What are you most proud of?

If it’s one thing, obviously it had to have been being selected to make the first manned space flight for the United States. That was competition at its best, not because of the fame or the recognition that went with it, but because of the fact that America’s best test pilots went through this selection process, down to seven guys, and of those seven, I was the first one to go. That always will be the most satisfying thing for me.

I have never really studied them very much. I think that I was proud of — not just what I did — but my staff played obviously a major part, did in popularizing the sport, with the early promotional activities of NFL Properties, merchandising, NFL Films, all the work that we put on the Super Bowl to make that a top attraction. All those things, I feel very good about, but I think they played a big part in popularizing the league.

I’m most proud that, after all I’ve been through, God has let me be alive and well today, and still with June Carter.

That’s difficult for someone to talk about themselves. If I’ve helped improve the game of golf and if I’ve helped improve people’s outlook on life and the game of golf, that would be something that I would be very happy for. I would really like to think that maybe I have left something that other people will look at and say, when people come in back of them, that they have given them the same opportunity that we had. And that means give our kids the opportunities that we’ve had through these years. And if I can do that and leave something along those lines to people, I’ll be very happy for that.

Proud that I believe I have the respect of my fellow soldiers. And by soldiers, I mean all the members of the armed forces that I served with. No medal, no nice introduction, no awards could substitute just for the knowledge I have that I’m reasonably well respected by my fellow soldiers. If I didn’t have that, I would have considered this to be a busted career.

It will continue and it is due to something which I am very proud to say I invented. ... In 1975 I was asked to become a member of CERN’s scientific policy committee, that committee advises the council of CERN as to what they should do in the future concerning physics. ... we cannot go all the times through the traumatising experience of fighting for a new accelerator, making it and then fall back and so on, so I came to the concept of a constant budget.

And then in 1974 I started to work on phosphorous chemistry which is the area of which I’m most proud as it turns out. I’m most proud of my work on carbon phosphorous chemistry.

I wasn’t interested in politics in those days, but I was interested in helping people, and I got involved in the Foundation of the Credit Union movement. And, of all the things I’ve been doing, it’s the thing I’m proudest of because no movement has done more good for the people of Ireland, north and south, than the credit union movement.

I don’t know whether I feel pride. I think pride is hubris. I think it is an emotion that if you bask in it, it’s like hate; it will destroy you. So I don’t make those kinds of assessments. I like what I do. I am repeatedly struck by how I have missed part of the story, always.

This was an unexpected benefit let’s say. There is a new class of diseases that came up in the last, yes I would say 10 years, they are called channelopathies. This means diseases related to defects in the function of ion channels and all of a sudden ion channels and electrical signals, which we’re not very popular for the general public because it’s somewhat difficult to understand how electrical signal comes about and that we all run on electrical signals but this development of finding channelopathies is quite, you know, rewarding I would say

I’m most proud of my family. My five children are all doing quite well, and I’m proudest of them. Of my business accomplishments, obviously I’m proudest of CNN, although on any given day at any given time, the Cartoon Network’s audience is about twice as large.

I am not a nationalist in any way, and I hate flag waving, and I don’t think much good has come out of nationalism. I am proud of Scandinavia in the sense that we have actually managed to create a very tolerant and human society, which is very livable. They are of course deconstructing it and privatizing everything now, but there has been some achievement up there, in that cold north.

I take great pride in the fact that we have a whole movement of people that are working on these cases, obviously, to get innocent people out of prison, and identify those who really committed the crime. But most importantly, it is a movement of criminal justice reform. And that we have made a big difference, I hope, in the system. We have prosecutors forming what we call “conviction integrity” units to try to look at miscarriages of justice and work cooperatively with defense lawyers to change the results. We are really trying to make some fundamental changes in the way the criminal justice system operates.

Well, I’m very proud, this is true, I mean. But, you know, it’s also being with the right people, in the right place, at the right moment. And, you know, it’s a team work too.

I am of course honoured to get this recognition for all the work I’ve done over the years, but I’m also proud for my family and for my native country and my adopted country, and especially for Turkey it’s quite important.

Very happy, very proud, apart from the loss of many lives, which can never be corrected, or we can’t do much about it. It’s probably the most expensive part of the struggle. But to have won the war and won the peace for ourselves, because if you look at those years of the war, of the genocide, and they are brought to an end, and then we started building and rebuilding and a sense of reconciliation, a sense of allowing Rwandans to live together as a nation. And now a proud people of Rwanda, and socially made progress politically, significant progress, economically the same. I think we could not have asked for more.

There are a lot of images to be proud of. There are a lot of images that I’m very happy with, in the film context, that were very hard to do or that happened in the right moment, and that were the embodiment of the fact that I engulf myself in the spirit of an understanding of those animals at that time.

Mr. Rogers lives on. There’s so many legions of people that grew up with him, and they’re still in a way growing up with him. He, of course, was a minister. ... And the children of the show, in the neighborhood, are his ministry. And what a beautiful thing that is. So I, to this day, when someone says, “What are you most proud to have accomplished?” I am so proud to have been a part of that.

I’m proud any time that I see a toxic chemical process, something that produces toxic waste or requires precious metals, which have to be mined at terrible environmental degradation costs — I’m proud when I see that replaced with a clean, efficient biological process that doesn’t produce those things. And we have to do that a million times over in order to move away from our addiction to this old-fashioned chemistry that we do.

One of the things I’m proudest of is that today is a Friday, and hundreds of Gypsy bands will be playing for tips, and they will play a lot of my songs. I like the idea that because of that, some kid will have marmalade on his bread.