Voltaire

Admirable parting words: "I die adoring God, loving my friends, not hating my enemies, and detesting superstition." So wrote François-Marie Arouet, Voltaire, shortly before his death in 1778. Today's his birthday, in 1694. (Almanac)

Though he believed in a higher power, he had long been deeply critical of organized religion, so he was denied a church burial, but friends found an abbey in Champagne that would accept him. Thirteen years later, the revolutionary French National Assembly ordered his body moved to the Panthéon in Paris. It's estimated that a million people turned out to watch his procession. 

His father wanted him to become a notary, but he refused, and the two quarreled about it into Voltaire's adulthood. Sometimes he would pretend that he was serving as a notary's assistant, but he was really writing. He was thrown out of Paris for the first time when he was only 21, for writing a poem critical of the king. After he returned, he wasted no time in insulting the royal family again, and this time they had him thrown in the Bastille for almost a year. It was there that he adopted his pen name. Voltaire made good use of his time behind bars; he wrote his first play, the tragedy Oedipe, which was a great success when it was staged in 1718. In 1733, his Philosophical Letters on the English — a critique of the French establishment — landed his publisher in the Bastille. He spent much of his life fleeing or being sent into exile, where he would manage to offend someone in his new home, forcing him to flee again. His work, and the work of other Enlightenment philosophers, influenced the American and French revolutions.

And of course, he wrote the best possible philosophical satire ever. “If this is the best of possible worlds, what then are the others?” 

Good question. Best possible reply: "Let us cultivate our garden."