Best Minds of the 20th Century

[RCMerchant]

Who do you consider to be the BEST minds-thinkers-of the 20th century?
Mine-

.Franklin Roosevelt
.Malcom X
.Gore Vidal
.Albert Einstein
.Martin Luther King
.Arhtur C Clarke
.Robert Oppinheimer
.Shirly Jackson

[indianasmith]

Winston Churchill
Theodore Roosevelt (aside from his politics, the guy wrote FORTY books!)
J.R.R. Tolkien (the dude invented SIX languages with their own alphabets)
J.P. Moreland (a leading Christian intellectual - I've heard the guy in person and he is BRILLIANT)

[RCMerchant]

Winston Churchill
Theodore Roosevelt (aside from his politics, the guy wrote FORTY books!)
J.R.R. Tolkien (the dude invented SIX languages with their own alphabets)
J.P. Moreland (a leading Christian intellectual - I've heard the guy in person and he is BRILLIANT)

Defintly Churchill!
I could I forget Churchill?

[VenomX73]

Carl Sagan

[LilCerberus]

Philo Farnsworth - none of us would be sitting here, staring into this stupid contraption if it weren't for him

Richard Nixon - Watergate aside, He did a bunch of stuff for the environment, gun control, Women's Lib & minorities that the left is trying to take credit for.

[Rev. Powell]

This is just minds, not necessarily character or influence.

Einstein
Stephen Hawking
Richard Dawkins
Vladimir Nabokov
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Bobby Fisher
Garry Kasparov

[LilCerberus]

With a blank check from the government, & the best minds of science at his side, William Langley was beaten to a dream by a pair of uneducated bicycle repairmen...

[ER]

I agree with many of the names you guys have mentioned, so let me just add:

Dorothy Parker
Edward Teller
Milton Friedman
Oscar Wilde
Srinivasa Ramanujan
Marie Curie
Akio Morita
Stanley Kubrick
Gary Larson
Gilbert Chesterton
Sheldon Cooper

[Trevor]

I don't see my name anywhere.   *





* Nor did I expect to. 

[Derf]

In science:
Nicolai Tesla
Albert Einstein
Stephen Hawking

In Literature:
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Tolkien - while I'm not a huge fan, as Indy said, he was a brillant man
C.S. Lewis
Edgar Allen Poe - invented the modern horror story and the modern detective story.

In bad movies:
Andrew Borntreger
Ronnie Merchant
Trevor Moses

And in my own mind:
Li'l old me 

[lester1/2jr]

I would give it to Mr Ludwig Von Mises of Austria. He predicted that the central planning inherent in socialism would fail because there was no pricing mechanism ie it was impossible to tell what the actual demand for any given product was. Today, we all understand this thoroughly but at the time, people figured some smart person probably could figure out what everyone wanted on a given day. As it turned out, people are strange and want all kinds of unpredictable and often illogical stuff.

[zombie no.one]

perhaps Churchill's image has been romanticised a bit, his name is synonymous with standing firm in the face of adversity, stiff upper lip etc... the more I read about his thoughts and quotes the less I admire his 'mind' tbh

"I am strongly in favour of using poisonous gas against uncivilised tribes "

"I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion."

"I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place."

[lester1/2jr]

He had some major f**k ups. invasion of Gallipoli and also cutting the money supply in half to support the pound which jump started the great depression

[zombie no.one]

to be fair you could probably dig up some dirt on just about anyone if you look hard enough. I read some fairly dodgy things about nelson mandella before. and mother theresa. and we all know about peewee herman

[indianasmith]

Churchill was very much a product of his times - the Victorian era's last holdout.
He did absorb some of the prejudices of his era, but his literary ability and his peerless leadership during
World War II wipes out his minor sins in my eyes.

I think one of the worst mistakes we sometimes make is judging people who lived in another century by
the standards of our own time.