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Nobel Peace Prize laureates

  • Nelson MandelaNelson Mandela wore a Springbok shirt to the 1995 Rugby World Cup final. He gave the trophy to an Afrikaner captain.
  • Barack ObamaObama rejected a plan to bomb a compound in Pakistan and sent Navy SEALs instead. The 2011 raid killed Osama bin Laden.
  • Martin Luther King Jr.Martin Luther King Jr. died at the age of 39, yet his autopsy showed the heart of a 60 year old, according to his biographer Taylor Branch. Branch attributed the damage to stress. The causes were many. King was jailed repeatedly, attacked…
  • Theodore RooseveltTheodore Roosevelt was shot in the chest, then gave a 90-minute speech. It happened in Milwaukee in October 1912.
  • Jimmy CarterJimmy Carter once was lowered into a crippled nuclear reactor for 90 seconds at a time. He later ran for president.
  • Al GoreAl Gore won the 2000 popular vote but lost the presidency by 537 Florida votes.
  • Woodrow WilsonWoodrow Wilson ordered his own supporters to vote against his League of Nations treaty.
  • Anwar SadatAnwar Sadat was shot dead by his own soldiers at a parade celebrating his war.
  • Mikhail GorbachevMikhail Gorbachev refused to declare a state of emergency during the August 1991 coup.
  • Henry KissingerHenry Kissinger made a secret trip to China in July 1971. It helped end 23 years of diplomatic isolation.
  • Willy BrandtWilly Brandt, later West Germany's chancellor, fled Nazi Germany under a false name. He made it legal in 1948.
  • Kofi AnnanKofi Annan became the seventh secretary-general of the United Nations only after France vetoed him four times and then finally chose to abstain. He was also the first holder of that office to be chosen from the organisation's own staff.…
  • Austen ChamberlainAusten Chamberlain won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1925 but never became prime minister. His half-brother Neville did.
  • Desmond TutuDesmond Tutu, the South African Anglican archbishop who spent decades confronting apartheid, asked to be laid to rest in a plain pine coffin. It was the cheapest one available, chosen to avoid any ostentatious display. He died of cancer on…
  • Andrei SakharovAndrei Sakharov built the Soviet Union's most devastating weapon, then spent his life trying to limit its damage.
  • 14th Dalai LamaA two-year-old asked a disguised monk for an old mala that had belonged to the 13th Dalai Lama.
  • Muhammad YunusMuhammad Yunus, a Bangladeshi economist, once handed US$27 of his own money to 42 village women. Each woman made a profit of just BDT 0.50 on her loan, roughly US$0.02. It sounds like nothing at all. Yet from that tiny result he drew a…
  • Mother TeresaMother Teresa once summed herself up in a handful of short sentences. "By blood, I am Albanian. By citizenship, an Indian. By faith, I am a Catholic nun. As to my calling, I belong to the world." The woman who said this was born Anjezë…
  • Linus PaulingLinus Pauling left high school without a diploma. He later won two unshared Nobel Prizes, a first in history.
  • Nicholas Murray ButlerA 1939 poem in Poetry secretly spelled out an insult to Nicholas Murray Butler. The magazine later apologized.

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