Memoirist

🇮🇳Mahatma Gandhi

Politics

nonviolence

1869–1948

""The only real, dignified, human doctrine is the greatest good of all, and this can only be achieved by uttermost self-sacrifice.""

🇺🇸Barack Obama

Politics

b. 1961

"When it comes to our foreign policy, you seem to want to import the foreign policies of the 1980s, just like the social policies of the 1950s and the economic policies of the 1920s."

🇺🇸Tim Curry

Music

b. 1946

"I think that if you get too close to the character, if you do too much historical research, you may find yourself defending your view of a character against the author's view, and I think that's terribly dangerous."

🇺🇸Edmund White

Literature

1940–2025

"Perhaps we'd understood each other too well to be attracted to one another. There were no occlusions in communication, those breaks in understanding that awaken desire."

🇺🇸Amelia Earhart

Journalism

first-wave feminism

1897–1939

"Amelia Earhart interview following the 1932 transatlantic flight"

🇺🇸Demi Moore

Literature

b. 1962

"You could either be trapped by what was going on around you, or you could find a way out. I think that everything, even if it is scary or good, comes into our life to help elevate and expand us as human beings."

🇫🇷Charles de Gaulle

Politics

1837–1880

"The desire of privilege and the taste of equality are the dominant and contradictory passions of the French of all times."

🇨🇦Matthew Perry (actor)

Entertainment

1969–2023

"In television or a movie I bring my own ego and consequently can mess up. In the theatre I learnt very quickly to shut up and listen. Now I am able to get out of my own way."

🇫🇷Julie de Lespinasse

Literature

Enlightenment

1732–1779

"You know that when I hate you, it is because I love you to a point of passion that unhinges my soul."

🇩🇪Traudl Junge

Journalism

1920–2002

"The Line", an illustrated essay, a comparison and contrasting of Traudl Junge and Sophie Scholl"

🇷🇺Aleksandr Vasilevsky

Politics

1895–1977

"I did not decide to become an officer to start a military career. I still wanted to be an agronomist and work in some remote corner of Russia after the war. I could not suppose that my country would change, and I would."

🇺🇸Connor Franta

Business

b. 1992

"All that pressure you feel when you're growing up - especially self-imposed pressure - is not fun. It's no walk in the park to feel as if all eyes are on you, even when 99 percent of the time they're actually not."

🇬🇧Martin Amis

Literature

1949–2023

"Never content just to be, America is also obliged to mean; America signifies, hence its constant and riveting vulnerability to illusion."

🇮🇹Catherine of Siena

Literature

1347–1380

"The path to heaven lies through heaven, and all the way to heaven is heaven."

🇵🇰Malala Yousafzai

Social Activism

women's rights

b. 1997

"Birmingham is very special for me because it is here that I found myself alive, seven days after I was shot... It is now my second home, after my beloved Pakistan."