André Paul Guillaume Gide (1869 - 1951)  French author known for his fiction as well as his autobiographical works. He was the winner of the 1947 Nobel Prize in Literature. 

Toni Morrison (1931 - 2019) - American writer and poet, born in Lorain, Ohio,  She received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993.

Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson (1809 -1892) - British poet who become the most popular poet of the Victorian era and remains one of the most popular British poets. 

Euripides (480 - 406 BC) Born in the Salamis Island, Greece. He was one of the great Athenian playwrights and poets. Of his 90 plays,18 have survived the centuries since he wrote them.

Martin Luther King Jr. - (1929 - 1968) American Christian minister, activist and leader in the Civil Rights Movement from 1955 until his assassination in 1968.

”Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children"

Address given by U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower on April 16, 1953, speaking only three months into his presidency. The Cold War deepened during his administration and political pressures for increased military spending mounted. By the time he left office in 1961, he felt it necessary to warn of the military-industrial complex.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) American poet and educator . His works include "Paul Revere's Ride", The Song of Hiawatha, and Evangeline. He was was one of the Fireside Poets from New England and the first American to translate Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy.

Khalil Gibran (1883 - 1931) Lebanese-American poet and writer. He was the author of The Prophet, The Broken Wings , Beloved, The Three Ants and many others (His name is sometimes spelled Kahlil)

Henry A. Wallace (1888 – 1965) - American politician, journalist, and farmer who served as U.S Secretary of Agriculture , U.S Secretary of Commerce and  33rd  Vice President Of the United States from 1941 to 1945 under President  Franklin D. Roosevelt. He was a strong supporter of Roosevelt's New Deal.

Christopher C. Krebs -   American attorney who served as the Director of Cybersecurity Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA)  in the United States Department of Homeland Security. He previously worked in the private sector as Director for Cybersecurity Policy for Microsoft.
As CISA's Director, he played a major role in creating a CISA "Rumor Control website to debunk election-related disinformation.  On November 17, he tweeted "On allegations that election systems were manipulated, 59 election security experts all agree, "in every case of which we are aware, these claims either have been unsubstantiated or are technically incoherent.". He was fired by President Donald Trump the next day.

Toni Morrison (1931 - 2019) - American writer and poet, born in Lorain, Ohio,  She received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. 

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

Read more at Brainpickings by Maria Popova - Photo Credit: York College ISLGP / CC by https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

Nikola Tesla (1856 - 1943) Serbian-American inventor, electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, and futurist best known for his contributions to the design of the modern alternating current (AC) electricity supply system.

Mark Twain (1835 - 1910) American writer, humorist, publisher, and lecturer.

Khalil Gibran (1883 - 1931) Lebanese-American poet and writer. He was the author of The Prophet, The Broken Wings , Beloved, The Three Ants and many others (His name is sometimes spelled Kahlil)

Thomas Jefferson - (1743 - 1826) 3rd President of the United States 

Source" Library of Congress - Image by By Rembrandt Peale - White House Historical Association, Public Domain, 

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756 – 1791) An influential and prolific music composer. (From a Letter as published in The Letters of Mozart & His Family (1938) translated and edited by Emily Anderson, p. 1114)

Ruth Bader Ginsburg (1933-2020) - Wrote an essay when she was 13 years old which was published in her synagogue bulletin urging congregants to rid themselves of hate and prejudice. The essay, dated June 2, 1946 and titled "One People" was published in Ginsburg’s 2017 book “My Own Words”, which contains a collection of her speeches and writings as well as her thoughts on growing up in Brooklyn’s Midwood neighborhood.

One People

The war has left a bloody trail and many deep wounds not too easily healed. Many people have been left with scars that take a long time to pass away. We must never forget the horrors which our brethren were subjected to in Bergen-Belsen and other Nazi concentration camps. Then, too, we must try hard to understand that for righteous people hate and prejudice are neither good occupations nor fit companions. "Rabbi Alfred Bettleheim once said: 'Prejudice saves us a painful trouble, the trouble of thinking'.” In our beloved land families were not scattered, communities not erased nor our nation destroyed by the ravages of the World War.

Yet, dare we be at ease? We are part of a world whose unity has been almost completely shattered. No one can feel free from danger and destruction until the many torn threads of civilization are bound together again. We cannot feel safer until every nation, regardless of weapons or power, will meet together in good faith, the people worthy of mutual association. 

There can be a happy world and there will be once again, when men create a strong bond towards one another, a bond unbreakable by a studied prejudice or a passing circumstance. Then and only then shall we have a world built on the foundation of the Fatherhood of God and whose structure is the Brotherhood of Man.

Jorge Luis Borges (1899 – 1986) Argentine short-story writer, essayist and poet. He was a key figure in Spanish language and universal literature.