Regarding old Les:
http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/Hoaxipedia/Tombstone_Humor/
It’s not on a headstone as far as I know, but one of the greatest epitaphs said about a soldier was Confederate General Hardee’s tribute to Patrick Cleburne:
“Where this division defended, no odds broke its lines; where it attacked, no numbers resisted its onslaught, save only once; and there is the grave of Cleburne and his heroic division.”
My favorites found on thefirst site in a search:
Called Back
Emily Dickinson
(West Cemetery; Amherst, Massachusetts)
{self written}
The Body of
B. Franklin, Printer
Like the Cover of an old Book
Its Contents turn out
And Stript of its Lettering & Guilding
Lies here. Food for Worms
For, it will as he believed
appear once more
In a new and more elegant Edition
corrected and improved
By the Author
Benjamin Franklin
(Christ Church Burial Grounds; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania)
Everybody Loves Somebody Sometime
Dean Martin
( Westwood Memorial Cemetery, Los Angeles, California)
Quoth the Raven,
“Nevermore.”
Edgar Allan Poe
(Westminster Presbyterian Cemetery; Baltimore, Maryland)
“Slug” as meaning a “lead bit” dates back to 1622.
I missed the stipulation in the OP about it being epitaphs of famous people; I just saw the thread title “Great Epitaphs,” opened it, and started reading great epitaphs.
Now, are done Junior Modding?
OK.
POUND A RUSTY NAIL INTO A CINDER BLOCK RIGHT THROUGH YOUR NUT SACK, AND THEN JUMP OFF A GODDAMNED BRIDGE.
It felt good to get that off of my chest.
Happy Trails, Motherfucker.
On the grave of William Butler Yeats in Drumcliffe, County Sligo, Ireland:
Cast a cold Eye
On Life on Death.
Horseman pass by
As directed by Yeats in the poem Under Ben Bulben:
VI
*Under bare Ben Bulben’s head
In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid.
An ancestor was rector there
Long years ago, a church stands near,
By the road an ancient cross.
No marble, no conventional phrase;
On limestone quarried near the spot
By his command these words are cut:
Cast a cold eye On life, on death. Horseman, pass by!*
[Official Moderator Warning]This is way over the top for someone who has certainly been here long enough to know better. Watch it.[/Official Moderator Warning]
Scipio Africanus was the Roman general who finally beat Hannibal and was one of the top military minds in human history. He eventually died in self-imposed exile from Rome, disgusted at the Roman people for his treatment at their hands. According to legend, he had this put on his tombstone:
“Ingrata patria, ne ossa quidem habebis” - ungrateful fatherland, you will not even have my bones.
Poking about online, here’re a few gems:
Jack London:
“The Stone the Builders Rejected”
Carl Jung:
VOCATUS ATQUE
NON VOCATUS
DEUS ADERIT
(Invoked or not invoked, the god is present.)
Robert Frost:
“I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.”
H.G. Wells:
“I told you so, you damned fools.”
Gracie Allen and George Burns:
“Together again.”
OK. Ouch.
Now what?
Some people are more than a tad touchy. I’d hate to see how you react to one of those REALLY snarky Dopers.
And I wasn’t saying the word didn’t exist, but “slugs” was not really appropriate for that era. That (wooden, by the way) tombstone sets off all sorts of suspicions.
Legend has it that Archimedes’ epitaph was simply a diagram of a cylinder enclosing a sphere.
Paul Eddington, star of Yes Minister, The Good Life and lots of other stuff.
“He did very little harm.”
Jackie Gleason in Miami’s Lady of Mercy Catholic Cemetary:
“And Away We Go”
Sadly although there are two spaces only Mr. Gleason’s is occupied, someone should chisel out the “We” and replace it with “I”.
Found this thread while looking for something else; now bumping.
My dad has long been the secretary-treasurer of my small hometown cemetery. His favorite is mine, too, set down by a widower for his not-all-that-mourned wife:
Forty years with a tongue so sharp
O angels! Give her a harp
Love it.
My favorite translation is,
Tell them in Sparta, passerby,
That here, obedient to their laws, we lie.
Saw on the news last night that Ruby Dee’s ashes will be added to an urn with her husband’s. On the urn is carved, We’re in this thing together!
I got a bang out of that. 
Penn & Teller wrote a book some time back and included a trick you could play on a friend/SO whenever the two of you would happen to be in the LA area. It’s basically a card force that results in the mark selecting the three of clubs. You then go to Forest Lawn Memorial Park and show your friend/SO Penn & Teller’s grave stone. It has an engraving of the three of clubs, and the inscription “Is this your card?”
P&T found a loophole. They found that they could buy a cenotaph, which is a means of observing the dead without the body. It was intended to honor soldiers who were lost on foreign soil, and thus does not require an actual body to be under the marker.
I like the epitaph which my dear late uncle Tom wrote, well in advance, for himself. He was a (happily) heavy smoker for well over fifty years – he finally gave it up, more to please his wife than for any other reason – died a few years ago, in his early nineties.
Here lies Tom Green:
He died of nicotine.
He was not in battle slain,
Nor run over by a train;
But he did it all himself –
So why should he complain?
Post 2.