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Mary Ann Evans (1819 - 1880) Also known by her pen name George Eliot, was one of the leading English writers of the Victorian era .
Source: George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss

“There are three ways of arriving at an opinion on any subject. The first is to believe what one is told; the second is to disbelieve it; and the third is to examine the matter for oneself. The overwhelming majority of mankind practice the first method; of the remainder, the overwhelming majority practice the second; only an infinitesimal remnant practice the third.”

Source:  Bertrand Russell, Mortals and Others, Bertrand Russell’s American Essays 1931–1935, Vol. II, Essay. 37: What to Believe, p. 454 (24 August 1931)

Jacque Fresco (1916 – 2017) was an American futurist and self-described social engineer. He left home at the age of 14 and was Self-taught, He worked in a variety of positions related to industrial design. Fresco wrote and lectured his views on sustainable cities, energy efficiency, natural-resource management, cybernetic technology, automation, and the role of science in society. He was the founder of the Venus Project a still active non-profit organization that advocates for a resource-based economy and redesigns civilization.

Image source: Maj Borg, Minttu Mäntynen, Andrea Miconi, CC BY 1.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 - 1860) was a German philosopher often called the “philosopher of pessimism". He is known for his 1818 work "The World as Will and Representation" (expanded in 1844), Schopenhauer was among the first philosophers in the Western tradition to share and affirm significant tenets of Indian philosophy, such as asceticism, denial of the self, and the notion of the world-as-appearance. His writings influenced later existential philosophy and Freudian psychology.

Maya Angelou (1928-2014) American writer, poet, singer, and civil rights activist

Blaise Pascal (1623 – 1662) was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, religious philosopher writer and a child prodigy. His earliest mathematical work at age 16 was on projective geometry. Later, he wrote a significant treatise on the subject of conic sections and he laid the foundation for the modern theory of probabilities and formulated what came to be known as Pascal’s principle of pressure. He also made important contributions to the study of fluids, and clarified the concepts of vacuum. Pascal died in Paris at the age of 39. More 

Source: "The Lettres provinciales" (“Provincial letters”) of 1656–7

Albert Einstein (1879 – April 1955) - German-born theoretical physicist best known for developing the theory of relativity and his important contributions to quantum mechanics. His mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc2, which arises from special relativity, has been called "the world's most famous equation". He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921, "for his services to Theoretical Physics and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect" More

Quote source: President Franklin D. Roosevelt's (FDR) Second Inaugural Address, on January 20, 1937. 

Abraham Lincoln (February 12, 1809 - April 15, 1865)

Gabriel Garcia Marquez (1927 - 2014) Was a Colombian writer and journalist, known affectionately as Gabo or Gabito throughout Latin America. Considered one of the most significant authors of the 20th century, particularly in the Spanish language, he was awarded the 1972 Neustadt International Prize for Literature and the 1982 Nobel Prize in Literature.  From early on he showed no inhibitions in his criticism of Colombian and foreign politics. More

Quote source: "One Hundred Years of Solitude" (Cien años de soledad. 1967.)

Marcus Aurelius Antonius (121 – 180) was Roman emperor from 161 to 180 AD and a Stoic philosopher. He was the last of the rulers known as the Five Good Emperors (a term coined some 13 centuries later by Niccolò Machiavelli), and the last emperor of the Pax Romana, an age of relative peace, calmness and stability for the Roman Empire lasting from 27 BC to 180 AD. He served as Roman consul in 140, 145, and 161. Meditations, the writings of "the philosopher" – as contemporary biographers called Marcus – are a significant source of the modern understanding of ancient Stoic philosophy. These writings have been praised by fellow writers, philosophers, monarchs, and politicians centuries after his death.

"Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a great ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair. I have sought love, first, because it brings ecstasy - ecstasy so great that I would often have sacrificed all the rest of life for a few hours of this joy. I have sought it, next, because it relieves loneliness--that terrible loneliness in which one shivering consciousness looks over the rim of the world into the cold unfathomable lifeless abyss. I have sought it finally, because in the union of love I have seen, in a mystic miniature, the prefiguring vision of the heaven that saints and poets have imagined. This is what I sought, and though it might seem too good for human life, this is what--at last--I have found. With equal passion I have sought knowledge. I have wished to understand the hearts of men. I have wished to know why the stars shine. And I have tried to apprehend the Pythagorean power by which number holds sway above the flux. A little of this, but not much, I have achieved. Love and knowledge, so far as they were possible, led upward toward the heavens. But always pity brought me back to earth. Echoes of cries of pain reverberate in my heart. Children in famine, victims tortured by oppressors, helpless old people a burden to sons, and the whole world of loneliness, poverty, and pain make a mockery of what human life should be. I long to alleviate this evil, but I cannot, and I too suffer. This has been my life. I have found it worth living, and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.”