Mohandas Gandhi, also known as Mahatma Gandhi, was the preeminent leader of Indian nationalism in British-ruled India. Employing nonviolent civil disobedience, Gandhi led India to independence and inspired movements for civil rights and freedom across the world.

Anatole France, pen name of Jacques Anatole Thibault (1844-1924), was a French poet, novelist, journalist, and Nobel Prize laureate. He was renowned for his ironic and skeptical wit, insightful social commentary, and elegant prose style.

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) was a German philosopher who is best known for his work The World as Will and Representation (1819), which characterizes the phenomenal world as the manifestation of a blind and irrational noumenal will. Building on the transcendental idealism of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), Schopenhauer developed an atheistic metaphysical and ethical system that rejected the contemporaneous ideas of German idealism.