Ask HN: What are your favorite books or essays written at least 100 years ago?

Some of the speeches of Robert G. Ingersoll. Great oratory from an age when oratory was prized.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_G._Ingersoll

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/2662

Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason. Not intended as oratory, but like Ingersoll's lectures, great fun to read aloud.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Paine

http://thomaspaine.org/major-works/the-age-of-reason-part-1....

> But some, perhaps, will say: Are we to have no word of God—no revelation? I answer, Yes; there is a word of God; there is a revelation. THE WORD OF GOD IS THE CREATION WE BEHOLD and it is in this word, which no human invention can counterfeit or alter, that God speaketh universally to man... The Creation speaketh an universal language, independently of human speech or human language, multiplied and various as they may be. It is an ever-existing original, which every man can read. It cannot be forged; it cannot be counterfeited; it cannot be lost; it cannot be altered; it cannot be suppressed....

The World Set Free - HG Wells

(I wanted to put in the Shape of Things to Come but it doesn't quite make the cut)

On the Origin of Species, by Charles Darwin. It's pretty dense, dry, and can require a bit of a commitment, but there's some pretty interesting bits and pieces in there aside from just proposing evolution.

I would also highly recommend the sequel, the Descent of Man. That's where Darwin actually discusses the evolution of humans, a topic he gingerly avoided in TOOS

The entire _Arsene Lupin_ series by Maurice Leblanc, been reading them again and again since I was 12.