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Elie Wiesel
Nobel Prize for Peace
Of course it had an overwhelming affect. After the war -- I was 15 when I entered the camp, I was 16 when I left it and all of a sudden you become an orphan and you have no one. I had a little sister and I knew, with my mother the first night that they were swept away by fire. My older sister I discovered by accident after the war in Paris, where I was in an orphanage. But to be an orphan -- you can become an orphan at 50, you are still an orphan. Very often I think of my father and my mother. At any important moment in my life, they are there thinking, "What an injustice." To date, I haven't written much about that period. Of my 40 books, maybe four or five deal with that period because I know that there are no words for it, so all I can try to do is to communicate the incommunicability of the event. Furthermore, I know that even if I found the words you wouldn't understand. It is not because I cannot explain that you won't understand, it is because you won't understand that I can't explain.
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Lenny Wilkens
Basketball Hall of Fame
There were many times when I had to fight to get home from school. But you couldn't back down, because if you backed down what happens is you got picked on all the time. So even if I lost a fight they knew that I would fight so they wouldn't bother you anymore. And, you know, if you went ten blocks in any direction, there were gangs and my mother didn't want me involved in any of that, and she was a very strong personality. She felt that there was always something better but it was up to me. And so the friends that I started surrounding myself with had the same kind of ideas that I had. They had both parents, which was fine, you know, that pushed them and helped them. But, there were many times when we were in situations that we had to get out of in order to get home. But like I said, you know, you don't allow yourself to be intimidated.
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Lenny Wilkens
Basketball Hall of Fame
We decided to buy a house and we bought a home in an area called Moline Acres, and when we moved in, "For Sale" signs went up everywhere. We had a collie, a little puppy, that was poisoned and stuff like that. But, you know, I wasn't going to be intimidated. I was still young. I was young and stupid, you know, but I refused to be intimidated by it. Some people moved out. Some stayed. And then when they got to realize that we were just like them, you know, I became friends with most of them except for one guy who lived next door to us. We had carports then. It was our first house, it was a starter house. And he would get out of his car and I may be out front sometimes and see him. And if I was out there he'd open the door, you know, on the driver's side and he'd back out so he wouldn't have to speak. So there were a lot of things like that. You work your way through it. My thing was to show people that I was as good as they were and that they needed to take the time to know me and not judge me just by the color of my skin.
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Lenny Wilkens
Basketball Hall of Fame
We went and had an interview with the commissioner, a guy named Walter Kennedy, and so as we're sitting in his suite talking and we say that we're going to strike the All Star game. They had lost their TV contract and this was going to be an opportunity to get it back because this was going to be the first game they were going to televise in maybe a year or two. And the commissioner looks at, you know, Russell and these guys when they say, "We're going to strike the All Star game." And we're sitting -- he's like where you are, and the four of us or five of us are sitting over here. And he looks at everybody, and he looks at me, and I'm the lowest guy on the totem pole in the room. And he says to me -- he comes right up and gets right in my face and says to me, "You mean to tell me you're going to strike the All Star game?" And I was sliding down in my seat and I said, "Yes." But that night we all went into one locker room and told them we weren't going to play unless we got a commitment that we'd have a pension plan. So to make a long story short, they agreed finally, because they were going to lose the TV time if they didn't.
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E.O. Wilson
Father of Sociobiology
Edward O. Wilson: I caught them by surprise, (by) including humans, and I saw right then and there that this could be very important, to include humans in this. I caught them by surprise, and then they caught me by surprise because I didn't expect to be blindsided, literally, from the left. I won't go into all of that, except to say that it was a period in which the whole subject came close -- that is, as it applied to humans -- came dangerously close to being politicized. It was politicized. The animal part was enormously successful. It resulted in a couple of new journals, a very substantial increase in the studies of animal social behavior. It was accompanied by an explosive growth of behavioral ecology, a closely related subject which included solitary animals and their behavior. At one point, the Animal Behavior Society voted Sociobiology: The New Synthesis the most important book on animal behavior ever, even got more votes that Darwin's book. But I think so many of the social scientists, philosophers, and particularly those who were defending a Marxist ideology, considered it the worst book on human behavior in history, or one of them, and it was a tumultuous period in which what they considered the dangers of returning biology to the consideration of human behavior were too great to be tolerated.
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E.O. Wilson
Father of Sociobiology
Edward O. Wilson: What was new about sociobiology -- and it finally began to dawn -- was that, for better or for worse, right or wrong in its basic presumptions, for the first time, biology was in a really serious way coming up to the social sciences. That will only happen once, and that was another reason why there was so much trouble. The social scientists weren't prepared for this. They didn't understand it, or they think they saw fundamental flaws in it. They thought it was unhealthy. They thought it was hegemonic, and a great many of them still feel that way. That is one reason that I wrote my book Consilience, was to try to show how knowledge might be unified, and in a manner that would mean coalition and cooperation and joint exploration of the big remaining gap, rather than translation of the great branches of learning -- the other great branches of learning -- into scientific language and scientific rules of validation. Many who resisted Consilience resisted Sociobiology for the belief that somehow the scientists who didn't really know what they were talking about were coming into the social sciences, humanities, and trying to take over in a destructive way. I hope that Consilience might have moderated that response.
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