What are your favorite essays?

More specifically, those that are on the short side and of the expository/argumentative/persuasive variety. But anything you like really.
Quite pathetically, I haven’t got one to start this thread with any kind of momentum, but that’s partly why I’m asking, because I don’t know any, so don’t hesitate to point out any well known classics either.

George Orwell, “Politics and the English Language”
Virginia Woolf, “A Room of One’s Own”

‘A Modest Proposal’ by J. Swift.

I was not unamused somewhat by the George Orwell one, sometimes not always not too unlike monsieur William Strunk Jr. he is, is he not?

the Woolf OTOH, I x’ed out of as soon as I saw that it required a table of contents with 6(!) sections. Maybe another day.

Hey here’s one I actually knew. Read it in middle school without any kind of introduction or primer, and spent much of it partly trying to figure out how the hell it got printed in a textbook and partly kind of convinced.

G. K. Chesterton has written a lot of great ones. Try, for example,
On Running After One’s Hat
On Lying In Bed
The Contented Man

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “The American Scholar,” although it’s technically a speech rather than an essay.

“Letter from Birmingham Jail”
-Martin Luther King Jr

“Gettysburg Address”
-Abe Lincoln

I hope this counts; it’s been one of my favorites for several years now:

False Authority Syndrome

I have not read **Montaigne **- yet. He is on my list of classics to read…

Would **Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex ** apply here? I found a link to it here: Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex

Mark Twain: Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses.

The essay that always comes to mind is Adam Gopnik’s comments on the Virgina Tech shootings.

This Is No Game, by Jack Handey.

Not as elevated as the others, but it started me thinking about something that will be the defining problem of the next century - Marshall Brain’s “Robotic Nation”.

Orwell’s The Lion and the Unicorn as well as his essay on Rudyard Kipling are about as close to my political views as one can get (minus the actual socialism), and they’re about 50 times more eloquent than I could hope to become. How could anyone read what Orwell wrote about Chamberlain and not immediately think of Dubya?

Isaac Asimov’s “The Relativity of Wrong”

Haven’t read it in ages, but Thoreau’s essay on Civil Disobedience floored me back in high school.

Why I Am Not a Christian by Bertrand Russell

http://users.drew.edu/~jlenz/whynot.html

While not as eloquent (in my opinion) as Russell, Clarence Darrow’s Why I am an Agnostic is good as well.

I find this excerpt from Carl Sagan’s Reflections on a Mote of Dust one of the most moving things I have ever read.

Another favorite is Garrison Keillor’s We’re Not in Lake Wobegon Anymore from August 2004. It is worth a look just for the following paragraph -

“The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons, hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks, Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil Armstrong’s moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, little honkers out to diminish the rest of us, Newt’s evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of information and of secular institutions, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk.”

THEY’RE MADE OUT OF MEAT by by Terry Bisson

It’s actually a story, or more specifically, a conversation, but it is awesome and essay-ish. It’s a conversation between two aliens upon seeing Earth.