Emma Lazarus wrote, ""Progress and Poverty" is not so much a book as an event. The life and thought of no one capable of understanding it can be quite the same after reading it," and even that reading it would prevent such a person, who also "prized justice or common honesty", from being able to ever again "dine or sleep or read or work in peace". Many famous figures with diverse ideologies, such as George Bernard Shaw, Friedrich Hayek, H. G. Wells, and Leo Tolstoy, mark their first encounters with "Progress and Poverty" as literally life-changing experiences.