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John Lewis
Champion of Civil Rights
John Lewis: I never thought that we would fail or that I would fail. I knew from time to time we may make some blunders. We may make some mistakes, but we were not going to fail. I think part of leadership is you must be hopeful. You must be optimistic. You must have this idea that we're not -- that I'm not going to give up. I'm not going to give in. I'm not going to give out that I'm going to hang in there. I'm going to keep the faith. I'm going to keep pushing. I'm going to keep pulling. People accuse me from time to time of being too hopeful, too optimistic, but I think being hopeful, being optimistic is part of being a leader, that in a sense you know where you're going. I know maybe it won't happen in my lifetime, but I know somehow in some way we're going to create the Beloved Community, that we're going to create a national community, a world community that is at peace. And as you pass this way, as you travel life's journey, you must do what you can. You must be part of an investment. You must be part of a down payment on the building of that Beloved Community. You must be part of an installment plan. You have to give your part. You have to give your piece.
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John Lewis
Champion of Civil Rights
I loved Martin Luther King, Jr. He was my hero. He was a wonderful friend. I remember during the last leg of the march from Selma to Montgomery, we were walking and I think it started raining. He had a little cap on his head, and he took the cap off and he put it on my head and he said, "John, you've been hurt. You need to protect your head. You need to wear this cap." I just thought it was a wonderful something on his part, but he was always so caring and so sharing. And Robert Kennedy, I'll tell you, I saw there was something about him that was so dear. When Dr. King was assassinated, I said to myself -- I had what I call an executive session with myself. I said, "We still have Robert Kennedy." And then two months later Robert Kennedy was taken. The assassination of these two young men was the most difficult time in my life really. The saddest. They were friends. They were people that I loved and admired. I was with Robert Kennedy when we heard that Dr. King had been shot. I was in Indianapolis, Indiana campaigning with him, and I was in his room at the Los Angeles Ambassador Hotel and spoke to him about 15 minutes before he went down to make his victory statement. Even today I feel like I must continue to do what I can. And I often wonder, "If Dr. King were here, and Robert Kennedy were, what would they be doing?" So someone must continue to speak up and speak out, because they're not here.
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John Lewis
Champion of Civil Rights
John Lewis: More than anything else, I had to combat the barriers, and we tore down those barriers. I just had to set a sail against the wind, those strong winds, to end segregation and racial discrimination, but somehow, in some way, I didn't let those barriers keep me down. When I would get arrested from time to time and thrown in jail one day, and I'd get out, I'd go right back the next day. That's how I got arrested 40 times. There were people who didn't want me to march all the way from Selma to Montgomery because I had been hurt, but two weeks after Bloody Sunday I was back on the line, marching all the way. They didn't want me to continue the Freedom Ride from Montgomery to Jackson, Mississippi, because I had been hurt, because I had a patch on my head but I kept going. You have to be determined. You have to feel that somehow in some way you can make it, that you will survive, that it's all going to work out.
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Maya Lin
Artist and Architect
Maya Lin: I was probably the first kid in my high school to go to Yale. And you know, Athens, Ohio, town of 15,000. I applied almost as a lark. I didn't know where I was going to go to school and I got in, and I was just so happy, and it was really surprising. And then, when I got there, the whole shock of being in a way not as well prepared academically for an Ivy League school and learning that you were the dumbest person in your class, not the smartest. No, it was very, very, intimidating. And it was also funny because my -- as I started to really focus on art and architecture, my roommates were appalled. Like one semester I never went to the library. I mean, I was pulling all nighter after all nighter obsessing about this project or that.
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George Lucas
Creator of "Star Wars"
Film is not an easy occupation. There's a lot of occupations that are difficult. Film is one of them. There's always adversity that you're faced with. I like to tell students that I talk to that, you know, it's not a matter of how well can you make a movie. It's how well can you make it under the circumstance, because there's always circumstances. You cannot use that as an excuse. You can't put a title card at the head of the movie and say, "Well, we really had a bad problem. You know, the actor got sick and it rained this day and we had a hurricane." And you know, you can't -- the cameras broke down -- you can't do that. You simply have to show them the movie and it has got to work and there are no excuses. And so, you really have to focus on what you're doing and just plow ahead no matter what hurdles are thrown in front of you.
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George Lucas
Creator of "Star Wars"
George Lucas: I had a very, very difficult time my first two pictures. And when I started working on Star Wars, my second film, American Graffiti, had not come out yet. So, in the beginning it wasn't something anybody was interested in and I had taken it to a couple of studios and they had turned it down. And then one studio executive saw American Graffiti and loved it, and I took him the proposal. He said, "You know, I don't understand this, but I think you're a great film maker and I'm going to invest in you. I'm not going to invest in this project." And that's really how it got made.
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George Lucas
Creator of "Star Wars"
American Graffiti was really my first attempt at doing something mainstream, so to speak, and even it was so -- one, it was in a genre that was looked down upon but I loved when I was a kid. It was about my life as I grew up, so I cared about it a lot. And then on top of it, it was in a style that was different from what everybody was used to. It was intercutting four stories that didn't relate to each other, which nobody had really done before. Now it's sort of the standard fare for television. And it had music all the way through it; not just the score but actual songs from the period, and that is something that nobody had done before. And they just sort of described it as a musical montage with no characters and no story, and so it was very, very hard to get that off the ground, and on top of that it was a B movie. I almost got it set up at American International Pictures, where they liked doing those kinds of movies but it was too strange for them in terms of the style. And Star Wars was kind of the same situation where it was a genre they weren't that interested in. Science fiction was not something that did well at the box office. It dealt with robots and Wookies and things that -- generally most people -- they couldn't read it and say, "I understand what this is all about." They just were completely confused by it. And really on top of that, it was aimed at being a film for young people, and most of the studios said, "Look, that's Disney's. Disney does that. The rest of us can't do that, so we don't want to get into that area." So I had so many strikes against me when I did that. I was lucky that I found a studio executive that just believed in me as a film maker and just disregarded the material itself.
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