30 Non-Fiction Books a Well-Rounded Person Should Read

If you’re interested in being considered “well-read,” you probably already know that breadth is more important than depth.

The following list covers 30 books spanning topics that include: Science, History, Business & Money, Politics & Government, Social Sciences, Biography and Philosophy.

These are books that will make you a more well-rounded person, and many of them are even worth reading more than once.

This list is by no means complete. Visitors of this site are among the biggest readers of leather-bound books. So I’m sure there are books worthy of being mentioned that I’ve missed. Make sure to add your own picks in the comments section.

Here is our list of 30 non-fiction books to make yourself a more well-rounded reader.

Social Sciences

Notable Quote:

“You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.”

Notable Quote:

“The way to love anything is to realize that it might be lost.”

Notable Quote:

“You want to believe that those who work hard and sacrifice get ahead and those who are lazy and cheat do not. This, of course, is not always true. Success is often greatly influenced by when you were born, where you grew up, the socioeconomic status of your family, and random chance”

Business & Money

Notable Quote:

“A part of all you earn is yours to keep.”

Notable Quote:

“The intelligent investor is a realist who sells to optimists and buys from pessimists.”

Notable Quote:

“Whatever your income, always live below your means.”

Notable Quote:

“The most decisive mark of the prosperity of any country is the increase of the number of its inhabitants.”

Notable Quote:

“A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact.”

History

Notable Quote:

“If you want to do anything new you must first make sure you know what people have tried before.”

Notable Quote:

“Much of human history has consisted of unequal conflicts between the haves and the have-nots.”

Notable Quote:

“The memory of oppressed people is one thing that cannot be taken away, and for such people, with such memories, revolt is always an inch below the surface.”

Science

Notable Quote:

“We now know that our galaxy is only one of some hundred thousand million that can be seen using modern telescopes, each galaxy itself containing some hundred thousand million stars.”

Notable Quote:

“This preservation of favourable variations and the rejection of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection.”

Notable Quote:

“It is a curious feature of our existance that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it.”

Notable Quote:

“In the end, though, science is what matters; scientists not a bit.”

Biography

Notable Quote:

“As a child I was fond of reading, and all the little money that came into my hands was ever laid out in books.”

Notable Quote:

“In order to ‘win a man to your cause,’ Lincoln explained, you must first reach his heart, ‘the great high road to his reason.’”

Notable Quote:

“The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think,”

Notable Quote:

“I don’t think of all the misery but of the beauty that still remains.”

Notable Quote:

“You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.”

Politics & Government

Notable Quote:

“A prudent man should always follow in the path trodden by great men and imitate those who are most excellent, so that if he does not attain to their greatness, at any rate he will get some tinge of it.”

Notable Quote:

“Whatever is my right as a man is also the right of another; and it becomes my duty to guarantee as well as to possess.”

Notable Quote:

“Liberty may be gained, but can never be recovered.”

Notable Quote:

“Political power, properly so called, is merely the organised power of one class for oppressing another.”

Philosophy

Notable Quote:

“I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.”

Notable Quote:

“Some things you miss because they’re so tiny you overlook them. But some things you don’t see because they’re so huge.”

Notable Quote:

“When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”

Miscellaneous

Notable Quote:

“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”

Notable Quote:

“Systems are organic, living creations: if people stop working on them and improving them, they die.”

Notable Quote:

“Omit needless words.”

Do you want to read some or all of these books? Learn to read faster and more efficiently by enrolling in an Iris Reading course today!

What books did we miss that you would include? Let us know in the comments…





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