Archive
All Quoted Figures
Browse 179 notable figures mentioned in UN General Assembly speeches. Click on any name to see their quotes.
49
World Leaders
11
UN Leaders
17
Civil Rights Leaders
23
Philosophers
27
Writers
World Leader(49)
| Name | Description | Mentions |
|---|---|---|
| Fidel Castro | Cuban leader | 316 |
| Ronald Reagan | US President | 307 |
| Gamal Abdel Nasser | Egyptian President | 303 |
| Mikhail Gorbachev | Soviet leader | 292 |
| John F. Kennedy | US President | 284 |
| Yasser Arafat | Palestinian leader | 264 |
| Nikita Khrushchev | Soviet leader | 263 |
| Shimon Peres | Israeli President | 221 |
| Jimmy Carter | US President, Nobel Peace | 207 |
| Charles de Gaulle | French President | 167 |
| Franklin D. Roosevelt | US President, UN founder | 165 |
| Winston Churchill | British Prime Minister | 161 |
| Willy Brandt | German Chancellor | 159 |
| Jawaharlal Nehru | Indian Prime Minister | 153 |
| F.W. de Klerk | South African President | 147 |
| Joseph Stalin | Soviet leader | 143 |
| Salvador Allende | Chilean President | 135 |
| Saddam Hussein | Iraqi President | 135 |
| Julius Nyerere | Tanzanian founding father | 129 |
| Yitzhak Rabin | Israeli Prime Minister | 107 |
| Kwame Nkrumah | Ghanaian President | 105 |
| Patrice Lumumba | Congolese independence leader | 101 |
| Oscar Arias | Costa Rican President, Nobel Peace | 97 |
| Abraham Lincoln | US President | 96 |
| Olof Palme | Swedish Prime Minister | 71 |
| Jomo Kenyatta | Kenyan founding father | 69 |
| Robert Mugabe | Zimbabwean leader | 64 |
| François Mitterrand | French President | 59 |
| King Hussein | Jordanian King | 58 |
| Benazir Bhutto | Pakistani Prime Minister | 57 |
| Indira Gandhi | Indian Prime Minister | 53 |
| Tony Blair | British Prime Minister | 52 |
| Haile Selassie | Ethiopian Emperor | 47 |
| Leopold Senghor | Senegalese poet-president | 41 |
| Augusto Pinochet | Chilean dictator | 37 |
| Ayatollah Khomeini | Iranian Supreme Leader | 37 |
| Zhou Enlai | Chinese Premier | 36 |
| Thomas Jefferson | US Founding Father | 34 |
| Vaclav Havel | Czech President and playwright | 33 |
| Helmut Kohl | German Chancellor | 32 |
| Sukarno | Indonesian founding father | 29 |
| Che Guevara | Argentine revolutionary | 25 |
| Muammar Gaddafi | Libyan leader | 23 |
| Margaret Thatcher | British Prime Minister | 21 |
| Juan Perón | Argentine President | 17 |
| Deng Xiaoping | Chinese leader | 6 |
| Ahmed Ben Bella | Algerian independence leader | 5 |
| Lee Kuan Yew | Singapore founding father | 2 |
| George Washington | US First President | 1 |
UN Leader(11)
| Name | Description | Mentions |
|---|---|---|
| Kofi Annan | UN Secretary-General 1997-2006 | 1349 |
| António Guterres | UN Secretary-General 2017-present | 1295 |
| Kurt Waldheim | UN Secretary-General 1972-1981 | 1205 |
| Boutros Boutros-Ghali | UN Secretary-General 1992-1996 | 1094 |
| Ban Ki-moon | UN Secretary-General 2007-2016 | 949 |
| Javier Pérez de Cuéllar | UN Secretary-General 1982-1991 | 669 |
| U Thant | UN Secretary-General 1961-1971 | 609 |
| Dag Hammarskjöld | UN Secretary-General 1953-1961 | 440 |
| Trygve Lie | UN Secretary-General 1946-1952 | 49 |
| Ralph Bunche | American diplomat, Nobel Peace 1950 | 20 |
| Eleanor Roosevelt | Chair of UN Human Rights Commission | 13 |
Civil Rights Leader(17)
| Name | Description | Mentions |
|---|---|---|
| Nelson Mandela | South African anti-apartheid leader | 1056 |
| Aung San Suu Kyi | Burmese politician | 105 |
| Mahatma Gandhi | Indian independence leader | 71 |
| Martin Luther King Jr. | American civil rights leader | 48 |
| Andrei Sakharov | Soviet physicist and dissident | 15 |
| Malala Yousafzai | Pakistani activist | 9 |
| Greta Thunberg | Swedish climate activist | 8 |
| Lech Walesa | Polish trade union leader | 8 |
| Desmond Tutu | South African Anglican bishop | 7 |
| Fridtjof Nansen | Norwegian explorer and humanitarian | 6 |
| Albert John Luthuli | South African anti-apartheid leader | 6 |
| Shirin Ebadi | Iranian human rights lawyer | 4 |
| Denis Mukwege | Congolese gynecologist | 3 |
| Nadia Murad | Yazidi human rights activist | 3 |
| Frederick Douglass | American abolitionist | 2 |
| Wangari Maathai | Kenyan environmentalist | 2 |
| Rosa Parks | American civil rights activist | 1 |
Philosopher(23)
| Name | Description | Mentions |
|---|---|---|
| Plato | Greek philosopher, founder of Academy | 39 |
| Immanuel Kant | German philosopher | 38 |
| Bertrand Russell | British philosopher and activist | 26 |
| Aristotle | Greek philosopher, student of Plato | 25 |
| Seneca | Roman Stoic philosopher | 16 |
| Thomas Hobbes | English philosopher | 13 |
| Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel | German philosopher | 13 |
| Socrates | Greek philosopher, teacher of Plato | 12 |
| Confucius | Chinese philosopher and politician | 10 |
| Cicero | Roman statesman and philosopher | 9 |
| Voltaire | French Enlightenment writer | 9 |
| Jean-Paul Sartre | French existentialist philosopher | 9 |
| Jean-Jacques Rousseau | Genevan philosopher | 8 |
| René Descartes | French philosopher | 5 |
| David Hume | Scottish philosopher | 4 |
| Friedrich Nietzsche | German philosopher | 4 |
| Baruch Spinoza | Dutch philosopher | 3 |
| Karl Popper | Austrian-British philosopher | 3 |
| Marcus Aurelius | Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher | 2 |
| Zygmunt Bauman | Polish sociologist | 2 |
| Simone Weil | French philosopher and mystic | 1 |
| Martin Heidegger | German philosopher | 1 |
| Isaiah Berlin | British philosopher | 1 |
Writer(27)
| Name | Description | Mentions |
|---|---|---|
| William Shakespeare | English playwright | 34 |
| George Orwell | English novelist | 20 |
| Derek Walcott | Saint Lucian poet | 16 |
| Pablo Neruda | Chilean poet | 14 |
| George Bernard Shaw | Irish playwright | 13 |
| Homer | Ancient Greek poet | 12 |
| W.B. Yeats | Irish poet | 12 |
| Albert Camus | French author and philosopher | 11 |
| Ernest Hemingway | American novelist | 11 |
| Rabindranath Tagore | Indian poet | 10 |
| Victor Hugo | French writer | 9 |
| William Faulkner | American novelist | 9 |
| Rumi | Persian poet | 8 |
| Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn | Russian novelist and historian | 5 |
| Leo Tolstoy | Russian writer | 4 |
| Chinua Achebe | Nigerian novelist | 4 |
| Octavio Paz | Mexican poet and diplomat | 4 |
| Mark Twain | American writer | 3 |
| Khalil Gibran | Lebanese-American writer | 3 |
| Gabriel García Márquez | Colombian novelist | 3 |
| Nadine Gordimer | South African writer | 2 |
| José Saramago | Portuguese writer | 2 |
| Seamus Heaney | Irish poet | 2 |
| Thomas Mann | German novelist | 2 |
| Fyodor Dostoevsky | Russian novelist | 1 |
| Dante Alighieri | Italian poet | 1 |
| T.S. Eliot | American-British poet | 1 |
Scientist(13)
| Name | Description | Mentions |
|---|---|---|
| Albert Einstein | German-American physicist | 52 |
| Charles Darwin | English naturalist | 10 |
| Louis Pasteur | French chemist and microbiologist | 7 |
| Isaac Newton | English mathematician and physicist | 6 |
| Albert Schweitzer | German-French theologian and physician | 6 |
| Nikola Tesla | Serbian-American inventor | 5 |
| Galileo Galilei | Italian astronomer | 4 |
| Linus Pauling | American chemist, double Nobel laureate | 4 |
| Sigmund Freud | Austrian neurologist | 4 |
| Marie Curie | Polish-French physicist | 2 |
| Stephen Hawking | British theoretical physicist | 1 |
| Robert Oppenheimer | American physicist | 1 |
| Rachel Carson | American marine biologist | 1 |
Economist(12)
| Name | Description | Mentions |
|---|---|---|
| Karl Marx | German philosopher and economist | 87 |
| Raúl Prebisch | Argentine economist | 30 |
| Jeffrey Sachs | American economist | 24 |
| John Maynard Keynes | British economist | 18 |
| David Ricardo | British economist | 14 |
| Joseph Stiglitz | American economist | 11 |
| Amartya Sen | Indian economist and philosopher | 8 |
| Adam Smith | Scottish economist, father of economics | 6 |
| Muhammad Yunus | Bangladeshi economist, microfinance pioneer | 3 |
| Thomas Piketty | French economist | 2 |
| Milton Friedman | American economist | 1 |
| Hernando de Soto | Peruvian economist | 1 |
Religious Figure(8)
| Name | Description | Mentions |
|---|---|---|
| Pope John Paul II | Pope 1978-2005 | 193 |
| Pope Francis | Current Pope | 134 |
| Prophet Muhammad | Founder of Islam | 47 |
| Jesus Christ | Central figure of Christianity | 35 |
| Buddha | Founder of Buddhism | 23 |
| Mother Teresa | Albanian-Indian nun | 12 |
| Dalai Lama | Tibetan spiritual leader | 7 |
| Elie Wiesel | Romanian-American Holocaust survivor | 7 |
Historical Figure(9)
| Name | Description | Mentions |
|---|---|---|
| Simon Bolivar | Venezuelan military leader | 468 |
| José Martí | Cuban independence leader | 69 |
| Ho Chi Minh | Vietnamese revolutionary | 61 |
| Napoleon Bonaparte | French military leader | 34 |
| Julius Caesar | Roman general and statesman | 32 |
| Toussaint Louverture | Haitian revolutionary | 28 |
| Genghis Khan | Mongol emperor | 8 |
| Alexander the Great | Macedonian king and conqueror | 4 |
| Giuseppe Garibaldi | Italian general | 4 |
Political Thinker(10)
| Name | Description | Mentions |
|---|---|---|
| Niccolò Machiavelli | Italian diplomat and philosopher | 48 |
| Montesquieu | French political philosopher | 8 |
| Noam Chomsky | American linguist and activist | 8 |
| Frantz Fanon | Martinican psychiatrist and philosopher | 7 |
| Alexis de Tocqueville | French political scientist | 6 |
| Thomas Paine | American political activist | 5 |
| Hannah Arendt | German-American political theorist | 2 |
| John Rawls | American political philosopher | 2 |
| Edmund Burke | Irish statesman and philosopher | 1 |
| John Stuart Mill | British philosopher | 1 |