List of Famous people who died in 1903

Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, was a British statesman. He was styled Lord Robert Cecil before the death of his elder brother in 1865, Viscount Cranborne from June 1865 until his father died in April 1868, and then the Marquess of Salisbury. He served as prime minister three times for a total of over thirteen years. He acted as his own foreign minister. He avoided alignments or alliances, maintaining the policy of "splendid isolation".

Lester Legrant Bond was a member of the Illinois state House of Representatives from 1866–1870 and served as acting Mayor of Chicago, appointed by Joseph Medill in 1873 when Medill left for Europe.

Gabriel Jean Baptiste Ernest Wilfrid Legouvé was a French dramatist.

Louis-Arsène Delaunay (1826–1903), French actor, was born in Paris, the son of a wine-seller. He studied at the Conservatoire, and made his first formal appearance on the stage in 1845, in Molière's Tartuffe at the Odéon, where he was engaged for two years as a lead juvenile.

Henry Laurens Dawes was an attorney and politician, a Republican United States Senator and United States Representative from Massachusetts. He is notable for the Dawes Act (1887), which was intended to stimulate the assimilation of Native Americans by ending the tribal government and control of communal lands. Especially directed at the tribes in Indian Territory, it provided for the allotment of tribal lands to individual households of tribal members, and for their being granted United States citizenship. This also made them subject to state and federal taxes. In addition, extinguishing tribal land claims in this territory later enabled the admission of Oklahoma as a state in 1907.

Misao Fujimura was a Japanese philosophy student and poet, largely remembered due to his farewell poem.

Herbert Spencer was an English philosopher, biologist, anthropologist, and sociologist famous for his hypothesis of social Darwinism whereby superior physical force shapes history. Spencer originated the expression "survival of the fittest", which he coined in Principles of Biology (1864) after reading Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species. The term strongly suggests natural selection, yet Spencer saw evolution as extending into realms of sociology and ethics, so he also supported Lamarckism.

Sir Oliver Mowat, was a Canadian lawyer, politician, and Liberal Party leader. He served for nearly 24 years as the third Premier of Ontario. He was the eighth Lieutenant Governor of Ontario and one of the Fathers of Confederation. He is best known for defending successfully the constitutional rights of the provinces in the face of the centralizing tendency of the national government as represented by his longtime conservative adversary, John A. Macdonald. This longevity and power was due to his political maneuvering, in terms of building a political base around Liberals, Catholics, trade unions, and anti-French-Canadian sentiment.