Sun Tzu (traditional Chinese: 孫子; simplified Chinese: 孙子; pinyin: Sūnzǐ) was a Chinese military general, strategist, philosopher, and writer who lived during the Eastern Zhou period (771–256 BC). Sun …
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a German classical scholar, philosopher, and critic of culture, who became one of the most influential of all modern thinkers. He began his career as a classical philol…
Daniel Defoe was an English novelist, journalist, merchant, pamphleteer and spy. He is most famous for his novel Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719, which is claimed to be second only to the Bible in …
Alberto Manguel (born 1948 in Buenos Aires) is an Argentine-born writer, translator, and editor. He is the author of numerous non-fiction books such as The Dictionary of Imaginary Places (co-written w…
Erich Fromm, Ph.D. (Sociology, University of Heidelberg, 1922) was a German-American social psychologist, psychoanalyst, sociologist, humanistic philosopher, and democratic socialist. He was a German …
Dr. Sigismund Freud (later changed to Sigmund) was a neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, who created an entirely new approach to the understanding of the human personality. He is regarded a…
In 1934, scientist Carl Sagan was born in Brooklyn, N.Y. After earning bachelor and master's degrees at Cornell, Sagan earned a double doctorate at the University of Chicago in 1960. He became profess…
Charles Robert Darwin of Britain revolutionized the study of biology with his theory, based on natural selection; his most famous works include On the Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent o…
Hannah Arendt (1906 – 1975) was one of the most influential political philosophers of the twentieth century. Born into a German-Jewish family, she was forced to leave Germany in 1933 and lived in Pari…
After Napoleon III seized power in 1851, French writer Victor Marie Hugo went into exile and in 1870 returned to France; his novels include The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831) and Les Misérables…
French essayist, philosophical theorist, and novelist, often called the "metaphysician of evil." Bataille was interested in sex, death, degradation, and the power and potential of the obscene. He reje…
Carl Gustav Jung (/jʊŋ/; German: [ˈkarl ˈɡʊstaf jʊŋ]), often referred to as C. G. Jung, was a Swiss psychiatrist and psychotherapist who founded analytical psychology. Jung proposed and developed the …
"Experience is, for me, the highest authority. The touchstone of validity is my own experience. No other person's ideas, and none of my own ideas, are as authoritative as my experience. It is to exper…
José Hernández (born José Rafael Hernández y Pueyrredón) (November 10, 1834 – October 21, 1886) was an Argentine journalist, poet, and politician best known as the author of the epic poem Martín Fierr…
Dr. Robert Cialdini has spent his entire career researching the science of influence earning him an international reputation as an expert in the fields of persuasion, compliance, and negotiation.
Giuliano da Empoli è un saggista e consigliere politico italiano e svizzero che vive a Parigi, dove insegna politica comparata a Sciences-Po. Nato in Francia, è cresciuto in diversi paesi europei, si …
Lev Semenovich Vygotsky (Russian: Лев Семёнович Выготский or Выготский, born Lev Simyonovich Vygodsky) was a Soviet developmental psychologist and the founder of cultural-historical psychology.
Gill Paul is the international bestselling author of thirteen novels, many of them reevaluating extraordinary twentieth-century women whom she believes have been marginalized or misjudged. Her novels …
Irvin David Yalom, M.D., is an author of fiction and nonfiction, Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry at Stanford University, an existentialist, and accomplished psychotherapist.
Miguel de Cervantes y Cortinas, later Saavedra was a Spanish novelist, poet, and playwright. His novel Don Quixote is often considered his magnum opus, as well as the first modern novel.
Dante Alighieri, or simply Dante (May 14/June 13 1265 – September 13/14, 1321), is one of the greatest poets in the Italian language; with the comic story-teller, Boccaccio, and the poet, Petrarch, he…
Guzel Yakhina is a Russian author and screenwriter. She is a winner of the Big Book literary prize and the Yasnaya Polyana Literary Award. Guzel Shamilevna Yakhina was born in Kazan. Her mother is a do…
Julian Sancton has written for Vanity Fair, Departures, Esquire, The New Yorker, Wired, and Playboy, among other publications. He spent most of his childhood in France and attended Harvard University,…