Socrates was, by his own account, “a gadfly”. He spent his days in the ancient Athenian marketplace asking awkward questions, disconcerting the people he met by showing them how little they genuinely understood. His typical approach was to innocently question an established idea; he started with simple questions that a politician or businessman or military general invariably found easy to answer. Then, moving logically from one question to the next, Socrates would soon have the powerful man flummoxed and red-faced, fumbling for a valid response. Within minutes, the foundations of the “established idea” were shown to be weak, and the interlocutor was storming away. To be clear, Socrates’ goal wasn’t to annoy people; he was simply trying to get at the truth. He endeavored, through dialogue, to strip the falsehoods away. His was a position of ultimate intellectual humility: “To know, is to know that you know nothing. That is the meaning of true knowledge.”

Socrates essentially invented Western philosophy, and he did it not by preaching his ideas, but by asking questions. His was the spirit of the young child who asks “why?” to everything. We’re supposed to stop asking “why” when we grow up—this is construed somehow as a sign of maturity—but Socrates saw the crucial importance of inquiry, and he wielded it around the marketplace like a weapon. The elites of his day fully appreciated the danger of this man. They understood that their power—as is true of all elites—relied heavily on a non-thinking populace, and they sentenced him to death for “corrupting the youth of Athens”.

This is a standard response to anyone who seriously threatens the status quo. If one considers the response to those who do so today—Noam Chomsky, Julian Assange, Bradley Manning, Tim DeChristoper, Thomas Drake, the Occupy movement—one suspects that the elites would dearly love to feed them hemlock, if only they thought they could get away with it. Socrates was no respecter of power; his allegiance was solely to the truth. He wrote nothing down—we can thank Plato for our knowledge of his life. And his life was lived literally as an example to others—the embodiment of the intellectual tradition we call philosophy, and the standard bearer for free thinkers everywhere.

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Alimamy Rassin was a Fula chief from Sierra Leone, who devoted his life to making peace. Raised in a warrior culture during the 1800s, he was a pacifist from an early age; he harbored an innate hatred of war and all forms of violence. He showed the strength of his conviction by refusing to train as a soldier when he was a young man. This was an unthinkable choice for a future leader—most chiefs in the area saw themselves as warlords who were only in a minor way responsible for the well-being of their people.

When Rassin inherited the chiefdom of his tribe from his adopted father, he allowed a small army to exist in Mafonda solely for self-defense. He set up a fund for the promotion of peace, to be replenished from fines levied in his court. This was another unprecedented idea; prior chiefs had kept this income for themselves. Rassin regularly traveled beyond his kingdom on peace-keeping missions, intent on teaching neighboring villages that non-violence was the best option. This wisdom seemed abundantly clear to him: most villages suffered from food shortages because their men were constantly at war. When local tribes ran out of food entirely, and came to Rassin for help, he made them promise to avoid war for five years in exchange for his assistance. After much negotiation, when the chiefs reluctantly agreed, an entire region of people who had never even considered life without war were obliged to experience it. The climate of Sierra Leone became fundamentally more peaceful, and that change was due to Alimamy Rassin.

Rassin’s commitment to peace was indicative of his great independence of thought. He was unafraid to go against the current way of thinking, or challenge the status quo. When the prior king, whom Alimamy had loved, passed away, the citizens wanted him to take the crown immediately. But he felt that more time was needed to honor the prior king, so he deferred. He led his people for twelve years before officially taking the crown; in the meantime, he simply did the work without the pomp and circumstance. He endeavored to live up to his own ideals, and no one else’s. He required neither praise nor recompense. He believed that the only way for his people to flourish was for them to put aside weapons and focus on education and trade, so he devoted his efforts to making that happen. When the Mandinka army of Samori Toure reached Mafonda in 1885, after systematically occupying many areas of northern Sierra Leone, the invaders were so impressed by Rassin’s wise rule that they chose to withdraw and leave Mafonda alone. The British in Freetown also admired Rassin’s leadership; they offered the chief an annual stipend to keep peace between the surrounding tribes—a job he was already performing—and were shocked when he turned down the salary. He argued that it was unethical to accept payment for the promotion of peace. This choice, which few would have had the strength to make, helped keep his people independent of the British rule that was fast swallowing the surrounding villages.

Despite the increasing prosperity and peace within his tribe, Rassin was rarely satisfied with his efforts. He labored from dawn to dusk to do more, and to do it better. His diligence and excellence as a young scholar was admired across Sierra Leone. And when he took on the role of leader, he made a point of continuing to work in every part of his kingdom. He took part in the farm work and hunting himself, and conducted all of the trade negotiations. He regularly visited the schools and encouraged the young children to apply themselves to their studies. When there was unrest in a neighboring community, he went himself or sent his sons. The older inhabitants of Mafonda joked that their chief seemed to be everywhere at all times.

Rassin increased his own workload in response to the needs of the people around him. As the prosperity of Mafonda grew, payments were frequently made to Rassin in slaves. The ordinary practice would have been for Rassin to sell those slaves for a profit. He hated the idea of selling men and women to brutal slave-dealers, though, so Rassin chose to keep the slaves, and employ them on his own farms. Soon, he had taken on so many slaves that he had to build a village for their accommodation. And as their numbers further swelled, he had to considerably expand his farming operations; he understood that if he had been unable to give the men and women work, it would be considered unacceptable to allow them to stay in his chiefdom. In return, the slaves were deeply loyal and committed to the chief; most of the slave songs that were passed down from that era celebrate Rassin as their savior. The breadth and depth of affection for Rassin ran deep across social classes and across Sierra Leone itself; when the legendary chief died, men and women who had never laid eyes on him grieved.

Mafonda was a very small chiefdom in a part of the world that has received very little attention in our history books. There is, in fact, only one biography of Alimamy Rassin, and it is difficult to find. But his lack of fame does not quell his significance. In a tiny corner of the world, Alimamy Rassin surveyed the society around him, noted the unhappiness and strife, and said, I can make this better. And he did.

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The word “genius” is doubtlessly overused. Leonardo da Vinci, however, was the real deal. He showed what the human brain—albeit just one—is capable of. He was a painter, sculptor, architect, engineer, inventor, musician, scientist, mathematician, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist and writer. His curiosity was voracious, and he rarely entered a field without mastering it. He is considered one of the greatest painters of all time. The Mona Lisa is the most famous painting in existence, and his Last Supper has been reproduced more often than any other work of art. He was also a technological virtuoso; he designed a helicopter, a tank, a calculator, concentrated solar power, and outlined a rudimentary theory of plate tectonics. Da Vinci was a living embodiment of the plasticity of the human mind. Like the rest of us, he was endowed with the same three pounds of lumpy grey matter, encased in a calcium shell; unlike the rest of us, he really knew how to use his 100 billion neurons.

Da Vinci was a free thinker. He addressed every subject as if it had never been touched before. He had no prejudices, and no loyalty to the status quo. For example, in the 1400s, he had the idea for a helicopter. The first operational helicopter did not exist for another five hundred years. Relatively few of his designs were constructed or even feasible in his lifetime. He made plans for machines containing metals and plastics that wouldn’t be created for centuries. He scoured the world around him and saw only opportunities. He never said: that can’t be done. The fact that nothing close to a helicopter, or a calculator, or the harnessing of solar power had ever been realized was of no interest to him. Most of us look at the world around us and say, where can I go from here? Da Vinci’s starting place was within his own imagination. His open-mindedness was not limited to science. He chose to be a vegetarian for moral reasons, an extremely rare position during his time. He believed that since it wasn’t necessary to consume animals in order to be healthy, that it was wrong to do so: “I have from an early age abjured the use of meat, and the time will come when men such as I will look upon the murder of animals as they now look upon the murder of men.” When the philosopher Peter Singer made similar claims in the 1970s, he was ahead of his time, so what does that say of Leonardo Da Vinci? He regularly bought caged birds, for sale at the local market, in order to set them free. Da Vinci’s mind was remarkably un-tethered by the mores of the society he lived in; this freedom of thought allowed him to make great leaps of discovery. He wrote in his notebooks: “There are three classes of people: those who see, those who see when they are shown, those who do not see.” Perhaps no one, before or since, has been able to see as well as Leonardo da Vinci.

His life was formed through overcoming obstacles. Da Vinci was born the illegitimate son of a Florence notary and a peasant woman. Since he was born out of wedlock, he wasn’t allowed a proper surname—da Vinci simply means “of Vinci”, the hill-town where he was born. His low social status meant that no good school would take him, and that most professions were blocked to him. His father, seeing his son’s intelligence, offered him as an apprentice to a Florentine artist, because an apprenticeship was one of the few ways for Leonardo to break into proper society. This movement forward became emblematic of da Vinci’s life; he would continue to find ways through every closed door. He supplemented his poor education by reading voraciously. He became a devoted student of the Florentine artist, Verrochio, and was named a master in a Guild—thus securing himself legitimacy—before the age of twenty. He spent his career moving from one wealthy, powerful patron to another. His main aim was to continue with his work, and he attached himself to whoever would best facilitate his progress. Da Vinci started as a non-person in society and became one of the most celebrated artists, scientists and inventors of all time; this path was forged by his own strength and determination. He wrote: “Obstacles cannot crush me; every obstacle yields to stern resolve.”

Da Vinci achieved great fame in his own lifetime, but he never saw that as an index of success. His measure of success was always internal, not external. He got in trouble a few times, as a young artist, for not finishing commissioned paintings. He abandoned several important works—including the Adoration of the Magi—right before completion, because he lost interest and moved on to a new project. Having envisioned what the painting would look like in his own mind, he saw no reason to actually finish it. He had no need or desire for the acclaim he would receive upon sharing the finished painting with the public. In this realm of his life, as in others, the independence of Da Vinci’s mind reigned supreme. He attached himself to various patrons, but barely seemed to notice, much less want, their admiration. He valued no approval other than his own. He wrote in his notebook: “You can have no dominion greater or less than that over yourself.”

His wonderful notebooks also reveal that this man—whom many consider to be the most brilliant to have ever lived—was often disappointed by his achievements. We blink in disbelief at this statement: “I have offended God and mankind because my work didn’t reach the quality it should have.” He worked seven days a week, during all of his waking hours. He devoted his entire life, and all of his self, to his projects, and yet he was relentlessly self-critical. One heartbreaking line in a notebook reads: “I have wasted my hours.” If he had been satisfied by the standards of the world around him, he might have stopped working, and stopped creating, much earlier. Having reached the threshold necessary for fame and adulation, he might have shone less brightly as an example of the extraordinary heights human beings are able to reach.  Instead, Leonardo da Vinci looked deep inside himself, saw his vast potential, and spent his life pursuing it.

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In 1849, Harriet Tubman trekked ninety miles from Maryland to Philadelphia under constant threat of being caught and either killed or returned to the white family that owned her. When she arrived in the city of brotherly love, she found that she was unable to enjoy her freedom. She was plagued with thoughts of her family members, who were still enslaved. “I was free, and they should be free,” she said. When she received word that her niece Kessiah was being sold to a new owner, she took action. With the help of Kessiah’s husband—a free black man—Tubman returned to the south and rescued her niece and her niece’s two children. Then she headed back to Maryland to rescue two of her brothers. When that trip was completed, she started another. For the next eleven years, Tubman returned again and again to the Eastern Shore of Maryland; all told, she rescued seventy slaves, both family and strangers, in thirteen expeditions. She also provided specific instructions for fifty or sixty other slaves who were planning escapes. Tubman was relentless in her missions, and famous for her success. Despite the best efforts of slave-owners, she was never captured, and neither were the fugitives she guided. Years later, she told an audience: “I was conductor of the Underground Railroad for eight years, and I can say what most conductors can’t say—I never ran my train off the track and I never lost a passenger.” The abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison gave Harriet Tubman the nickname “Moses”, an allusion to the prophet in the Book of Exodus who led the Hebrews to freedom from Egypt.

Tubman’s efforts are even more impressive when you take into account that she was a five-foot tall, disabled woman with no education. As a child in Dorchester, Maryland, she was regularly lent to other masters by her owner, so she rarely saw her family. She was, in the course of her work, regularly beaten, and shown almost no kindness. When Tubman was a teenager (and still enslaved) she was sent to the dry-goods store on an errand, where she encountered a slave from another family who had left the fields without permission. His furious overseer ordered Tubman to help restrain the runaway, and Tubman refused. When the slave started to run, the overseer threw a two-pound weight at him, missed, and the weight struck Tubman. In her words, it “broke my skull”. Bleeding and unconscious, Tubman was returned to her owner’s house where she was left without medical care for two days. When she finally revived, she was sent back into the fields “with blood and sweat rolling down my face until I couldn’t see”. She began to have seizures, crippling headaches and narcoleptic attacks. This condition (later assumed to be temporal lobe epilepsy, resulting from the injury) stayed with Tubman for the rest of her life.

When asked why she risked running away from her slave owner, Tubman said, “There was one of two things I had a right to, liberty or death; if I could not have one, I would have the other.” She willingly, and bravely, put her life on the line countless times. She left her safe, hard-won home in Philadelphia to sleep in the woods with a revolver at her side, praying the slave-catchers would not hear her or the runaways she was transporting. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, she saw it as an opportunity to assist fugitive slaves, and spent the next several years in army camps, often playing nursemaid to ill soldiers, braving gunfire with each attempt to move yet another slave towards freedom. In 1863, she became the first woman to lead an armed assault during the Civil War. Tubman was asked to guide three steamboats around Confederate mines in the Combahee River, a stretch of water she knew well. Plantations were attacked and set fire to by soldiers, and when the steamboats finally sounded their whistles, slaves throughout the area understood that they had been liberated. More than seven hundred slaves were rescued in the Combahee River Raid. The famous abolitionist Frederick Douglass wrote in praise to Tubman, “Most that I have done and suffered in the service of our cause has been in public, and I have received much encouragement at every step of the way. You, on the other hand, have labored in a private way. I have wrought in the day—you in the night… The midnight sky and the silent stars have been the witnesses of your devotion to freedom and of your heroism. Excepting John Brown—of sacred memory—I know of no one who has willingly encountered more perils and hardships to serve our enslaved people than you have.” Harriet Tubman met every obstacle with courage, until the very end of her life. When a New York surgeon offered to, at long last, repair her head wound, she refused to accept any anesthesia for the procedure, and reportedly chose instead to bite down on a bullet, as she had seen Civil War soldiers do when their limbs were amputated.

Harriet Tubman never stopped working for her cause; she never stopped to rest. She saw the Civil War as an opportunity to continue and expand her work, instead of an interruption. She received government rations for her army work initially, but when newly freed blacks thought she was getting special treatment, she gave up her right to the supplies. Instead, she earned money selling pies and root beer, which she made in the evenings. She spent her life in near-constant poverty, working small jobs to make ends meet while devoting the bulk of her time to her cause. The common image of her is a dogged woman trudging through dark woods, intent on saving just one more slave, and this representation is a fair one. Tubman was deeply industrious, without any promise or delivery of monetary reward. She worked hard because her work was important; she was saving lives.

It is a common misunderstanding to think that Harriet Tubman devoted her life to freeing slaves. What she actually devoted her life to was helping people. During the Civil War, she nursed the sick and wounded. After the Confederacy surrendered and there were no more slaves for her to liberate, she became an activist for women’s suffrage. When a white woman asked Tubman whether she believed women ought to have the vote, she replied: “I suffered enough to believe it.” When the National Federation of Afro-American Women was founded in 1896, Tubman was the keynote speaker at its first meeting. She started a rest home for elderly African Americans, because she saw that there was no place for them to go. After buying a parcel of land from the abolitionist senator William Seward in Auburn, New York, she used the property to shelter people who had no money or home. It is impossible to imagine someone who started with less than Tubman, and yet she chose to look at the world around her and say, How can I help?  To this day, her example is an inspiration to every individual seeking equality, and a shot at a better life.

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Leo Nikolayevich Tolstoy wrote two of the best novels of all time. War and Peace was published in 1869. The novel details the events leading up to the French invasion of Russia, as seen through the eyes of five aristocratic families. There are five hundred and eighty characters in this novel, some historical, the rest fictional. The novel is separated into four volumes, and the reader has the singular experience of flying through the romantic and domestic dramas of the “Peace” sections, and then thudding into the graphically detailed battle strategies of “War”. Tolstoy had been a soldier himself, and he conducted extensive research on military history. As a result, the “War” sections read almost like non-fiction, and thereby achieve a level of literary realism that was unprecedented for its time. Isaac Babel said, “If the world could write by itself, it would write just like Tolstoy.” The author himself claimed that War and Peace was “not a novel, even less is it a poem, and still less an historical chronicle.” As far as he was concerned, Anna Karenina, published in 1878, was his first true novel. It is impossible to reduce this epic masterwork to a few sentences, but Anna Karenina contains romance, tragedy, betrayal, an exploration of the merits of life in the city over life in the country and one of the most memorable heroines in all of literature. William Faulkner claimed the novel was, quite simply, “the best ever written.”

However, Leo Tolstoy was no mere novelist. Yes, indeed, he also wrote short stories and plays, but Tolstoy was a deep moral thinker and a social reformer, a Christian anarchist, an ardent pacifist, a Count of Russian nobility and a principled ascetic, a philanthropist, a provocative essayist, and a vegetarian. His spiritual and moral awakening was inspired by his experiences in the army, as well as a trip to France in 1857 during which he witnessed a public execution. This had a huge effect on him, and cemented his distaste for both violence and governments. He wrote in a letter to a friend later that year: “The truth is that the State is a conspiracy designed not only to exploit, but above all to corrupt its citizens… Henceforth, I shall never serve any government anywhere.”

Tolstoy had been raised as an Orthodox Russian Catholic, but he now saw religion as inextricably bound to the state. He chose instead to follow what he considered the direct teachings of Jesus as contained in the Gospels, specifically the Sermon on the Mount. In The Kingdom of God is Within You, published in 1894, Tolstoy outlined a new organization for society based on a literal Christian interpretation of the gospels. This book advocated living according to Jesus’s actual words, by turning away from violence and towards love. He argued that when Christ said to turn the other cheek, he actually meant it: “How can you kill people, when it is written in God’s commandment: ‘Thou shalt not murder’?” Tolstoy believed that all governments that wage war are an affront to Christian principles. He said that every institution or man that argued against non-violence did so only because he stood to gain from bloodshed: “That this social order with its pauperism, famines, prisons, gallows, armies, and wars is necessary to society; that still greater disaster would ensue if this organization were destroyed; all this is said only by those who profit by this organization, while those who suffer from it—and they are ten times as numerous—think and say quite the contrary.”

This brazen, radical treatise has influenced nearly every peaceful activist from Tolstoy’s time until now. Gandhi listed The Kingdom of God is Within You as one of the three most important influences on his life. He read it as a young lawyer living in South Africa, and the book strengthened Gandhi’s burgeoning dedication to non-violence. In 1908, Tolstoy wrote A Letter to a Hindu, detailing how only by using non-violent resistance could the Indians overthrow the powerful British Empire; unfortunately, Tolstoy would not live to see Gandhi put these very ideas into action. Gandhi sent the older author a letter of admiration, and the two men maintained a correspondence until Tolstoy’s death.

Leo Tolstoy had the bravery to think freely and to change his life according to his ideas, even when he suffered for it personally. Tolstoy and his wife, Sonya Adreevna Bers, were married in 1862 and together had 13 children. They enjoyed a passionate, honest relationship—before their marriage, Tolstoy insisted she read his personal journals that detailed his prior sexual affairs so that when she married him, she would know him completely. Sonya was the only one he trusted to transcribe his fiction—she hand-copied War and Peace seven times before Tolstoy was happy with it. Sonya was his secretary, proofreader and financial manager. When Tolstoy began to turn away from fiction towards the matter of how to best live life, a rift opened between them. The more radical Tolstoy’s ideas became, the more rejected Sonya felt. She wanted him to be the man she had married: a wealthy society writer. Tolstoy, as much as he might have wanted to please her, could not remain unchanged. He said, “Without knowing what I am and why I am here, life is impossible.”

Tolstoy never rested on his laurels. For decades, he devoted himself to creating masterworks of fiction, spending hundreds of hours reading, thinking, researching and writing in order to produce art of the highest level. When Anna Karenina was published, Tolstoy was fifty and famous around the world. Many men would have retired at this stage, or at least settled comfortably into their position of wealth and prestige. Tolstoy did neither. He chose, instead, to question everything his life was built on. He wrote over a dozen philosophical works after the publication of Anna Karenina. He confronted uncomfortable truths, started a school for serfs, and publicly advocated positions that were unpopular both inside and outside his home. In 1885, his free thinking led him to vegetarianism: “A man can live and be healthy without killing animals for food; therefore, if he eats meat, he participates in taking animal life merely for the sake of his appetite.” He was excommunicated from the Russian Orthodox Church, and his book The Kingdom of God is Within You was banned throughout Russia. Still, Tolstoy was intent on learning and growing as a human being. “Everyone thinks of changing the world,” he said, “but no one thinks of changing himself.” Tolstoy was engaged, throughout his life, with the hard work of changing himself.

He struggled with giving up his wealth for many years. He felt it was the right thing to do; his wife disagreed. He came to believe that he was undeserving of his inheritance, and he was renowned among the local peasantry for his generosity. Much to Sonya’s chagrin, he would frequently return to his country estate with vagrants whom he felt needed a helping hand, and dispense large sums of money to street beggars while on trips to the city. In his later years, he signed away the royalties from his fiction, to benefit to the public of Russia, and this drove a final wedge between him and his wife. His death came only days after finally gathering the nerve to abandon his family and wealth and take up the path of a wandering ascetic. Tolstoy died in a train station, after falling too ill to travel any further. His very death embodied the search he had conducted his entire life: to be a better human being, to live a better life. In his words, “There is no greatness where there is no simplicity, goodness and truth.”

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