.

For titles in the fourth category you must follow the specific requirements of the copyright holder whose work we publish online under license. In the case of the Glasgow Edition of the Works of Adam Smith published under license from Oxford University Press, for reprint or copying permission you need to contact OUP directly. Under our contractual obligations with OUP we have placed the following declaration on the front page of every book and section of the online version of the Glasgow Edition of the Works of Adam Smith:

The Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith and the associated volumes are published in hardcover by Oxford University Press. The six titles of the Glasgow Edition, but not the associated volumes, are being published in soft cover by Liberty Fund. The online edition is published by Liberty Fund under license from Oxford University Press.

© Oxford University Press 1976. All rights reserved. No part of this material may be stored transmitted retransmitted lent or reproduced in any form or medium without the permission of Oxford University Press.

Thus, for reprint or copying permission you need to contact OUP directly. Liberty Fund cannot grant you this permission because it is not the copyright holder.