100 GREAT LIVES

I stumbled upon this book while clearing my Dad's book shelves, sorry library considering he has 4 shelves and an old Godrej Almira dedicated to books from parental care to understanding C++

The title is self explanatory "100 GREAT LIVES"
While I am at it, it is edited by John Canning and is published in India by Rupa & Co by arrangement with Souvenir Press Ltd., London.

Here are a few of my favourite quotes about a few interesting personalities:


JULIUS CAESAR

"Why, man, he doth bestride this narrow world, like a Colossus."
-Shakespeare

"....Combined in him in the highest dgree were the realism of the man of action, the sensitiveness of the artist, and the imagination of the creative dreamer-a unio not, I think, to be paralled elsewehere."
- Lord Tweedsmuir


GANDHI

" Many figures have moved across the modern world stage with a more spectacular flourish and a greater aplomb than Mahatma Gandhi; few though have wielded an influence so momentous on the history of our time..............His achievement, rare if not unique was to bring to poitics the moral force of a great religious teacher."


GEORGE WASHINGTON

" Modern history has not a more spotless character to commemorate. Invincible in resolution, firm in conduct, incorruptible in integrity, he brought to the the helm of a victorious republic the simplicity and innocence of a rural life; he was forced into greatness by circumstances rather than lead into it by inclination, and prevailed over his enemies rather by the wisdom of his designs and the perseverance of his character than by any extraordinary genius for the art of war........."

- Sir Archibald Alison

SOCRATES

Socrates was an ugly, snub-nosed, paunchy, bolt-eyed little man, who talked a lot and did little. He wrote nothing that was published. Yet we know him as the finest philosophers of the ancient world, perhaps the greatest of the great men produced by Athens. For his genius he became conspicuous, for his vitue he was condemned to death-the world cannot stand the completely honest man.



KARL MARX

" A name which, fifty years after the death of its possesor, has still the power to excite passionate loyalties and passionate hatred, will soon not be effaced from the annals of mankind. Marx was not, in the strict sense of the world, a great philosopher. He was not in any sense of the word at all, a great economist. He was not inspired by any deep love for humanity...................But he imposed upon himself on his contemporaies, and he has imposed himself upon history, with all the sheer force of a unique and dominant idea."

- Edward Hallet Carr