There was a couple of years in my life when High Weirdness By Mail was a guiding text in my life. It determined what I was either going to send for or receive in the mail almost every day during that time. That was really fun.
Only the Second Treatise. Nobody reads the First any more, and there’s no reason any more to bother. Sir Robert Filmer, from a modern perspective, seems just too silly to rebut – and, I think, seemed nearly so even in Locke’s day.
I’m surprised there’s been only one vote for the Analects of Confucius, and none at all for Mao Tse-Tung’s On Guerrilla Warfare, which I suspect will have more lasting impact than the more famous Little Red Book of his Sayings.
Most influential forged texts in history:
The Donation of Constantine
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (still influential, damn it)
Most influential letter (private):
Undoubtedly many candidates, but I’d start with Einstein’s letter to FDR warning of the possibility of an atomic weapon.
Most influential open letter:
Zola, J’Accuse!
M L King, Letter from Birmingham Jail
Most influential telegram: Gray Ghost has it–the Zimmerman Telegram. The only other one I can think of that’s even close is George Kennan’s “Long Telegram” laying out a proposed US Cold War strategy.
And it’s “The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”, not the rise and fall. And of course, 476 AD comes halfway through the book, the rest is about the decline and decline and decline of the Eastern Empire, aka the Byzantine Empire.
Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book?
Plato’s Timaeus. Simply put,* it’s about the relationship between human beings and the natural world, and ultimately had a profound effect on how music was perceived and composed in the Middle Ages (especially following Boethius) – until you get to theorists like Johannes Gorcheio in the late twelfth, early 13th century. Until then, music was a branch of philosophy meant to be in aid of spiritual redemption and maintaining the harmonic order of the universe, and not viewed as a craft or an art (especially instrumental music).
*Simply put because I am currently hip deep in a conference paper that compares the outcry from clerics and secular authority against popular music (Ars Nova) and instrumentalists of the 12th and 13th centuries with criticism and hysteria from civic and church leaders against rock and roll between the 1950s and 1980s, and am too demented from sifting through the writings of hot ‘n’ bothered medieval canonists to make much sense at present! 
let’s derail this sucker. can you imagine the various texts world leaders would have sent?
brb - jesus
i don’t think the religious texts have too much of lead over notable scientific texts, notably Newton’s principles of math, darwin’s origin of species, and smith’s wealth of nations.
Some things in the intellectual history of human civilization are best gotten rid of and forgotten.
Ah, but that isn’t the most inluential Confessions — a title that should go to Augustine’s Confessions, a worthy inclusion on this list.
I don’t think I’ve seen Machiavelli’s The Prince yet, although it may be less important than people think (I mean, he was more recording how rulers already behaved than anything else.)
Baby and Child Care by Benjamin Spock (Much that was great and awful about the Baby Boom generation can be laid at the feet of this book)
The Joy of Cooking
The Tale of Genji
Don Quixote (These last two codified the form of the novel as a literary form, in both Asia and Europe)
Oliver Twist More than any other book, this one opened they eyes of the middle class to society’s inequalities.
The Pilgrim’s Progress. Hugely influential in early America. Many homes on the frontier had but two books: the Bible and Pilgrim’s Progress.
Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature and The American Scholar
Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, 347 U.S. 483 (1954)
Abraham Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address
Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal
But it leads to fantastic quotes such as this one from John of Salisbury (d. 1190): ‘Could you but hear the effete emotings of their before-singing and their after-singing and their ill-advised singing, you would think it an ensemble of sirens, not of men. . .the ears are almost completely divested of their critical power, and the intellect, which pleasureableness of so much sweetness has caressed insensate, is impotent to judge the merits of things heard. Indeed, when such practices go too far, they can more easily occasion the titillation between the legs than a sense of devotion in the brain.’
I know, John; Pet Sounds makes me feel pretty happy, too. Poor old sod, whose nickname was Johannes Parvus, or John the Small. Hmm.
It may have been strange stuff, but without it we wouldn’t have had the invention of musical notation, polyphony, and a lot of great music and instrumentation that did come out of it (speaking as one who has had a lot of fun performing in medieval ensembles) and the subsequent development of the Ars Nova which led to all the massive changes and innovation in music and harmony from the Renaissance onwards.
The positive aspect of the ‘harmony of the worlds’ led to quite beautiful medieval music; there will always be No Fun Grups like Bernard of Clairvaux and Tipper Gore complaining about it.
That’s all very interesting and good to know . . . My point was, while music is certainly one of the most wonderful things in life, the idea that music as such has any non-esthetic spiritual significance is almost certainly a dead end.
here is a pretty interesting list:
The Influence of Sea Power on World History, Mahan–its influence on the Kaiser was pretty much responsible for WWI (and hence WWII).
For influence, how about Paradise Lost? Isn’t that the source of the whole idea of Lucifer/Satan as fallen angel? Also many of our ideas of Heaven and Hell?
Marx’ Capital should be in here as well. Lotta economists have spilled a lot of ink in defense of and in attacking it.
art of war
Most of the ones I would say have already been mentioned so I’ll list a few different ones.
Milton’s Paradise Lost.
Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.
Tolkien’s LOTR.
http://www.cracked.com/article/18368_7-books-we-lost-to-history-that-would-have-changed-world/