My all-time best experience reading the classics was when I had to write a term paper for History of Mathematics, and I chose to do the history of probability theory. I based my paper of a 19th-century English classic, and read DeMoivre (1731) and Laplace (1812) in the original, as well as Bernoulli (ca. 1710) in translation (my Latin is not that good ;-).

It's a great experience to see it argued forcefully that the law of large numbers is evidence of the existence of God.

A society committed to the notion that government is always bad will have bad government. And it doesn't have to be that way. — Paul Krugman