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Martin Seymour-Smith The 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written: The History of Thought from Ancient Times to Today Citadel Press, Secaucus, NJ, 1998, ISBN: 0806520000 ![]()
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| # | Author | Title | Year |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | King Wen & Duke Chou | The I Ching | 1500 B.C. |
| 2 | Moses | The Old Testament | 1500 B.C. |
| 3 | Homer | The Iliad & The Odyssey | 9th century B.C. |
| 4 | Hindu rishis | The Upanishads | 700 B.C.-400 B.C. |
| 5 | Lao-tzu | The Way and Its Power | 3rd century B.C. |
| 6 | Zoroaster | The Avesta | 500 B.C. |
| 7 | Confucius | Analects | 5th-4th century B.C. |
| 8 | Thucydides | History of the Peloponnesian War | 5th century B.C. |
| 9 | Hippocrates | Works | 400 B.C. |
| 10 | Aristotle | Works | 4th century B.C. |
| 11 | Herodotus | History | 4th century |
| 12 | Plato | The Republic | 380 B.C. |
| 13 | Euclid | Elements | 280 B.C. |
| 14 | Buddha | The Dhammapada | 252 B.C. |
| 15 | Virgil | The Aeneid | 19 B.C. |
| 16 | Lucretius | On the Nature of Reality | 55 B.C. |
| 17 | Philo of Alexandria | Allegorical Expositions of the Holy Law | 1st century A.D. |
| 18 | Jesus | The New Testament | 64-110 A.D. |
| 19 | Plutarch | Lives | 120 A.D. |
| 20 | Cornelius Tacitus | Annals, From the Death of the Divine Augustus | 120 A.D. |
| 21 | Valentinus | The Gospel of Truth | 1st century A.D. |
| 22 | Marcus Aurelius | Meditations | 167 A.D. |
| 23 | Sextus Empiricus | Outlines of Pyrrhonism | 150-210 A.D. |
| 24 | Plotinus | The Enneads | 3rd century A.D. |
| 25 | Augustine of Hippo | Confessions | 400 A.D. |
| 26 | Muhammed | The Koran | 7th century A.D. |
| 27 | Moses Maimonides | Guide for the Perplexed | 1190 |
| 28 | Moses de Leon | The Kabbalah | 12th century |
| 29 | Thomas Aquinas | Summa Theologiae | 1266-1273 |
| 30 | Dante Alighieri | The Divine Comedy | 1321 |
| 31 | Desiderius Erasmus | In Praise of Folly | 1509 |
| 32 | Niccolo Machiavelli | The Prince | 1532 |
| 33 | Martin Luther | On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church | 1520 |
| 34 | François Rabelais | Gargantua and Pantagruel | 1534 & 1532 |
| 35 | John Calvin | Institutes of the Christian Religion | 1536 |
| 36 | Nicolaus Copernicus | On the Revolution of the Celestial Orbs | 1543 |
| 37 | Michael Eyquem de Montaigne | Essays | 1580 |
| 38 | Miguel de Cervantes | Don Quixote, Parts I and II | 1605 & 1615 |
| 39 | Johannes Kepler | The Harmony of the World | 1619 |
| 40 | Francis Bacon | Novum Organum | 1620 |
| 41 | William Shakespeare | The First Folio100 | 1623 |
| 42 | Galileo Galilei | Dialogue Concerning Two New Chief World Systems | 1632 |
| 43 | Rene Descartes | Discourse on Method | 1637 |
| 44 | Thomas Hobbes | Leviathan | 1651 |
| 45 | Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz | Works | 1663-1716 |
| 46 | Blaise Pascal | Pensées | 1670 |
| 47 | Baruch de Spinoza | Ethics | 1677 |
| 48 | John Bunyan | Pilgrim's Progress | 1678-1684 |
| 49 | Isaac Newton | Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy | 1687 |
| 50 | John Locke | Essay Concerning Human Understanding | 1689 |
| 51 | George Berkeley | The Principles of Human Knowledge | 1710, revised 1734 |
| 52 | Giambattista Vico | The New Science | 1725, revised 1744 |
| 53 | David Hume | A Treatise of Human Nature | 1739-1740 |
| 54 | Denis Diderot (Ed.) | The Encyclopedia | 1751-1772 |
| 55 | Samuel Johnson | A Dictionary of the English Language | 1755 |
| 56 | François-Marie de Voltaire | Candide | 1759 |
| 57 | Thomas Paine | Common Sense | 1776 |
| 58 | Adam Smith | An Enquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations | 1776 |
| 59 | Edward Gibbon | The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire | 1776-1787 |
| 60 | Immanuel Kant | Critique of Pure Reason | 1781, revised 1787 |
| 61 | Jean-Jacques Rousseau | Confessions | 1781 |
| 62 | Edmund Burke | Reflections on the Revolution in France | 1790 |
| 63 | Mary Wollstonecraft | Vindication of the Rights of Woman | 1792 |
| 64 | William Godwin | An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice | 1793 |
| 65 | Thomas Robert Malthus | An Essay on the Principle of Population | 1798, revised 1803 |
| 66 | George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel | Phenomenology of Spirit | 1807 |
| 67 | Arthur Schopenhauer | The World as Will and Idea | 1819 |
| 68 | Auguste Comte | Course in the Positivist Philosophy | 1830-1842 |
| 69 | Carl Marie von Clausewitz | On War | 1832 |
| 70 | Soren Kierkegaard | Either/Or | 1843 |
| 71 | Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels | The Manifesto of the Communist Party | 1848 |
| 72 | Henry David Thoreau | Civil Disobedience | 1849 |
| 73 | Charles Darwin | The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection | 1859 |
| 74 | John Stuart Mill | On Liberty | 1859 |
| 75 | Herbert Spencer | First Principles | 1862 |
| 76 | Gregor Mendel | Experiments With Plant Hybrids | 1866 |
| 77 | Leo Tolstoy | War and Peace | 1868-1869 |
| 78 | James Clerk Maxwell | Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism | 1873 |
| 79 | Friedrich Nietzsche | Thus Spake Zarathustra | 1883-1885 |
| 80 | Sigmund Freud | The Interpretation of Dreams | 1900 |
| 81 | William James | Pragmatism | 1908 |
| 82 | Albert Einstein | Relativity | 1916 |
| 83 | Vilfredo Pareto | The Mind and Society | 1916 |
| 84 | Carl Gustav Jung | Psychological Types | 1921 |
| 85 | Martin Buber | I and Thou | 1923 |
| 86 | Franz Kafka | The Trial | 1925 |
| 87 | Karl Popper | The Logic of Scientific Discovery | 1934 |
| 88 | John Maynard Keynes | General Theory of Employment Interest, and Money | 1936 |
| 89 | Jean-Paul Sartre | Being and Nothingness | 1943 |
| 90 | Friedrich von Hayek | The Road to Serfdom | 1944 |
| 91 | Simone de Beauvoir | The Second Sex | 1948 |
| 92 | Norbert Wiener | Cybernetics | 1948, revised 1961 |
| 93 | George Orwell | Nineteen Eighty-Four | 1949 |
| 94 | George Ivanovitch Gurdjieff | Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson | 1950 |
| 95 | Ludwig Wittgenstein | Philosphical Investigations | 1953 |
| 96 | Noam Chomsky | Syntactic Structures | 1957 |
| 97 | T. S. Kuhn | The Structure of Scientific Revolutions | 1962, revised 1970 |
| 98 | Betty Friedan | The Feminine Mystique | 1963 |
| 99 | Mao Zedong | Quotations From Chairman Mao Tse-tung | 1966 |
| 100 | B. F. Skinner | Beyond Freedom and Dignity | 1971 |
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