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Robert Ballard
Discoverer of the Titanic
The real thing that got me, when the goose bumps were having goose bumps, was after we fixed the submarine and came down on the second dive. That's when we made love. Because we came in on the bow and landed, and it was clunk, clunk. It was like Armstrong on the moon. And you took on the ten-degree list of the Titanic. It was listing to the starboard, and you listed. You just sat there. "We are on... the... deck of the Titanic. Oh my God!" And you just looked out the windows and just looked at it.
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Robert Ballard
Discoverer of the Titanic
I used to love to go down to tidal pools. What an adventure a tidal pool is! The tide comes in, covers the rocks, and then it goes away, and it traps life from the sea, and they can't get away. It's like a nature-made aquarium. You look around and there's fish, crabs and all sorts of things. Then they get washed away and in twelve hours there will be a new aquarium. I loved tidal pools. I also loved the tide, when it would come in, and you'd find adventure washed up on your shore. Like a Robinson Crusoe walking along, and seeing a float that had come from Japan, that had crossed the Pacific Ocean, a third of our planet, and just washed up at your feet. It was so exciting, I couldn't wait to go and walk the tide line and see what treasures were waiting for me.
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Sir Roger Bannister
Track and Field Legend
Sir Roger Bannister: I was always a great bundle of energy. As a child, instead of walking, I would run. And so running, which is a pain to a lot of people, was always a pleasure to me because it was so easy. I wanted to have some success. I came from such a simple origin, without any great privilege, and I would say I also wanted to make a mark. It wasn't, I suppose, until I was about 15 that I appeared in a race. I was playing rugby and the other games English school children do, and there was an event which was planned in which races were run, and I simply just won these by a considerable margin. So, everybody thought I was just rather special.
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Sir Roger Bannister
Track and Field Legend
Medicine is complex. Indescribably difficult. It involves collaboration. There aren't lonely peaks. I mean, there are Nobel Laureates who work on one particular subject in isolation and are so clever that they are able to perceive what others cannot. And I was, of course, not that kind of a scientist, and clinical medicine is not like that, and I knew this. I knew it, and I chose it, because I felt that the capacity to apply yourself to be alert to new developments, and to be prepared to spend the time writing papers, would lead to a fascinating life in which a reputation would be created for hard work, for -- one hopes -- kindness and effectiveness in dealing with patients and clinical problems, and then ultimately the kind of problems of organizing medical committees and having a responsibility thrust upon one by colleagues who wished one to undertake particular duties of this kind.
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Ehud Barak
Former Prime Minister of Israel
I was highly interested in mathematics. It seemed to me to be a form of art, something very beautiful, geometry, mathematics, and the systematic way how it's built and so on. But I was somewhat bored by most of other issues that were taught at school and I became at the age -- from 13 maybe to 17, I was totally undisciplined and could not take any kind of discipline. So gradually I became a burden of the school. They asked me to go do something more productive maybe. I was -- I don't know, not hyperactive, I was a very shy introvert -- but to do something useful to work in the field, rather than spend my time in interrupting others that want to study. So I was expelled from high school in the last year. I was allowed to come to listen to the math hours and I spent the rest of the day working until I joined the army at a very early age.
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Ehud Barak
Former Prime Minister of Israel
Tito said that a good military unit is a social cell where shame -- the fear of being kind of shamed by the rest of the group -- is stronger than the fear of death. And there is something true about it, that works among youngsters well-trained and somehow understanding that they are serving a cause which is somehow more important than their own. No one really bothers you in battle with this kind of overstructure of ideology and devotion and so on. And we know, unfortunately, from world experience, that you can lead people to highly devoted and professional military activities under terrible kind of regimes with terrible ideologies. But somehow, with youngsters, it works. If they have got young leaders and they are trained together, they create this kind of self-reliance of the unit, so that they are not dependent on what happens in other parts of the battlefield, but they rely upon each other. It works, and they can reach kind of activities that are against, may I say, the individual instincts of anyone in the group.
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Ehud Barak
Former Prime Minister of Israel
I still remember going with my father from the collective dining room that I mentioned in the beginning and asking -- pointing to one of these Holocaust (survivors), a young woman, that came alone from Auschwitz or Majdanek -- I do not remember -- and she was taking a loaf of bread under her hand every evening from the dining room. And I asked my father why -- Anka was her name -- why Anka is taking this loaf of bread? There will be breakfast tomorrow. There will be bread on the table. He told me what hunger passed in her life will make her to her last day on earth taking this bread. She will never -- could be convinced that tomorrow there will be bread on the table. And so we -- you know, it is to a young kid of five years old or four years and a half, it kind of haunted me since then, and later on through all these wars I realized that we --that Israel is -- that we were born about the middle of last century, slightly before. Our generation did not learn the Alamo stories of his nation in the history books. We experienced them personally. It's a formative, personal, individual experience, a formative collective experience of the Israeli society. The bringing about of a Jewish sovereign entity that can defend itself, stepping back on the stage of real history. Not as a spiritual kind of heritage but as a real way of life for a people that suffered so much. So it became the kind of mobilizing factor of my life, and it gave a certain kind of meaning that you could not think of it when you are -- have to be alert to touch the trigger a split second before someone shoots at you. You don't think about history and so on. But somehow it was a kind of shaping for the whole generation that I was a part of.
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