"An odder group of men ... could scarcely be imagined. There were among them a philosopher and a madman, a cleric and a stockbroker, a revolutionary and a nobleman, an aesthete, a skeptic, and a tramp. They were of every nationality, of every walk of life, of every turn of temperament... Thus is was neither their personalities, their careers, their biases, nor even their ideas that bound them together. Their common denominator was something else: a common curiosity. They were all fascinated by the world about them... Hence they can be called the worldly philosophers, for they sought to embrace in a scheme of philosophy the most worldly of all a man's activities -- his drive for wealth." from Heilbroner's The Worldly Philosophers, Sixth Edition