OpinionSoup's Internationally Famous List of the World's Most IMPRESSIVE People
"One can survive anything nowadays, except death, and live down anything except a good reputation."
~ Oscar Wilde
Personal from Donny:
Some of these people are no longer living; therefore, they cannot defend themselves against my charge of being "impressive." It is up to you to decide who's who. Jesus, Buddha and other Masters are not included because they were too extraordinary. They belong on another, very short list.
By the way, there are at least seven or eight more people whom I consider "fairly impressive" and who, with just a little more effort, could have made the cut; but you have to stop somewhere. Besides, I am leaving an opening for sequels and yearly updates.
The only criterion for inclusion here is my own, personal opinion, which is very true. If you disagree, let me know. If you think I am full of baloney, at this precise moment you are wrong - as I write this, I happen to be full of turkey breast and onion bagels. LET ME KNOW, if you think any name should be struck from or added to this list, and TELL ME WHY. Who knows what I'll be full of, when your letter or email arrives.
A
Bella Abzug, Abigail Adams, Conrad Aiken, Edward Albee, Louisa May Alcott, Alexander the Great, Alfred the Great, Alfred (Lord Tennyson), Muhammad Ali, Gracie Allen, Woody Allen, Jack Anderson, Anonymous, Susan B. Anthony, Johnny Appleseed (John Chapman), Thomas Aquinas, Archimedes of Syracuse, Aristotle, Louis Armstrong, Isaac Asimov, W. H. Auden, Marcus Aurelius, Jeffrey Azoulay
B
Meher Baba, J. S. Bach, Francis Bacon, Roger Bacon, Roger Baldwin, Anne Bancroft, Tallulah Bankhead, Dan Barker, Dr "James" Barry, Béla Bartók, Clara Barton, Bernard Baruch, Matsuo Basho, Simone de Beauvoir, Samuel Beckett, Ludwig van Beethoven, Brendan Behan, Harry Belafonte, Alexander Graham Bell, Irving Berlin, Hector Berlioz, Hildegard von Bingen, Georges Bizet, Black Elk, Black Hawk, William Blake, Helena P. Blavatsky, Boadicea (Boudicca), Humphrey Bogart, Niels Bohr, Victor Borge, Jórge Luís Bórges, Brian Boru, Ray Bradbury, Bertolt Brecht, Dave Brubek, Lenny Bruce, Giordano Bruno, William Cullen Bryant, Martin Buber, Pearl S. Buck, Jimmy Buffett, Warren E. Buffett, Michelangelo Buonarroti, George Burns, William Burroughs, Richard Burton, George Gordon (Lord Byron)
C
Joseph Campbell, Albert Camus, Truman Capote, George Carlin, Andrew Carnegie, Rachel Carson, Jimmy Carter, George W. Carver, Páblo Casáls, Cárlos Castañeda, Fidel Castro, Edgar Cayce, Miguel de Cervantes, Pëtr Ilich Chajkovskij, Charles Chaplin, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Cesár Estrada Chávez, Anton P. Chekhov, Frédéric François Chopin, Chuang-tzu, Winston Churchill, Arthur C. Clarke, Samuel L. Clemens, Cleopatra VII, Hillary Rodham Clinton, William Jefferson Clinton, Jean Cocteau, Michael Collins, Aaron Copland, Gregory Corso, Bill Cosby, Norman Cousins, Jacques Cousteau, Stephen Crane, Crazy Horse (Tashunca-Uitco), Hume Cronyn, E. E. Cummings, Marie Curie, Cyrus II (Cyrus the Great)
D
Salvador Dali, Clarence Darrow, Charles Darwin, Ram Dass (Baba Ram Dass, Dr. Richard Alpert), Adelle Davis, Angela Davis, Miles Davis, Rene Descartes, Sergei P. Diaghilev, Philip K. Dick, Charles Dickens, Joan Didion, Babe Didrikson, Marlene Dietrich, Fëdor M. Dostoevskij, Emily Taft Douglas, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, Robert Duvall, Bob Dylan
E
Amelia Earhart, Meister Eckhart, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, T. S. Eliot, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Maurits Cornelius (M. C.) Escher, Medgar Evers
F
William Faulkner, Lawrence Ferlingetti, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Zelda Sayre Fitzgerald, Gustave Flaubert, Jane Fonda, Steve Forbert, Steve Forbes, Dian Fossey, Benjamin Franklin, Betty Friedan, Robert Frost, Buckminster Fuller
G
Galileo Galilei, Mohandas K. Gandhi, Stephen Gaskin, William H. Gates III, Anne Nicol Gaylor, Annie Laurie Gaylor, David Geffen, Jean Genet, Artemisia Gentileschi, Geronimo (Goyathlay), George Gershwin, Alan Ginsberg, Danny Glover, Jean-Luc Godard, Kurt Gödel, Vincent van Gogh, Whoopi Goldberg, Jane Goodall, Steve Goodman, Glenn Gould, Francisco Góya, Judy Grahn, Dick Gregory, Ché Guevarra, Woody Guthrie, Tenzin Gyatso (14th Dalai Lama)
H
Dag Hammarskjold, George F. Handel, Thich Nhat Hanh, Tim Hardin, Mary Harris (Mother Jones), George Harrison, Don Harthcock, Stephen W. Hawking, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Lillian Hellman, Joseph Heller, Jimi Hendrix, Kirby Hensley, Jim Henson, Audrey Hepburn, Katherine Hepburn, Frank Herbert, Hermann Hesse, Rabbi Hillel, Hippocrates, Abbie Hoffman, Douglas R. Hofstadter, Buddy Holly, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sidney Hook, Anthony Hopkins, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Julia Ward Howe, Howard Hughes, Langston Hughes, John Huston, Aldous Huxley
I
Robert Ingersoll, Eugene Ionesco, Washington Irving, Christopher Isherwood
J
William James, Thomas Jefferson, Joan of Arc, Pope John XXIII, Pope John Paul II, James Joyce, Carl Jung
K
Frida Kahlo, Wassily Kandinski, Immanuel Kant, John Keats, Helen Keller, Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk), John F. Kennedy Sr., Johannes Kepler, Jack Kerouac, Ken Kesey, Søren Kierkegaard, Martin L. King Jr., Rudyard Kipling, Tommy Kirk, Paul Klee, Jethro Kloss, Willem de Kooning, Jiddu Krishnamurti, Stanley Kubrick, Akira Kurosawa, Paul Kurtz
L
Fiorello LaGuardia, Corliss Lamont, Lao-tzu (Li Erh), D. H. Lawrence, Timothy Leary, Robert E. Lee, Ursula K. LeGuin, John Lennon, C. S. Lewis, Abraham Lincoln, Charles Lindbergh, Franz Liszt, John Lithgow, John Locke, Jack London, H. P. Lovecraft, Ada Lovelace, Patrice Lumumba, Martin Luther
M
Wangari Maathai, John MacLean, James Madison, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Maimonides (Rambam, Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon), Albertus Magnus, John Malkovich, Nelson Mandela, Jean-Paul Marat, Guglielmo Marconi, Wynton Marsalis, Groucho Marx, Karl Marx, Henri Matisse, don Júan Matús, George S. McGovern, Brian McLeod, Marshall McLuhan, Margaret Mead, Golda Meir, Mencius (Mengzi, Meng-tse), H. L. Mencken, Gregor Mendel, Yehudi Menuhin, Thomas Merton, A. A. Milne, John Stuart Mill, Henry Miller, John Milton, Ho Chi Minh, Joni Mitchell, Claude Monet, Thelonius Monk, Ashley Montagu, Lady Mary Worthey Montagu, Marie Montessori, Robert Moses, Wolfgang A. Mozart
N
Ralph Nader, A. S. Neill, Randy Newman, Isaac Newton, Reinhold Nieburh, Friedrich Nietzsche, Florence Nightingale, Kwame Nkrumah, Dame Julian of Norwich
O
Flannery O'Connor, Lawrence Olivier, Jacqueline Onassis, Eugene O'Neill, Yoko Ono, Origen of Alexandria, Daniél Ortega, José Ortega y Gasset, George Orwell, Robert Owen, Jesse Owens, Seiji Ozawa
P
Niccolo Paganini, Thomas Paine, Sylvia Pankhurst, Philip A. Paracelsus, Rosa Parks, Blaise Pascál, Boris L. Pasternak, Louis Pasteur, Kenneth Patchen, Johan Paulik, Linus C. Pauling, I. M. Pei, Séan Penn, Walker Percy, Ross Perot, Tom Petty, Páblo Picasso, Silvia Plath, Plato, Sidney Poitier, Jackson Pollock, Alexander Pope, Beatrix Potter, A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, Otto Preminger, Marcel Proust, Giacomo Puccini, Aleksandr S. Pushkin
R
Francois Rabelais, Ayn Rand, Sam Rayburn, Red Cloud (Makhpiya-Luta), Robert Redford, Wilhelm Reich, John E. Remsburg, Malvina Reynolds, Anne O'Brien Rice, Adrienne Rich, Sally Ride, Diego Rivera, Paul B. Robeson, Jimmie Rodgers, Roy Rogers, Will Rogers, Eleanor Roosevelt, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Elizabeth Kubler Ross, Philip Milton Roth, Mark Rothko, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Bertrand Russell
S
Carl Sagan, Antoine de Saint Exupery, Camille Saint-Saens, Andrei D. Sakharov, Jerome David Salinger, Margaret Sanger, George Santayana, Sappho, May Sarton, Jean-Paul Sartre, Erik Satie, Arnold Schoenberg, Charles Monroe Schulz, John Thomas Scopes, Mary Seacole, Pete Seeger, Haile Selassie, Peter Sellers, Sequoya (George Guess), Rod Serling, Elizabeth Seton, Georges Seurat, William Shakespeare, Ravi Shankar, George Bernard Shaw, Dmitri Shostakovich, Jean Sibelius, King John Sigismund, Shel Silverstein, Homer Simpson, Sitting Bull (Tatanka-Iyotanka), Adam Smith, Socrates, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Sophocles, Steven Spielberg, Benjamin McLane Spock, Luther Standing Bear (Ota K'te, Mochunozhin), Konstantin Stanislavskij, Elizabeth Cody Stanton, Gertrude Stein, John Steinbeck, Adlai Stevenson, Princess Diana Stewart, Leopold Stokowski, Oliver Stone, Marie Stopes, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Johan Strauss, Richard Strauss, Barbra Streisand, Annie Sullivan, Sun-tzu, Jonathan Swift, A. C. Swinburne
T
Jessica Tandy, James Taylor, Sara Teasdale, Tecumseh (Shooting Star), Nikola Tesla, Mother Teresa (Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu), Dylan Thomas, Henry David Thoreau, Jim Thorpe, Marshal Tito, J. R. R. Tolkien, Count Leo Tolstoy, Lily Tomlin, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Leon Trotsky, Gary Trudeau, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Desmond Tutu, Mark Twain
V
Giuseppe Verdi, Gore Vidal, Leonardo da Vinci, François Marie Arouet de Voltaire, Kurt Vonnegut
W
Loudon Wainwright III, Tom Waits, Booker T. Washington, George Washington, Alan Watts, Noah Webster, Andrew Weil, Simone Weil, H. G. Wells, Eudora Welty, Mae West, Walt Whitman, Eli Whitney, Oscar Wilde, Robin Williams, Séan Williams, Tennessee Williams, Jonnie Wilson, Jonathan Winters, Victoria Woodhull, Tiger Woods, Virginia Woolf, Frank Lloyd Wright
Y
William Butler Yeats, Paramhansa Yogananda
Z
Emiliano Zapata, Frank Zappa, Georgi K. Zhukov, Zoroaster (Zarathustra)
Jonnie once pointed out to me that there is a low percentage of women and people of color in the preceding list, and all I can say is, "Well, that's history for you."
So educate me. Really, why do you think this list is dominated by males of European extraction? Does this say something about the avenues of history, or does it say something about Donny, who made the list?
Contact me and let me know who else belongs here, and why. I always appreciate a little enlightenment. Perhaps this list is not objective at all, but is purely a subjective set of clues to my own personality.
OpinionSoup Impressive People List is published by Don Harthcock, ©2000-2006, Don Harthcock, OpinionSoup.com. Portions of OSIPL may be reproduced on your site with proper credit and a link. This instruction supercedes all previous prohibitions. Taping OSIPL to refrigerators, posting on bulletin boards & emailing to friends is waycool, highly-recommended, and much appreciated.
