This is what they wrote:

1. It was said of Cicero that when people heard him, they turned to one another and said “Great Speech”; but when Demosthenes spoke, people turned to one another and said, “Let’s march”. All around the world the people are marching with Barack Obama. British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, writing about Barack Obama, published in Times magazine about 100 most influential people of the world.

2. [Mr. Gordon Brown] went on to become one of the longest-serving Chancellors of the Exchequer that Britain has ever seen…..he brought in and continually drove up the minimum wage, and 600,000 children and a million pensioners were raised out of poverty. Brown believed that wealthy would always be able to look after themselves; it was people at the other end of the economic scale that government ought to be helping….. when capitalism shuddered on its foundation last year, Brownite words like responsibility and morality started issuing from the unlikeliest politicians .... Now Prime Minister Brown took a lead amongst European leaders in setting a course for economic recovery. He hosted the most important meeting of the world's major economies in years. In doing so, the British press said, he had become "Chancellor to the world"...... These are strange and turbulent times, but issues of fairness, equality and protection of the poor have never been more important. I still want Gordon Brown in charge. Mrs. J. K .Rowling the author of the best-selling Harry Potter series, who wrote about Mr. Gordon Brown, the British Prime Minister in special edition of Times magazine, world’s 100 most influential people.

3. I am the Roman Emperor, and am above grammar [reply to prelate who had criticized his Latin] – Emperor Sigismund (1361-1437)

4. Crito, we ought to offer a cock to Asclepius, See to it, and don’t forget. [Final words. Quoted in Plato, Phadeo, 118] – Socrates (469-399 BC)

5. When men heard thunder on the left the gods had somewhat of special advertisement to impart. [The Dangers of mortal life] – Sir Eustace Peachtree (17 Cent.)

6. "We of the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations who participated in the decision on Vietnam and acted according to what we thought to be the principles and traditions of this nation. Yet we were wrong, terribly wrong". - Robert S. McNamara (1916-2009) Secretary of Defense, Opening paragraph, In Retrospect: The tragedy and lessons of Vietnam, 1995

Washington (AFP) - Robert McNamara, the US secretary of defense who was one of the main architects of the US war in Vietnam, died Monday July 6 2009, The Washington Post reported. He was 93. Brilliant-arrogant, some would say-certain of himself and a whirlwind of energy, McNamara was a key member of president John F. Kennedy’s cabinet, a team famously described as “The Best and the Brightest” in author David Halberstam’s seminal book on the Vietnam war.

But in later years McNamara came to regret his Vietnam role, although he remained silent until the publication of his controversial 1995 memoirs “In Retrospect: The Tragedies and Lessons of Vietnam.”

Top US officials “who participated in the decisions on Vietnam acted according to what we thought were the principles and traditions of this nation,” McNamara wrote.“We made our decisions in light of those values. Yet we were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why.”

But his term as defense secretary did not start out that way, when Kennedy asked McNamara, then 44, to be his defense secretary soon after the young president was elected.“I don’t object to its being called McNamara’s war,” he wrote of Vietnam in 1964.
By the time the war ended in 1975 more than 58,000 US soldiers had been killed, as well as more than three million Vietnamese from the North and South and around 1.5 Laotians and Cambodians.

But McNamara had already left as defense secretary, increasingly at odds with the administration’s policies.“Although he loyally supported administration policy,” reads his official Pentagon biography, “McNamara gradually became skeptical about whether the war could be won” by sending in more troops and intensifying the bombing.

McNamara “became increasingly reluctant to approve the large force increments requested by the military commanders,” the biography reads.

After years of clashes with Johnson and the top military brass, and facing a growing anti-war movement at home, McNamara resigned in early 1968.

Robert Strange McNamara-the odd middle name was his mother’s maiden name-was born June 9, 1916 in San Francisco, California, the son of a wholesale shoe firm sales manager.

He studied economics and philosophy at the University of California at Berkeley, then obtained a masters degree in business administration at Harvard.McNamara entered the Army Air Force in 1943. Weak eyesight prevented him from flying, so he worked at an office that analyzed the efficiency of US bombing raids.
After the war he was one of 10 ex-Air Force statisticians that Henry Ford II hired to turn around his automotive company. The team, dubbed the Whiz Kids, turned Ford into the second most popular US auto brand.

McNamara shot up the ranks and become company president-the first ever outside of the Ford family-in November 1960.

One month later he accepted the job as Kennedy’s secretary of defense.In 1968, when he left the Pentagon, McNamara went on to head the World Bank and “shaped the bank as no one before him,” according to the institution’s official biography.

During his tenure, which ended in 1981, McNamara focused the bank on representing the needs of its developing member countries and aggressively sought funding for development projects.

McNamara “came to the bank brimming with energy, forceful, active, pushing to get things done. He brought with him the firm belief that the problems of the developing world could be solved,” the biography reads.McNamara also wrote or co-authored 11 books on topics that mainly focused on issues of defense and development, the most recent one in 2001.

7. As long as he lived, he was the guiding-star of a whole brave nation, and when he died the little children cried in the streets – J. L. Motley (1814-1877) [(William the Silent) The Rise of the Dutch Republic]

8. “Cut off his head, if necessary.” – Then- U.S. president Richard Nixon, on newly released White House tapes from 1973, joking that he’d like to decapitate the South Vietnamese president who was reluctant to sign a peace treaty to end the war, published in Newsweek.

9. In an interview with Spiegel Online, former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger discusses the painful lessons of the treaty of Versailles, idealism in politics and Obama’s opportunity to forge a peaceful American foreign policy.
Following is an excerpt
SPIEGEL: Do concepts like "good" and "evil" make sense in the context of foreign policy?
Kissinger: Yes, but generally in gradations. Rarely in absolutes. I think there are kinds of evil that need to be condemned and destroyed, and one should not apologize for that. But one should not use the existence of evil as an excuse for those who think that they represent good to insist on an unlimited right to impose their definition of their values.

10. The business of a poet, said Imlac, is to examine, not the individual but the species; to remark general properties and large appearances. He does not number the streaks of the tulip. – Dr. Samuel Johnson (1709-1784)

11. In Guardian newspaper there was an article about 17,000 young carers as per 2001 census in UK. These are children who are looking after their ailing parents with exemplary character in the most difficult conditions. In the same article it is written about Dickens introducing in “Bleak House”, Judi smallweed, a child who has “never owned a doll, never heard of Cinderella, never played at any game”.

12. Let’s put it this way. I could be finished tomorrow, but I think I’ll last longer than anyone else who’s governed Pakistan. First of all because I’m healthy and full of energy – I can work, as I do, even eighteen hours a day. Then because I’m young- I’m barely fourty-four, ten years younger than Mrs. Gandhi. Finally because I know what I want. I’m the only leader in the third world who has gone back into politics despite the opposition of two great powers-in 1966 the United States and the Soviet Union were both very happy to see me in trouble. And the reason I’ve been able to overcome that trouble is that I know the fundamental rule of this profession. What is the rule? Well, in politics you sometimes have to -----------

Mr. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto the then Prime Minister of Pakistan was answering Orian Fallaci, an Italian journalist question “One last question, Mr. President, and excuse the brutality of it. Do you think you can last?” The interview finalized in Karachi on April 1972, was published in Fallaci’s book “Interview with history”. About this book Washington Post commented “Fallaci infiltrates, goes behind the lines and sketches from life… [The book] is a splendid example of that most self-effacing of all arts – the art of the interview.”
Mr. Ali Bhutto's elected government was toppled on 5th July 1977. Billions of people across the world were stunned and saddened when on 4th April 1979 within hours they came to know about Ali Bhutto had been mercilessly martyred.

13. Makarios III (August 13, 1913 – August 3, 1977), was the archbishop and primate of the Cypriot Orthodox Church (1950–1977) and first and fourth President of the Republic of Cyprus (1960–1974) and (1974–1977). Makarios III died unexpectedly, of a heart attack, on August 3, 1977.

At his funeral, held at St. John's Cathedral outside the Archbishopric in Nicosia, 182 dignitaries from 52 countries attended whilst an estimated 250,000 (or about half the Greek Cypriot population of the island) mourners filed past the coffin.

In international circles, Makarios is regarded as one of the most notable politicians of his time. In the The Times editorial on the day following his death Makarios is described as "one of the most instantly recognisable figures of international politics".In his obituary The Times wrote of him as "a familiar and respected figure of the councils of the United Nations, the Commonwealth and of the Third World" and of "a statesman too big for his small island". He was a very important leader of the Non-Aligned Movement.

O.F.: We'll see. But now let's forget about Cyprus and talk about you. First of all, why did you become a priest?

M.; I always wanted to be a priest. Ever since I was a child. I was barely thirteen when I entered the monastery. But the reason is hard for me to explain. Maybe I'd been impressed by my visits to the monasteries around my village. I liked the monasteries so much. Life there was so different from the kind we led in the village, and I sometimes wonder if for me the monastary wasn't a way of escaping the sheep, the poverty. My father was a shepherd. And he always wanted me to help him look after the sheep, and I didn't like looking after the sheep. In fact, he used to complain and say, "I can't expect anything from my elder son! If I need help when I'm an old man, I'll have to turn to my younger son!" He said it so often that in the last years of his life, when I was already archbishop, I liked to tease him: "Do you remember when you used to grumble and say you couldn't expect anything from me?" He was very religious, like everyone in the family, but he couldn't understand why on Sunday morning I left the sheep to run to the monastery and help the priest say Mass. I was twelve years old when I told him I wanted to take that path, and he got angry. But I wasn't scared, I was so sure that nothing would be able to stop me.

O.F.: And your mother?
M.: I don't remember my mother very well. She died when I was very small; I don't even have a picture of her. In those days, the poor didn't get their pictures taken, especially in the mountains of Cyprus. About my mother, I only remember the day she got ill. There was only one doctor in the whole district, and my father set out on foot to look for him. He had no idea in what village he might find him, and went wandering around for hours, and finally he came back dragging the doctor like a sheep. The doctor used the same pill for all illnesses. Aspirin, I guess. He gave my mother the pill, and she died soon after. I remember the funeral. I remember the nights I slept with my father, because with him I could cry better. And I remember the night when he too started crying, and I said, "If you'll stop crying, I'll stop too." And then I remember my grandmother taking me away, and the relatives saying to my father, "You're young, you should get married again. Also for the children." Besides myself, there was my little brother, and my little sister who had just been born. And one day they brought me home to meet my new mother. Father had got married again. My new mother was a woman in the middle of the room, and she kept whispering, "Come in, come in!" I didn't want to go in because I didn't know her. But then I went in and soon I loved her. She was nice. She's still alive, and still nice, and I still love her. Very much. Oh, it's so difficult, and also so easy, to tell you where I come from. My father couldn't read or write. Neither could my mother, nor my grandmother, nor my stepmother. I think my father resigned himself to the idea of letting me go into the monastery because there I would learn to read and write. When he took me there, he kept urging me: "Be obedient, study . . .

This interview of Makarios III at New York on November 1974 was published in Oriana Fallaci book “Interview with History”.

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