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Charles Townes
Inventor of the Maser & Laser
You have to be determined. You have to be open-minded. You have to be willing to examine. You have to be willing to stand up by yourself and differ with people, but you have to be very self-critical at the same time, otherwise you can waste a lot of time. If you just want to be yourself, and be different from everybody else, and not self-examining, then you can waste a lot of time. You have to be very self-critical and honest with yourself, when you're right or wrong. At the same time be able to stand by what you think.
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Charles Townes
Inventor of the Maser & Laser
I like to have enough money so I can live reasonably and do science, but I didn't want to get wrapped up with a lot of patent cases, and trouble administrating patents, and worrying about it and so on. And in addition, there's an organization that takes patents from university people, collects money from it, and then puts that money back into university research. That's called the Research Corporation. And I thought the Research Corporation was fulfilling a very good function, and they would take the load off of my back if I would just turn it over to them. They characteristically give the scientist some portion, and I got some portion of the proceeds in the maser patent. The maser patent really covered both masers and lasers. It was the basic idea, so it covered both of them, and Research Corporation had that.
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Ted Turner
Founder, Cable News Network
I asked myself where the threat's going to come. Once CNN is on the air and people see it's going to be successful, where is the next threat going to come from? And I said the threat is going to come from a right wing news network, and it was 18 years later before Fox got started, 18 years. We had that, and by then I was making so much money and doing so well, because the way I was going to counteract Fox was -- I had two networks, CNN and Headline News, and I could say, "Well, I'll just turn Headline News into the rightest wing network you ever saw and preempt Fox, and there will be no real reason for people to tune into it." But when the time came and Fox got started, I was so successful. I was worth billions, where I had been worth nothing at the beginning. I liked being straightforward with the news. Something with my name on it, I couldn't do a right wing network. I said they can just have whatever they want with it, and we'll stick to what we've been doing, being the world's most respected news network. Like The New York Times. The New York Times doesn't try and mimic the Post, not really. They stand there, and I give them credit. I wanted to be The New York Times of the television news business.
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Desmond Tutu
Nobel Prize for Peace
We were wonderfully encouraged by what blacks were achieving in the United States. I recall when I was about nine picking up a tattered copy of Ebony magazine and I think -- I mean, maybe journalists ought to know just how much power they actually have because here I was 10,000 miles away from America with this copy of Ebony magazine and it was describing the exploits of Jackie Robinson and how he broke into major league baseball. Now I didn't know baseball from ping pong but what was so important for me, what made me grow inches was to know that a black guy had triumphed over all of the obstacles that were placed in his way and there he was now playing for something called Brooklyn Dodgers. Now I didn't know Brooklyn Dodgers. I didn't know Jackie, but it helped to exorcise what is the most awful consequence of racial injustice and it is the sense -- this demon of self-hate when you have a very low self-esteem.
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Desmond Tutu
Nobel Prize for Peace
Archbishop Desmond Tutu: I wanted to become a doctor, a physician, and I was admitted to medical school, but my family did not have the money for fees. So I ended up becoming a teacher. I stopped being a teacher when the South African Government introduced a deliberately inferior education for blacks called Bantu education, and I felt I wasn't ready to collaborate with this apology for an educational system. Our children, the 1976 kids who revolted against apartheid in Soweto, called it "gutter education," and it was gutter education. I left teaching. Of course, I didn't have too many option, and mercifully, the Bishop of Johannesburg at that time accepted me for training for the priesthood. So I came to the priesthood, as it were, by default.
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Desmond Tutu
Nobel Prize for Peace
The South African government for some odd reason had ignored my letter where I warned. I didn't have any sort of premonition, although I felt there was something in the air, but when it happened, when June the 16th happened, 1976, it caught most of us really by surprise. We hadn't expected that our young people would have had the courage. See, Bantu education had hoped that it was going to turn them into docile creatures, kowtowing to the white person, and not being able to say "boo" to a goose kind of thing, you know, and it was an amazing event when these school kids came out and said they were refusing to be taught in the medium of Afrikaans. That was -- that was really symbolic of all of the oppression. Afrikaans was the language they felt of the oppressor, and protesting against Afrikaans was really protesting against the whole system of injustice and oppression where black people's dignity was rubbed in the dust and trodden underfoot carelessly, and South Africa never became the same -- we knew it was not going ever to be the same again, and these young people were amazing. They really were amazing.
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Desmond Tutu
Nobel Prize for Peace
The leader is the servant. So leadership is not having your own way. It's not for self-aggrandizement. But oddly, it is for service. It is for the sake of the led. It is a proper altruism. Now that paradigm sounds hugely unrealistic, idealistic, something for dreamers, namby-pamby -- when you think of our current world as a world of cutthroat competitiveness, dog-eat-dog, where stomach ulcers become status symbols, survival of the fittest, everyone for himself, herself, and the devil take the hindmost. And yet, you see, if you live by this latter code in your corporation, in your school, in whatever organization, you may indeed succeed, but it is at very, very great cost. You end up being feared rather than loved, as happened with a former state president of South Africa's, P.W. Botha, when the knives were out for him. No one, not even his closest associates, mourned his departure. And so they frequently say, "On your way up, be nice to those you meet. You might encounter them on your way down."
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