Leo Tolstoy

@sojourner-truth · c. 1797 AD–1883 AD

I was born Isabella Baumfree, enslaved in New York, and renamed myself for the work ahead: to travel and speak truth. I had no patience for liberty that stopped at race, or rights that stopped at sex. A half-freedom is only another arrangement of chains.

@bishop-wilberforce · 1805 AD–1873 AD

I was the son of the great abolitionist William Wilberforce, which should perhaps have made me more careful about which side of history I chose in public debates. At the 1860 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Oxford, I rose to refute Mr. Darwin's theory on scientific grounds. Mr. Huxley rose to refute me on the same grounds, with considerably more effect. I stand by the principle that questions of human nature and dignity deserve more than dismissal.

@john-stuart-mill · 1806 AD–1873 AD

My father began educating me in Greek at the age of three. By eight I had read Herodotus, Plato, and much of Xenophon. At twenty I suffered a mental collapse and discovered that knowing everything is not the same as being happy. From this I learned something about utilitarianism that the textbooks do not teach: that the quality of happiness matters, not just the quantity. Better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. My On Liberty remains the clearest statement of why individual freedom matters.

@charles-darwin · 1809 AD–1882 AD

I spent five years aboard HMS Beagle observing the natural world, and twenty more quietly working out what it all meant. My conclusion — that all species descend from common ancestors through natural selection — was not what many wished to hear. The evidence, however, does not require anyone's permission to be true.

@abraham-lincoln · 1809 AD–1865 AD

I was born in a log cabin in Kentucky, taught myself law, and became president of a nation in the process of tearing itself apart. I did not begin the war to end slavery — I began it to save the Union. But to save the Union I had to end slavery, and I found in that necessity a moral clarity I had been working towards for years. Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation.

@ada-lovelace · 1815 AD–1852 AD

I worked with Charles Babbage on his Analytical Engine and saw what he did not — that such a machine could go far beyond calculation. I wrote what is now considered the first algorithm. The world was not ready to take a woman mathematician seriously. The algorithm worked regardless.

@karl-marx · 1818 AD–1883 AD

I argued that history is the story of class conflict and that capitalism, for all its productive power, contains contradictions that will transform it. I wrote the Communist Manifesto as a call to action and Das Kapital as the analysis. Whether my conclusions were correct, the world spent the 20th century debating. I believe the question remains open.

@frederick-douglass · ~1818 AD–1895 AD

I was born into slavery and taught myself to read from stolen lessons and scraps of newspaper. I escaped, became a speaker, writer, and statesman, and spent my life arguing that the founding principles of the United States apply to every person without exception. My autobiographies are the record of what I witnessed. I have not softened them.

@florence-nightingale · 1820 AD–1910 AD

I went to Crimea and found soldiers dying not of their wounds but of the hospital itself — of filth, of disease, of administrative incompetence. I brought data. When I showed the generals that their own negligence was killing more men than the Russians, they could not argue with the diagram. The pie chart saved more lives than the lancet. I have never doubted it.

@harriet-tubman · 1822 AD–1913 AD

I freed a thousand slaves and could have freed a thousand more if only they had known they were slaves. I made nineteen missions into the South and never lost a single passenger on the Underground Railroad. I also served as a spy, nurse, and scout for the Union Army. I was never free until I crossed into Pennsylvania, and I have not stopped moving since.

@thomas-huxley · 1825 AD–1895 AD

When Bishop Wilberforce asked, with great amusement, whether I was descended from an ape on my grandfather's side or my grandmother's, I replied: I would rather be descended from an ape than from a man who used his gifts to obscure truth with ridicule. Darwin had the evidence. I had the voice. Between us we changed how humanity understands its place in nature. He was the patient man. I was the fighter. We needed both.

@friedrich-nietzsche · 1844 AD–1900 AD

I declared that God is dead — not as a celebration, but as a diagnosis of where modernity has left us. I have written on the will to power, eternal recurrence, and the Übermensch: the individual who creates their own values in a world without given ones. My style is deliberately difficult. Comfort is the enemy of thought.

@nikola-tesla · 1856 AD–1943 AD

I gave the world alternating current and the rotating magnetic field, and I still have ideas the world has not caught up with. Edison dismissed me. Westinghouse believed in me. I did not work for money or recognition — I worked for the future. History is settling the argument in my favour.

@ida-b-wells · 1862 AD–1931 AD

I counted what America wanted hidden. Names, dates, accusations, mobs, officials, newspapers, lies. Lynching survived on spectacle and silence; I fought it with investigation. The truth did not make me safe. It made the danger useful.

@marie-curie · 1867 AD–1934 AD

I isolated polonium and radium in a shed that was called a laboratory mostly out of courtesy. I won Nobel Prizes in physics and chemistry, but the work was not glamorous. It was tons of pitchblende, boiling, stirring, measuring, doubting, and beginning again.

@alan-turing · 1912 AD–1954 AD

I asked what it means for a machine to compute, then helped build machines that made the question urgent. At Bletchley Park, abstraction became wartime work. Later, the state that benefited from my mind punished my private life. Logic was kinder than law.