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Maya Angelou
Poet and Historian
Maya Angelou: I was a mute from the time I was seven and a half until I was almost 13. I didn't speak. I had voice, but I refused to use it. My grandmother, who was raising me in a little village in Arkansas, used to tell me, "Sister, mamma don't care about what these people say: 'You must be an idiot, you must be a moron'. Mamma don't care, sister. Mamma know, when you and the Good Lord get ready, you're gonna be a preacher." Well, I used to sit and think to myself, "Poor, ignorant mamma. She doesn't know. I will never speak, let alone preach." It has devolved upon me to -- not preach, as it were -- but to write about morals, about hope, about desolation, about pain and ecstasy and joy and triumph in the human spirit. So it seems to me, that is my calling. And I write about it for all of us, because I know that human beings are more alike than we are unalike.
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Maya Angelou
Poet and Historian
We, the teachers, those of us who are the television producers, I mean, and speakers, interviewers, the professors, the parents, we have to broaden our thinking. We must do to include all the children, you see? There are Asian children watching. Those children need to know that they have already been paid for. They need to be reminded that in the 1850s the Asians came to this country and built the railroads. They need to know that for centuries -- I mean for decades, they were unable legally to bring their mates. They need to know that, that they have been paid for. They need to be encouraged to read Kenzaburo Oe and Kobo Abe, and Janice Mirikitani, and Maxine Hong Kingston, Ishiguru. They need to be encouraged to read, so that they can say, "Oh, wait just a minute. I'm not here at anybody's sufferance. This is my country." You see?
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Maya Angelou
Poet and Historian
It is not impossible to become Martin Luther King, to become J.F. Kennedy, to become Mahatma Gandhi, it is not impossible to become Barbara Jordan or Eleanor Roosevelt. That is not impossible, it's within your grasp, absolutely. Those were human beings. So, if you approach that with that idea -- if you approach the future with the idea that I am up to it, I am a man or woman of my time, and I am up to it. I will study hard, pray a lot and all that, but I am up to it. If you do that, then, in case the contemporary leaders fall, there will be someone to step in the place, you see? That is what is important.
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Robert Ballard
Discoverer of the Titanic
Robert Ballard: Fortunately, I can visualize in three-dimensions. I think any good field mapper can look at a map and see the Grand Canyon in three dimensions. You conceptualize, because you can't see more than 30 or 40 feet under the ocean. So you must have a complete sense of reference. I don't know whether that's a gift, a compass that's built into your brain, like a bird's ability to migrate. I can know where north, south, east and west is at all times. I can remember where I was, and I can integrate it all in my mind. So when I go down there, I'm not lost. I'm very comfortable in total darkness with just a flashlight. It's like working in the Rocky Mountains at night in a snowstorm from a helicopter with a spotlight. You can develop that skill. Certain people have that three-dimensional skill set.
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Sir Roger Bannister
Track and Field Legend
John Landy, my rival, ran 4:02 three or four times, and he used the phrase, "It's like a wall." Now logically, I could not understand, as a physiologist, why a human being can run a mile in four minutes and two seconds, and four minutes and one second, and why somebody else won't inevitably come along, train a little better, know that there's a target to be beaten, and beat it. So that was my mental approach to it. It was just fortunate for me that the pathway of record breaking, which continues in all aspects of athletics, had just reached this magical critical four minutes: four laps of one minute each, on a quarter mile track. That was really the reason why it had conspired to become a possible barrier, physical or psychological. It wasn't, in my view, physical, but it did become to some extent psychological. And it was really an example -- I don't know whether the word paradigm is correct -- paradigm of human achievement in a purely athletic sense. What limits are there to what the body can do?
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Sir Roger Bannister
Track and Field Legend
Sir Roger Bannister: Running was something I wanted to do at school, so I became a champion at school. Then my father, when I was 16, took me to watch an athletic event. There are two parts to running. There is the simple enjoyment as you run through the countryside, a pure pleasure without any target. This meeting showed me a kind of forum in which success could be crystallized; those who were watching, applauded, and there was a gladiatorial interplay between the athletes. I watched an English runner called Sidney Wooderson, who had held the world record for the mile, and it had always been a British preoccupation to hold this mile record. There were a series of English runners who had held it. I watched him after the end of the war in 1945, running against the world record holders from Sweden, like Andersson. And, he was not in the same league, but he came up and challenged the world record holder on the last bend. The challenge was easily fought off by the Swede, but there was a feeling of courage that he showed in tackling the Swede, who looked physically much stronger, more elegant, and more powerful; Wooderson was a rather small man. But this exchange, this battle was, I think, the thing which led me to go on from simple running for pleasure to running with this target of records, Olympic Games and other events in mind.
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Sir Roger Bannister
Track and Field Legend
There was one journalist who said eventually the four-minute mile will be broken, and everybody thought it was a pretty eccentric view, because there was a long way to go. But to me, at that stage, I was only looking ahead to becoming an international. I was immediately involved in the management of the Oxford athletics, became the Secretary and then the President. I declined the invitation to compete in the London Olympics. In those days, I didn't train very much. We didn't really know how to train in modern terms. There was this thing called "burning yourself out." I didn't want to burn myself out at 18, and I had a notion that if I looked after myself, trained carefully, I would go on improving, not by training two to three hours a day, but by training three quarters of an hour a day. It seemed to me logical that you could go on improving, and you didn't have to spend all day running.
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Sir Roger Bannister
Track and Field Legend
All sporting events are more mental than physical. You have to train the physical aspects for years. But eventually, even in the more complex movements, which have my respect, those who can pitch and bat or play golf and so on, the basis of it is laid down in the brain and the real question is whether the brain can be allowed to do its bit without being interfered with by psychological factors. The other aspect of the brain is that it must be positive. I suppose these two are connected. But, the brain has to have some overall image of what is being achieved. I did have the feeling that -- in a sense -- looking down on myself doing it. I mean being outside of my body in some kind of way. I think this experience has been described by others.
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