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Greg Mortenson
Best-Selling Author, Three Cups of Tea
I went behind the village one day. I saw 84 children sitting in the dirt. There was about five girls and 79 boys. And most of the kids were writing with sticks in the sand, and the older kids were helping the younger kids. And then I had looked around, and I didn't see a teacher there. And I thought, "This is very strange. We've got 80 kids here and no teacher." And they said, "Our teacher, Master Hussein " -- master means teacher -- " is in the next village, Munjung, because we can't afford his daily one-dollar salary." And then a young girl named Cho Cho came up to me. She was about seven or eight. She said, "Could you help us build a school here? It's very cold. Could you just please help us build a school?" I had seen a lot of poverty in my life. I grew up in Africa. And I've seen development, so those kind of experiences really shouldn't affect me to such a degree, but when I looked into her eyes, I saw such a purity and such a kind of resilient determination to ask me for help. So I made a promise. It was kind of this "eureka" moment, but I said, "I promise I'll build a school for you." And little did I know that I'd changed my life forever.
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Greg Mortenson
Best-Selling Author, Three Cups of Tea
K2 is a very beautiful mountain. In the Balti language, which is of the people there -- it's classical Tibetan -- K2 is called Chogori or Chogor, means "the big peak." It's a very symmetrical peak and granite mass -- you can put 84 Matterhorns inside of it -- but it's kind of reaching up to the heavens. Also, one of the reasons I decided to climb a mountain to honor my sister Christa is that the very same hour that my sister died, I actually was climbing in Mount Sill which is in the east Sierra Mountains in California, and I fell about 800 feet. And the exact same hour that my sister died from epilepsy, I fell about 800 feet down a mountain. And earlier in the day, I had seen a ruby-throated hummingbird up near the top of the mountain, and ruby hummingbirds don't fly at 14,000 feet. Afterwards, I kind of put it together. I think that hummingbird was my sister coming to say goodbye to me. So that's one reason I chose climbing as a way to honor her memory. But yet, I never knew that it would take me to a far greater climb and a more special way to honor her memory.
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Story Musgrave
Dean of American Astronauts
Starting as a three year-old on a dairy farm, a thousand-acre dairy farm, nature became my world. Even as a three year-old I could go out in the forest and, at seven, eight o'clock at night, dark, and I was totally at home in the fields, the woods, the rivers from the earliest age, that became my world. Lying in a damp, cool, freshly plowed field, just after a sunset and looking out into the heavens, that became my world.
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Story Musgrave
Dean of American Astronauts
Space takes almost a new language. It's a new place. We created and evolved here on earth. We're earth-based creatures, and the magic of what goes on when you take humanity out there, it's going to take a new language to do it. And poetry has some tools in it which will, as music does, directly do you. You don't have to intellectualize music. You listen to music and it works on you and you get it. So it's a direct communication. And so, I think, a way of bringing space to people, that poetry will work.
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Story Musgrave
Dean of American Astronauts
Story Musgrave: For me, life is 99 percent a spiritual quest. And it started in childhood with myself and nature, and the universe. And finding truth, finding serenity, finding myself by being immersed and embracing the whole thing that is part of us, that has created us, evolved us, that we are part of. Space flight has allowed me to extend that into unbelievable kinds of realms in which you see a third of the earth, in which you see entire continents, and you see patterns. And you come over the Near East and you see, framed in the space ship window, all of the civilizations, the old civilizations. And you see nature at work, and great, huge lines of volcanoes, from the tip of South America, all the way up through the Aleutians and Alaska.
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Ralph Nader
Consumer Crusader
Ralph Nader: I grew up thinking one person can change things. Where did I get that idea? First from my parents, and second from reading American history. So many of the major steps forward in our society's progress started with just a handful of people. The abolitionist movement against slavery, the women's right to vote movement started with six women in an upstate New York farm house where they met in 1846. The Civil Rights movement. Environmental rights. Worker rights. The whole labor movement. If you grow up in a mass society and think that nothing can be done unless you have masses of people who all agree all at once to start doing something, then you are not going to count yourself as very significant. You are not going to think that you can begin a thoughtful strategy to change things for the better.
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Ralph Nader
Consumer Crusader
So, I am seeing more and more institutionalized lawlessness, where about the only bounds on government behavior is public relations. The more they think they can fool the people and get away with it, even those boundaries are limited. And, if the press is concentrated in a few media conglomerates, and there is not much diversity and they have a cushy relationship with their government officials because the government officials will give them stories from time to time, then another boundary against government lawlessness deteriorates. We have got a great future if we wake up to it in this country. And, anybody who starts out in this country who thinks that they can't be a leader ought to think again. There has never been a greater demand for leadership, in all areas: media, education, churches, government, business, you name it. There is no long waiting list to be a leader in this country.
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