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Jane Goodall
The Great Conservationist
Jane Goodall: When I was at Olduvai, I wasn't there because I wanted to be a paleontologist, but I was in the middle of the Africa I dreamed about. It was one of the most magic times of my life. I wasn't totally thrilled with digging for fossils, but I was totally thrilled with digging for fossils in the middle of the wilderness in Africa. And just every so often, I would hold a bone in my hand and I would almost seem to it would be almost like a mystical experience. I remember once holding the tusks of one of these big prehistoric pigs and just there stood the pig. And I could smell it and see the color and hear the sound of the pig. And then I came back to reality and it was the bone in my hand. But it was the walking out on the plains, the smell, the animals, the wilderness, the wildness. It was just complete magic. And afterwards, Louis told me that he deliberately selected someone with no degree because he wanted somebody whose mind was, as he said, unbiased by the reductionist attitude of the animal behavior people of that time in Europe, the ethologists. He didn't tell me that, he just that's what his idea was.
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Jane Goodall
The Great Conservationist
I came out as an activist, because in that session on conservation, seeing right across Africa the destruction of habitat, seeing the beginning of the bushmeat trade, the commercial hunting of wild animals -- including chimps -- for food, the session on the secretly filmed footage in some of the medical research labs, utterly shocking. And now I have this new self-confidence, because of publishing that book and learning what I didn't learn, know before. I came out as an activist. And since that day, I haven't spent more than three weeks in any one place, except once when I tore the ligaments on both ankles and I needed an extra week or so to get better.
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Mikhail Gorbachev
Nobel Prize for Peace
Because of growing up in a peasant family, and my experience of life and the war -- which I saw myself, all this blood and destruction, horrible destruction -- all this had great significance. This was all when I was a child, and yet that whole period is as clear as if it happened yesterday. I have forgotten a great deal of what happened in my life, but all that hasn't left me. At that time, I began to feel the desire for something more; I wanted to do something to make things better. This was unconscious; it was just something that was brewing inside of me, without my really being aware of it. So, when my father said, "If you want, why don't you go and try to get an education. If not, you can go on working the land with me." And I said, "I want to try." I ended up at the university, and this was a completely different world, the start of a whole new life. The university was like a door opening up on the whole world. For a young man thirsting for knowledge -- coming from the sticks, from the back of beyond, coming to the capital, to Moscow, to the university -- it was cataclysmic.
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Mikhail Gorbachev
Nobel Prize for Peace
There were many such people with initiative in the Soviet Union, very many, and they wanted to find ways for self-actualization. There was the Party, there was Komsomol, and naturally, since the Party was actually the only party available, everyone joined it. There was only one Party, everyone joined the same party. Also, I must confess, I remember that at the time the Party's slogans appealed to me, they made quite an impression on me. It was very seductive, very attractive, and I took it all on faith. A lot of time still had to pass before I began to understand what the purpose and nature of the Party slogans really were, and what real life was, and what the Party meant for the country. And that the Party, which I had joined, itself badly needed to be reformed and reoriented toward democracy. And through this, the country could begin to gain some freedom. That came later, but it all started with the desire to do something and show initiative. That was what led many good people to join the Komsomol and the Party.
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