Though nothing, nothing will keep us together
We can beat them, forever and ever
Oh, we can be heroes just for one day

~ David Bowie & Brian Eno ~


This is a page for expositions of quotes by or about some of those I believe to be great heroes, in that their lives and actions and thought have greatly benefited humanity, and some of the reasons I hold them to be such. This does NOT mean that I totally agree with them, nor with what MANY or even most might think about them, and I truly believe many of these were profoundly deficient or flawed in various ways — but I truly believe that even the least of them have exhibited some very important forms of unique genius which have helped to provide Humanity a rich legacy … and one that still grows.

I actually intended to create this page a year or two ago, with a concept of having some of those I consider most important in various fields at the top. But recently, within the last few weeks or months, I have begun to think of listing them in roughly the time frames in which they became heroes to me in my own personal life, and I think that is the format I am now determined to use. I will start with a short listing of some major figures to me by the time I was 5 or 6 years old which I had recently listed on the Talk:Taoism page — but that is just a quick kick-start for this for now. I believe I will eventually will break it out into far more extensive listings, based on what I can remember of WHERE I lived when I have some of my earliest memories of any of them becoming VERY impressive figures to my mind.

Akhenaton, Abraham, Moses, Laozi, Zhuangzi, Heraclitus, Pythagoras, Buddha, Socrates, Plato, Zeno of Citium, Parmenides, Zeno of Elea, Jesus, Muhammad, Rumi, Joan of Arc, Issac Newton, George Washington,Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Novalis, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Victor Hugo, Edgar Allen Poe, Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens, Thomas Henry Huxley, Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, Lewis Carroll, W. B. Yeats, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, William James, Edwin Abbott Abbott, Charles Sanders Peirce, Mark Twain, James Branch Cabell, Helen Keller, Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Schweitzer, Albert Einstein, G. K. Chesterton, Wilhelm Reich, H. G. Wells, Lin Yutang, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, E. E. Cummings, Julian Huxley, Aldous Huxley, Robert A. Heinlein, Walt Disney, Dr. Seuss, Woody Guthrie, eden ahbez, Jack Kerouac, John Lennon — and Albert Camus