Epitaph Tour of the World Trivia Quiz

The immortal line here belongs to entertainment legend Mel Blanc who, after decades in voice acting, passed away in 1989. He is, of course, known for voicing numerous roles in the Looney Tunes cartoon canon including Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and Porky Pig (amongst many, many others). The phrase "That's All Folks" comes from Porky who, at the end of any given animated short, would appear to say as much.

The Man of 1,000 Voices, as he was dubbed, was buried in Hollywood Forever Cemetery (in Los Angeles) after his passing. Notably, Blanc was a smoker through most of his life. He passed away of advanced coronary artery disease and emphysema.

One of the leading figures in the U.S. civil rights movement, Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated while staying at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4, 1968, and the event was a spark that started a wildfire. In the aftermath of the event, a series of riots cropped up across the states, and this led to the Civil Rights Act of 1968, signed into law by President Johnson.

MLK's body was originally taken to be buried in South View Cemetery in Atlanta, Georgia (where he was born) but was ultimately placed in a tomb in what would become Martin Luther King Jr. National Historical Park. The gravesite there, shared with Coretta Scott King, bears the quote "Free at last, free at last, Thank God Almighty I'm free at last."

F. Scott Fitzgerald, who wrote his books during the Modernist era of literary works and rubbed elbows with many of the greats of the era (including Hemingway, Ford, and Pound), passed away at the relatively young age of 44. After years of alcoholism, a heart attack took his life in 1940 and he was buried in a plot in Rockville Cemetery in Maryland.

The epitaph on his gravesite, later moved alongside Zelda Fitzgerald's in nearby Saint Mary's Cemetery, is a quote that closes out his most famous novel, "The Great Gatsby". It was only in his passing that critics regarded his writings as quintessential in understanding American sensibility during the 1920s.

The first President of the nation of Senegal, Léopold Sédar Senghor, led the country for two decades (across the 1960s and 1970s) and it was a transformative time for the previously French-led nation, particularly because Senghor's firm rule helped perpetuate a new wave of African-rooted socialism. Part of Senghor's unique approach came from his sensibilities; he was both a theorist and a poet, and much of his writing has been internationally lauded, being indicative of a shift in thinking that promoted what Senghor referred to as 'Négritude'.

Senghor passed away in 2001. At the time he was living in France; his body was moved to Cimetière de Bel-Air in Dakar. His epitaph is a poem he wrote, referring to his wishes for burial :

"Quand je serai mort, mes amis, couchez-moi sous Joal-l'Ombreuse.
Sur la colline au bord du Mamanguedy, près l'oreille du sanctuaire des Serpents.
Mais entre le Lion couchez-moi et l'aïeule Tening-Ndyae.
Quand je serai mort mes amis, couchez-moi sous Joal-la-Portugaise.
Des pierres du Fort vous ferez ma tombe, et les canons garderont le silence.
Deux lauriers roses-blanc et rose-embaumeront la Signare."

Poetic, eh? It's because it was written by William Shakespeare and inscribed into the floor before his gravesite in the Holy Trinity Church at Stratford-upon-Avon, his birthplace in Warwickshire, England. Shakespeare himself is buried at the chancel within, upon which a large monument to the bard is situated.

Upon the monument another, longer epitaph is written in Latin, though modernized it would read:

"Stay, passenger, why goest thou by so fast?
Read, if thou canst, whom envious death hath placed
Within this monument: Shakespeare, with whom
Quick nature died; whose name doth deck this tomb
Far more than cost, sith [since] all that he hath writ
Leaves living art but page to serve his wit."

Jim Morrison, the lead singer of The Doors, was buried in Paris' Père Lachaise Cemetery upon his passing in 1971 at the age of 27, and his gravesite is amongst the most visited in the city. Though Morrison shares the cemetery (one of many in Paris) with Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein, Marcel Marceau, and Frédéric Chopin (amongst others), there was always something to be said about his rock star appeal being a draw. For many years, the items placed on his gravesite were stolen, often by fans passing through.

Morrison's gravestone is marked with the Greek phrase 'kata ton daimona eaytoy', which translates to "true to his own spirit", and the piece was placed there nearly twenty years after his burial.

One of the great Romantic poets, John Keats passed away young, even by the standards of the early nineteenth century, at the age of 25, but not before writing classic literary pieces like "Ode to a Nightingale", "Ode on a Grecian Urn", and "La Belle Dame sans Merci". Born in England, the last months of his life would be spent in severe discomfort as he travelled, by sea, to Rome to try to push through a diagnosis of severe tuberculosis.

He would ultimately be buried in Rome's English Cemetery in 1821 under a gravestone bearing the epitaph of his request: Here lies one whose name was writ in water. Per his advising, his name was not included on the marker.

The following year, Keats' Romantic contemporary, Percy Bysshe Shelley, would be buried in the same cemetery following a drowning accident off the Italian coast.

Johannes Kepler led a life of achievements, being at the forefront of many new frontiers of scientific advancement in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As an astronomer, he contributed to our greater understanding of the laws of planetary motion; as a scientific mind, he aided Galileo Galilei in discovering the Jovian moons; he was seen by many to be one of the world's first astrophysicists.

Kepler would pass away in 1630 and be buried in the cemetery of St. Peter (at Peterskirchlein) outside Regensburg, Germany, but the plot would be destroyed during the Thirty Years War. Today, a plaque commemorating the spot, exists in the rebuilt church. It is known, however, that his grave was marked with a Latin inscription of his own request, translating into the quote provided.

Nobel Peace Prize winner Nelson Mandela is the likely candidate for a gravesite in South Africa, and it happens to be in the small village of Qunu in a rural part of the Eastern Cape Province, near where he was born in 1918, and near where he retired after a lifetime of Apartheid-era incarceration, his presidency, and philanthropic work. Essentially a family plot, the site also contained the remains of Mandela's children.

Unlike many famous figures, Mandela's gravestone is quite simple. Made of black marble, it contains little save for his name, dates of birth and death, and the common phrase "Rest in peace". Interestingly, a memorial stone for Mandela exists in Westminster Abbey bearing the words 'Forgiveness' and 'Reconciliation', though he isn't buried there.

Shackleton, born in Ireland, was best known for spending the early twentieth century in the throes of Antarctic exploration, taking ships as far south as possible and navigating one of the planet's last unmapped frontiers. Disaster struck in 1915 when his ship, the Endurance, sank in Antarctic pack ice and he and his surviving crew had to take to lifeboats, adrift in the Southern Ocean. He would end up in South Georgia, passing away of a heart attack there in 1921. His burial site would be in a small cemetery in the whaling station of Grytviken.

On one side of his gravestone is a quote from Robert Browning, one of his preferred poets.