The question
Who alive today do you admire most, and what draws you to them?Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
The Guardian's Q&A repeatedly uses this prompt, sometimes dropping 'living' while retaining the same comparative judgment.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
The problem with my job is that you meet people you admire and then you don’t admire them so much. The only one I carried on admiring was Nelson Mandela.
The Guardian, The Q&A, The Guardian, 3 December 2016 source ↗
Your average aid worker, wherever they may be. Any human being doing good by helping others, while putting themselves in harm’s way.
Ricky Gervais. I’m saying that so he might read this and cast me in something.
Sienna Miller. For obvious reasons!
Just look at a Dalai Lama and Mother Teresa and Aung San Suu Kyi and Nelson Mandela, and you’ll see that one of the outstanding characteristics of each one of these is how they have poured themselves out prodigally on behalf of others, of their being so utterly selfless.
I would have behaved better to my first wife, and the girl I lived with afterwards. I was always away.
Comfort, warmth and security.
Reading the news. It’s a dull job.
Recently, when I got out of hospital and into my own bed with my wife and 10-year-old son; we watched some crap television and life had never seemed better.
I’d like to say sorry to my mother. I had to choose between my parents, and I chose my father because he didn’t have any other kids. (My mother was a war widow and had two children from her first marriage.) I thought, in a childish way, that one had to be fair. It was very difficult for my mother and me, and we never really got over it.
Desmond Tutu, Gloria Steinem, Sarah Brown, Barack Obama, Kirsty Wark, Clare Balding
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