People on the record here who work in politics and public life, and what they were asked.
22 people · 634 answers
Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, 1940–1945 and 1951–1955; Member of Parliament 1900–1964
Recorded · Winston S. Churchill, My Early Life (Thornton Butterworth, 1930), Project Gutenberg Canada · 1930
Come on now all you young men, all over the world. You are needed more than ever now to fill the gap of a generation shorn by the War. You have not an hour to lose.
Civil rights leader, US Ambassador to the United Nations, Mayor of Atlanta
Recorded · Academy of Achievement · 2013
Everything I did, and I think everything Martin Luther King did, was because we allowed our lives to be in tune with what we felt to be a divine purpose.
President of Costa Rica, 1986–1990 and 2006–2010
Recorded · The Nobel Foundation · 1987
History was not written by men who predicted failure, who gave up their dreams, who abandoned their principles, who allowed their laziness to put their intelligence to sleep.
President of Poland, 1990–1995; co-founder and chairman of the Solidarity trade union
Recorded · The Nobel Foundation · 1983
When I recall my own path of life I cannot but speak of the violence, hatred and lies.
Peace activist; Nobel Peace Prize laureate, 2011
Recorded · Academy of Achievement · 2018
My key message to her, as a nine-year-old, recently has been, “You don’t need to be friends with everyone, but you’re forced to respect everyone.
Leader of the National League for Democracy; Nobel Peace Prize laureate; State Counsellor of Myanmar, 2016–2021
Recorded · The Nobel Foundation · 2012
Every kindness I received, small or big, convinced me that there could never be enough of it in our world.
President of the Philippines, 1986–1992
Recorded · AmericanRhetoric.com · 1986
I held out for participation in the 1984 election the dictatorship called, even if I knew it would be rigged.
U.S. Representative from Georgia, 1987–2020; Chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee 1963–1966
Recorded · Speakola (speech transcript archive) · 2014
I would come home and ask my mother, my father, my grandparents, my great-grandparents, 'Why?'. And they would say, 'That's the way it is. Don't get in the way, don't get in trouble!'
President of Costa Rica, 1986–1990 and 2006–2010
Recorded · The Nobel Foundation · 1987
Seeing that the past dictatorships were only capable of creating misery and crippling hope, how absurd to pretend to cure the evils of one extreme dictatorship by means of its opposite!
Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, 1940–1945 and 1951–1955; Member of Parliament 1900–1964
Recorded · International Churchill Society · 1941
You cannot tell from appearances how things will go. Sometimes imagination makes things out far worse than they are; yet without imagination not much can be done.
President of Czechoslovakia 1989–1992; President of the Czech Republic 1993–2003; playwright and dissident
Recorded · Václav Havel Library Foundation (havelcenter.org) · 1986
The kind of hope I often think about (especially in situations that are particularly hopeless, such as prison) I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world.
Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, 1997-2009; Nobel Peace Prize 2005
Recorded · Academy of Achievement · 2006
First of all, you learn to manage stress. You learn to live with stress. I mean, stress is there all the time. There’s no question about it. It’s in the morning. It’s at night.
Prime Minister of New Zealand, 2017–2023; Leader of the Labour Party 2017–2023
Recorded · Harvard Magazine · 2022
There's a term that gets thrown around a lot – keyboard warrior. It's used to refer to someone who makes aggressive or abusive posts online, often anonymously. I like the name.
Anti-apartheid lawyer; Justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa
Recorded · Academy of Achievement · 2009
I would try to keep myself going by inventing games, and I would sing songs, a song beginning with “A,” “Always.” “Because,” “Charmaine,” “Daisy,” go through the alphabet. ...
Anita Rani, Aung San Suu Kyi, Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Caroline Lucas, Chris Bryant, Clive Myrie, Desmond Tutu, Edmund Hillary, George H. W. Bush, Gloria Steinem, Jimmy Carter, John Lewis, Jon Snow, Jon Sopel, Keir Starmer, Kellie Maloney, Malala Yousafzai, Mohamed ElBaradei, Rory Stewart, Winston Churchill, Zack Polanski