How can we ever change the world? Military leaders have certainly managed to change large parts of it; scientists devising cures and vaccines for disease can spread a more benign influence across whole continents; [5] the thoughts of religious leaders or philosophers can sweep through generations like fire. But books? Reading books is generally a solitary pastime: bookishness is the very antithesis of the man-of-action qualities that seem to shake the world. The pen may boast [10] of being mightier than the sword, but it is generally the sword that wins in the short term. It is that phrase, though, which gives the game away: in the short term, writers can be imprisoned or executed, their work censored, and their books burned, but over history, it is books and the ideas [15] expressed within them that have transformed the world. But which books can be said to have changed the world? There are few better ways of starting an argument than producing a list, and I have no doubt that not everyone will be happy about the books I included in my
[20] list. About some, like the Bible, Shakespeare’s First Folio
and Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, there can be little
argument - but what about Euclid’s Elements, Thomas
Paine’s Rights of Man or A Vindication of the Rights of
Women by Mary Wollstonecraft? The answer is that any
[25] list can only be subjective.

Andrew Taylor. Books that changed the world: the 50 most influential books in human history. Quercus Editions, 2014 (adapted).

Judge the following according to the text presented

The word “mightier” (ℓ.10) expresses a comparison and could be correctly replaced by more powerful.