People That Inspire Me

It's going to be a long list of outstanding personalities. I'm going to start with Lawrence Krauss and his brilliant speech at the Atheist Alliance International (AAI) conference in 2009. 
Lawrence Krauss is an American theoretical physicist, a professor of physics, a director of the Origin Project at the Arizona State University, and an author of several best-sellers, including The Physics of Star Trek, Atom, Fear of Physics: A Guide for the Perplexed, the most recent Quantum Man: Richard Feynman's Life in Science and some others.
I particularly like a quote of his, "Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust. You couldn’t be here if stars hadn’t exploded, because the elements - the carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, iron, all the things that matter for evolution and for life - weren’t created at the beginning of time. They were created in the nuclear furnaces of stars, and the only way for them to get into your body is if those stars were kind enough to explode. So, forget Jesus. The stars died so that you could be here today."