Frederick II (German: Friedrich II.; 24 January 1712 – 17 August 1786) was a King in Prussia (1740–1772) and a King of Prussia (1772–1786) from the Hohenzollern dynasty. In his role as a prince-electo…
Plato (Greek: Πλάτων), born Aristocles (c. 427 – 348 BC), was an ancient Greek philosopher of the Classical period who is considered a foundational thinker in Western philosophy and an innovator of t…
Homer (Greek: Όμηρος born c. 8th century BC) was a Greek poet who is credited as the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, two epic poems that are foundational works of ancient Greek literature. Homer …
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…
Oscar Fingal O'Fflahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish poet and playwright. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of the most popular playwrights in London in the early 1890…
Genevan philosopher and writer Jean Jacques Rousseau held that society usually corrupts the essentially good individual; his works include The Social Contract and Émile (both 1762).
Thomas Hobbes was a British philosopher and a seminal thinker of modern political philosophy. His ideas were marked by a mechanistic materialist foundation, a characterization of human nature based on…
Romanian-born historian of religion, fiction writer, philosopher, professor at the University of Chicago, and one of the pre-eminent interpreters of world religion in the last century. Eliade was an i…
Works of Russian writer Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin include the verse novel Eugene Onegin (1831), the play Boris Godunov (1831), and many narrative and lyrical poems and short stories.
The Prince, book of Niccolò Machiavelli, Italian political theorist, in 1513 describes an indifferent ruler to moral considerations with determination to achieve and to maintain power.
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1532-1592) was one of the most influential writers of the French Renaissance. Montaigne is known for popularizing the essay as a literary genre. He became famous for his ef…
Henry Alfred Kissinger (born Heinz Alfred Kissinger) was a German-born American bureaucrat, diplomat, and 1973 Nobel Peace Prize laureate. He served as National Security Advisor and later concurrently…
Yukio Mishima (三島 由紀夫) was born in Tokyo in 1925. He graduated from Tokyo Imperial University’s School of Jurisprudence in 1947. His first published book, The Forest in Full Bloom, appeared in 1944 an…
The illegitimate child of a baron and an actress, Meyrinck spent his childhood in Germany, then moving to today's Czech Republic where he lived for 20 years. The city of Prague is present in most of h…
Carl Philipp Gottlieb von Clausewitz was a Prussian soldier, military historian and military theorist. He is most famous for his military treatise Vom Kriege, translated into English as On War.
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Vladimir Lenin, was a Russian revolutionary, leader of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (Bolsheviks), statesman and political theorist. After the Oct…
Napoleon I, originally Napoleon Bonaparte and known as "the Little Corporal," a brilliant strategist, overthrew the directory in 1799 and proclaimed first consul and later emperor of the French and ki…
A master of poetry, drama, and the novel, German writer and scientist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe spent 50 years on his two-part dramatic poem Faust, published in 1808 and 1832, also conducted scie…
Georg Friedrich List was a leading 19th-century German economist who developed the "National System" or what some would call today the National System of Innovation. He was a forefather of the German …
Lao Tzu (Chinese: 老子; pinyin: Lǎozǐ; Wade-Giles: Laosi; also Laozi, Lao Tse, Lao Tu, Lao-Tsu, Laotze, Laosi, Lao Zi, Laocius, Lao Ce, and other variations) was a mystic philosopher of ancient China, b…
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.
Roman mathematician Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius, imprisoned on charges of treason, wrote The Consolation of Philosophy, his greatest work, an investigation of destiny and free will, while a…
Miyamoto Musashi (宮本 武蔵, c. 1584 – June 13, 1645), also known as Shinmen Takezō, Miyamoto Bennosuke or, by his Buddhist name, Niten Dōraku, was an expert Japanese swordsman and rōnin. Musashi, as he w…
Statesman and historian Julius Caesar, fully named Gaius Julius Caesar, general, invaded Britain in 55 BC, crushed the army of the politician Gnaeus Pompeius Magn…
