No, Thanks: Six High Profile Award Renunciations

When Fareed Zakaria announced he would return his ADL-awarded Hubert H. Humphrey First Amendment Freedoms Prize and the $10,000 honorarium it came w

In 1970, George C. Scott refused to accept the Best Actor Academy Award for his performance in Patton, an iconic film treatment of World War II General George S. Patton. He had refused nominations in the past because he despised the competitive

Seeing as his then most recent work, Les Mots (The Words), could be read as a farewell to (if not a renunciation of) literature, it is rather unsurprising that Jean-Paul Sartre rejected the Nobel Prize in 1964. He expressed that he was fearful o

William Saroyan, an Armenian-American playwright, rejected a Pulitzer Award in 1939 for his play The Time of Your Life, a drama set in a San Francisco dive bar. Like George C. Scott, he stood in opposition to the idea of artistic competition, an

Grigori Perelman refused to accept the Fields Medal and Science's Breakthrough of the Year award in 2006, as well as a $1,000,000 Millennium Prize Problem award (in 2010) for solving the Poincare conjecture. Perelman believed his contribution to

Marlon Brando refused the Oscar for best performance in The Godfather in 1973. He had Native American activist Sacheen Littlefeather represent him at the ceremony. She declined the award for him, citing poor treatment of Native Americans across

The Vietnamese revolutionary and diplomat Le Duc Tho was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 alongside Henry Kissinger for their roles in ending the Vietnam war; the duo held a series of secret talks from 1970 to 1973 that led to cease-fire agreements