What is the most influential book in history?

I don't consider Leviathan influential. The Prince is definitely up there for sure.

What's up with the lack love for the leviathan? It left its mark on political philosophy.

King Lear, Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Othello.

Sorry, I was thinking of the biblical Leviathan. (The book itself is of lesser important compared to Genesis or Galatians or whatever.) I can agree the Leviathan is.

I can agree Shakespeare's works are influential but they only reach an extent to literature, no?

>What is the most influential book in history?
Euclid's Elements, the most successful and influential textbook ever written.
wilbourhall.org/pdfs/Heath_Euclid_II.pdf

Lana looks like a foot in that picture

Not really the best pic, but her Grammys appearance looked pretty good. I personally think she looked best during 2013.

Very cool!

>Looking for non-religious texts.
Sounds like you already know the answer.

Obviously the Bible is the most influential book. Common knowledge. I wanted books that aren't religious.

>wants influential literature
>doesn't think influential authors/playwrights didn't pave way for numerous other authors to come, or influence and steer tremedously the society in their day.

Just how dumb are you?

Carl Von Clausewitz: On war
Sun Tzu : The art of war
Plato : The Republic
Nikolai Machiavelli : The Prince

Hamlet or As You Like It

Adam Smiths Big Book of Gay Memes about Capitalism

Whether you agree with him or not, this is literally the correct answer. (you may not like it, but this is what peak influence looks like)

Hmm. That'd be before The Communist Manifesto?

it's worth reading in any context. pretty much everything he says can be applied to other aspects of your life as well

workers of the world didnt rise up like the manifesto called for, but kapital did serve as the basis of policy for the vanguard party

It's Shakespeare, OP. And it's not even close.

>The 46th word in Psalm 46 is ‘shake’, the 46th word from the end is ‘spear’, and that Shakespeare was 46 when the King James Bible was published.
>He invented nearly 3,000 of our common words by changing nouns into verbs, changing verbs into adjectives, connecting words never before used together, adding prefixes and suffixes, and devising words wholly original.
>His vocabulary was the largest of any writer, at over twenty-four thousand words. The total vocabulary of Milton's poetical remains is 17,377. Homer, including the hymns as well as both Iliad and Odyssey, is nine thousand. 5,860 words complete Dante's Divina Comedia.
>He was able to use over 7,000 words – more than occur in the whole King James Version of the Bible – only once and never again.
>Shakespeare wrote close to a tenth of the most quoted lines ever written or spoken in English. What’s more, according to the Literature Encyclopaedia, Shakespeare is the second most quoted English writer after the writers of the Bible.

The magna carta unironically as it led to locke, mills, and the constitutions of the US and more importantly France aswell as the British parliament.
That text is unironically the reason liberalism reigns supreme in the 21st century.

> political booklets
> fiction shit

Not a book, but these three articles:
>On a Heuristic Viewpoint Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light
>On the Motion of Small Particles Suspended in a Stationary Liquid, as Required by the Molecular Kinetic Theory of Heat
>On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies

They were critical to ALL scientific advances of the 20th century. Think back and put yourself in 1905, that's where we all still would be without them.

>If you appear to cath war prisonners, treat them with respect as they were your own soldiers.
Why won't any army do this? It was literally the best thing to do. And don't tell me it didn't work be cause it DID work, sun tzu was a war advisor and help unite the 3 kingdoms almost single-handedly

Faust

>Principia Mathematica
>Magna Carta
>The Illiad

Shakespeare was tremendously influential... For Anglo-Saxon culture.

I would say that Plato's dialogues, or The Republic if you must pick only one of them, have been the most influential texts of all time aside from dedicated religious ones. Plato brought Western thinking to a whole new level and his work has influenced every Western thinker since. Hard to beat that.

>Nikolai
Eastern europe was a mistake

>shakespeare
please.

It's Plato's republic like many have said

The Magna charta is an interesting proposal but the corpus iuris civilis would be the smart one

I really think shakespear is only relevant in the English speaking world. Books like On war, or Art of War or even the magna carta are much more important

Then you're not looking for the most influential books in history, are you.

The protocols of the elders of zion

More like Trana Del Rey. I have a hard time beilieving >she is actually a female.