skopia
Gibbon follows Rome from its imperial peak to the fall of Constantinople thirteen centuries later, in the finest prose English history possesses. His contempt for Christianity still makes readers laugh.
Wealth is not gold in a vault but what a country produces, and specialization multiplies it. Smith begins with ten men making pins and every economic argument since descends from him.
Werther writes to a friend about Lotte, who is engaged to a decent man, and about feelings he cannot govern. Young men across Europe dressed like him and read themselves into his condition.
Three friends argue over whether the order of the world proves a designer. Philo grants the comparison, then dismantles it, asking why a competent god would build this much suffering into the machine.
Paine tells the colonists that an island cannot rule a continent and that hereditary kingship is an absurdity. Read aloud in taverns, it turned grievance into independence within months.