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100 most influential books of all time
1998 | Martin Semoyr Smith

Posted on 07/27/2004 12:17:17 PM PDT by Borges

The I Ching. c. 1500 B.C.. The Old Testament. c. 1500 B.C.. Homer The Iliad. The Odyssey. 9th century B.C.. The Upanishads. c. 700-400 B.CE. Lao-Tzu The Way and Its Power. 3rd century B.C.. The Avesta. c. 500 B.C.. Confucius Analects. c. 5th-4th century B.C.. Thucydides History of the Peloponnesian War. 5th century B.CE. Hippocrates Works. c. 400 B.C.. Aristotle Works. 4th century B.C. Herodotus History. 4th century B.C.. Plato The Republic. c. 380 B.C.. Euclid Elements. c. 280 B.C.. The Dhammapada. c. 252 B.C.. Virgil The Aeneid. 70-19 B.C.. Lucretius On the Nature of Reality. c. 55 B.C.. Philo of Alexandria Allegorical Expositions of the Holy Laws. 1st century The New Testament. c. 64-110 . Plutarch Lives. c. 50-120 . Cornelius Tacitus Annals, From the Death of the Divine Augustus. c.120 The Gospel of Truth (The Valentinian Speculation). c.1st century Marcus Aurelius Meditations. 167 C.E. Sextus Empiricus Outlines of Pyrrhonism. c. 150-210 Plotinus Enneads. 3d century Augustine of Hippo Confessions. c. 400. The Koran. 7th century . Moses Maimonides Guide for the Perplexed. 1190 The Kabbalah (Quabala). 12th century . Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologiae. 1266-1273 Dante Alighieri The Divine Comedy. 1321 Desiderius Erasmus In Praise of Folly. 1509 Niccolo Machiavelli he Prince. 1532 Martin Luther On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church. 1520 Francois Rabelais Gargantua and Pantagruel. 1534, 1532. John Calvin Institutes of the Christian Religion. 1536 Nicolaus Copernicus On the Revolution of the Celestial Orbs. 1543 Michel Eyquem de Montaigne Essays. 1580 Miguel de Cervantes Don Quixote. Part I, 1605; Part II, 1615 Johannes Kepler The Harmony of the World. 1619 Francis Bacon Novum Organum. 1620 William Shakespeare The First Folio. 1623 Galileo Galilei Dialogue Concerning Two New Chief World Systems. 1632 Rene Desartes Discourse on Method. 1637 Thomas Hobbes Leviathan. 1651 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz Works. 1663-1716 Blaise Pascal Pensees. 1670 Baruch de Spinoza. Ethics. 1677 John Bunyan Pilgrim's Progress. 1678-1684 Isaac Newton Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. 1687 John Locke Essay Concerning Human Understanding. 1689 George Berkeley The Principles of Human Knowledge. 1740, rev 1734 Giambattista Vico The New Science. 1725, rev 1730, 1744 David Hume A Treatise of Human Nature. 1739-1740 Denis Diderot, ed. The Encyclopedia. 1751-1772 Samuel Johnson A Dictionary of the English Language. 1755 Francois-Marie de Voltaire Candide. 1759 Thomas Paine Common Sense. 1776 Adam Smith An Enquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. 1776 Edward Gibbon The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. 1776-87 Immanuel Kant Critique of Pure Reason. 1781 rev 1787 Jean-Jacques Rousseau Confessions. 1781 Edmund Burke Reflections on the Revolution in France. 1790 Mary Wollstonecraft Vindication of the Rights of Woman. 1792 William Godwin An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. 1793 Thomas Robert Malthus An Essay on the Principle of Population. 1798 rev 1803 George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Phenomenology of Spirit. 1807 Arnold Schopenhauer The World as Will and Idea. 1819 Auguste Comte Course in the Positivist Philosophy. 1830-1842 Carl Marie von Clausewitz On War. 1832 Soren Kierkegaard Either/Or. 1843 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels The Manifesto of the Communist Party. 1848 Henry David Thoreau Civil Disobedience. 1849 Charles Darwin The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. 1859 John Stuart Mill On Liberty. 1859 Herbert Spencer First Principles. 1862 Gregor Mendel "Experiments With Plant Hybrids." 1866 Leo Tolstoy War and Peace. 1868-1869 James Clerk Maxwell Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism. 1873 Friedrich Nietzsche Thus Spake Zarathustra. 1883-1885 Sigmund Freud The Interpretation of Dreams. 1900 William James Pragmatism. 1908 Albert Einstein Relativity. 1916 Vilfredo Pareto The Mind and Society. 1916 Carl Gustav Jung Psychological Types. 1921 Martin Buber I and Thou. 1923 Franz Kafka The Trial. 1925 Karl Popper The Logic of Scientific Discovery. 1934 John Maynard Keynes The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money. 1936 Jean-Paul Sartre Being and Nothingness. 1943 Friedrich von Hayek The Road to Serfdom. 1944 Simone de Beauvoir The Second Sex. 1948 Norbert Wiener Cybernetics. 1948, rev 1961 George Orwell Nineteen Eighty-Four. 1949 George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson. 1950 Ludwig Wittgenstein Philosophical Investigations. 1953 Noam Chomsky Syntactic Structures. 1957 Thomas Samuel Kuhn The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. 1962 rev 1970 Betty Friedan The Feminine Mystique. 1963 Mao Zedong Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung. 1966 B. F. Skinner Beyond Freedom and Dignity. 1971


TOPICS: Philosophy
KEYWORDS: readinglist; topten
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To: Borges
Clearly an oversight on the authors part not making mention of Guy Sajer "The Forgotten Soldier" 1965 anywhere in there.
61 posted on 07/27/2004 1:19:53 PM PDT by fso301
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To: Anitius Severinus Boethius

I showed this list to the head of the English department at my univ. and one of the first things he said was 'where the heck's Boethius?' :)


62 posted on 07/27/2004 1:20:43 PM PDT by Borges
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To: Borges

They put I Ching before the Bible????

Useless list.


63 posted on 07/27/2004 1:23:34 PM PDT by DannyTN
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To: Borges

Darn right!


64 posted on 07/27/2004 1:25:38 PM PDT by Anitius Severinus Boethius
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To: DannyTN

If the Exodus is dated to the 14th century BC as it is by most historians and theologians and the first five books of the Bible were first written down by Moses as is thought, wouldn't that mean the I Ching predates it?


65 posted on 07/27/2004 1:26:10 PM PDT by Borges
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To: Alberta's Child
David Ricardo might have made the list as well. Tough to decide on only 100, actually - you have to leave out some whose influence was derivative, through other books, and include some that have a notoriety disproportionate to their actual influence - I'd place Mao's Little Red Book under that category. I have a copy (bought in Kowloon during the bad old days) and frankly, it's trite, silly, and could be said to influence anything because it seems to say almost anything.

I have something of a soft spot for books that weren't even translated into English until very late - The Thousand Nights And One Night for example. Sir Richard Burton's wife actually burnt his original translations for obscenity... She was cursed as a thoughtless Victorian prude until somebody figured out just how obscene they really were...

66 posted on 07/27/2004 1:26:12 PM PDT by Billthedrill
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To: Anitius Severinus Boethius

When you're translated by everyone from King Alfred to Chaucer you've held some influence I would say.


67 posted on 07/27/2004 1:27:29 PM PDT by Borges
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To: Borges
I think almost all of the stuff listed from 1900, with the exception of Relativity, are overstated.

It's the inherent bias that because they are closer in time to us, they appear to be more important. We have no historical perspective on them. But truly influential works will withstand the test of time, and their influence reverberate for centuries if not millenniums. Mao and Friedan? Laughable is the only way to describe them belonging on a list with Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, and Aquinas.
68 posted on 07/27/2004 1:31:18 PM PDT by Truthsearcher
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To: muleskinner
What makes a book "third rate" as opposed to "second rate"?

My suggestions:

Third rate = Concept, story, or information is presented so poorly, that you can't finish the book.

Second rate = Something's amiss, but you can finish the book, either for entertainment value, or some information.

69 posted on 07/27/2004 1:32:02 PM PDT by Calvin Locke
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To: BufordP

#7 The Avesta is a collection of earlier writings going back to the seventeen Gatas (sacred songs) composed by Zoraster. The writings are in an ancient language called the Old Avestan. These writings should be in the #1 spot, as they were modified into the latter written Old Testament.


70 posted on 07/27/2004 1:32:03 PM PDT by ASA Vet (Tourette's syndrome is just a $&#$*!% excuse for poor *%$#** language skills.)
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To: Mr.Atos

I've read an awful lot of books and to this day Atlas Shrugged is still, without a doubt, the most influential one I've read. The beginning was a struggle, the meat of it was like breathing life itself into my soul and reaching the end was half an awakening and half a wake wishing it wasn't ending. And no, I'm not usually melodramatic about this kind of thing. It was that good.


71 posted on 07/27/2004 1:32:51 PM PDT by ShadowDancer
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To: Physicist; RightWingAtheist

ping


72 posted on 07/27/2004 1:32:58 PM PDT by RadioAstronomer
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To: Mr.Atos
Googled "Ayn Rand" as per your suggestion and got 200K hits. Then I googled "Sun Tsu" at 100K hits. I then recalled that there are several spellings for the author from 2000 BC and googled "Art of War" coming up with 9 million hits.

This nearly four thousand year old work is studied today at West Point and the Naval War College. My dear wife, who sells real estate, is reading it for the fourth time and still taking notes. She also bought another five copies for coworkers and our teenager.

I would submit for consideration that the absence of Sun Tsu's _Art of War_ makes this list highly suspect.

73 posted on 07/27/2004 1:33:24 PM PDT by Mycroft Holmes (Fnord!)
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To: Borges

Mary Mother of God! My new glasses aren't ready yet.


74 posted on 07/27/2004 1:33:29 PM PDT by Petronski (BOSTON TRUTH SQUAD: DemsExtremeMakeover.com)
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To: Doctor Stochastic

ping


75 posted on 07/27/2004 1:33:47 PM PDT by RadioAstronomer
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To: Borges
Must be an oversight - the list forgot to include:

and

76 posted on 07/27/2004 1:36:45 PM PDT by P.O.E.
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To: Mycroft Holmes

I would complete agree that the Art of War belongs.

Lik I said I would take out everything on the list post 1900, and put in books like Art of War and John Locke's Second Treatise on Government.


77 posted on 07/27/2004 1:40:53 PM PDT by Truthsearcher
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To: Mycroft Holmes

In his entry on Clausewitz he suggests that this update on Sun Tzu's work has had the greater influence.


78 posted on 07/27/2004 1:41:00 PM PDT by Borges
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To: Borges

I’ve actually read only 14 in their entirety - and reread them.
The Old Testament
Homer The Iliad. The Odyssey
History of the Peloponnesian War
Herodotus History
Plato The Republic
Virgil The Aeneid
The New Testament
Plutarch Lives
Cornelius Tacitus Annals
The Divine Comedy
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
The Origin of Species
War and Peace
Nineteen Eighty-Four
I’ve read parts of a couple dozen others on the list - but wading through The Upanishads, Augustine of Hippo Confessions, or Thomas Aquinas Summa Theologiae is a bit more than I can handle. Maybe when I reach the point where I have absolutely nothing else to do …


79 posted on 07/27/2004 1:42:17 PM PDT by R. Scott (Humanity i love you because when you're hard up you pawn your Intelligence to buy a drink.)
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To: RadioAstronomer

Skinner, Chomsky, and Kuhn do seem to be waning in influence though.


80 posted on 07/27/2004 1:43:03 PM PDT by Doctor Stochastic (Vegetabilisch = chaotisch is der Charakter der Modernen. - Friedrich Schlegel)
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