“Because I was politically involved (in Algeria’s war), the bourgeois establishment wanted to cover up my ‘past errors’. Now there’s an admission! And so they gave me the Nobel Prize. They ‘pardoned’ me and said I deserved it. It was monstrous!”
–Jean Paul Sartre

The origins of the Nobel Prize are dark. Yet it is considered the highest honour that a human being can win. Can someone turn it down if awarded? “No one in his/her right mind would do so,” an ordinary person would reply so. Many homo economicus would accept it so that other organisations also fall for bandwagon effect and confer prizes upon them.

However, the world is not empty of mavericks. One such maverick was Jean Paul Sartre, French philosopher, writer, and political activist. Being the greatest outlier of all, he refused to accept the Nobel Prize for literature in 1964. He became the first person to decline it.