Interesting thought question!

[ravencallscrows]

Shamelessly ripped off of the Seattle Gothic discussion boards.
If you could have ten people over for dinner, who would they be.

Here were my lists:
Contemporaries:

1. Neil Gaiman
2. Tori Amos
3. Björk
4. Ani DiFranco
5. Denis Leary
6. Neal Stevenson
7. William Gibson
8. Bruce Sterling
9. Linus Torvalds
10. Terry Pratchett

Past:
1. Maurits Cornelis Escher
2. Kurt Gödel
3. Padraigh Pearse
4. William Wallace
5. Vladimir Ily'ch Ulyanov
6. Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
7. Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev (ok, so he's not dead yet)
8. Alfred Nobel
9. Theodor Herzl
10.Salvador Dali

Past and Present:
1,2,6,7 and 9 from the Contemporaries list; 1,3,5,6,8 from the Past list.

Thinking about it more, i might substitute Nietzche or Kafka for Herzl, even though Herzl fits the more political bent of the table.