Albert Einstein or Winston Churchill

I think that pretty much all the famous names had a hard time in one way or another, so I think I'll stick with being Little Miss Nobody if I may, and just pootle along doing my own thing.

If I really have to choose, then I think I'd like to be someone who's work continues to be developed today by people who're passionate about it, and it would have to be in a field that I'm interested in. I'd like to be someone who was able to make a difference to the way people live and think in some way, but I'm not coming up with any names this morning.

It would have been fun to be a character from the centuries gone by,but there are so many that you could wish to be,that it would be evry hard to think of one individual one.Im thinking along the lines of Florence Nightingale here,or a similar figure in history.No way would I ever want to be a criminal from those days,the punishements were harsh and the jails were tough then.I will give it some more thought.

Hard to imagine being that person...would I be them or me? I do like to think of knowing some great person, having chats with them or seeing how they did what they did, day to day. Winston Churchill is a big favorite. Fascinating to contemplate how different our world would be if he had died in, say, 1930. You speak of "before us" in history, but you and I remember his funeral, and hearing about him directly from our parents. I gather from your 1066 post that you find history fascinating, as do I. It is the rate of change in the past 200 years,(as opposed to the past 3,000 of history), ever accelerating, that really draws my attention. I fear sometimes it is like looking at a car wreck happening. Riveting, but... Here is what I find astonishing about the rate at which history is happening, human civilisation changing: When Winston Churchill was a young officer, he took part in a cavalry charge at Omduran. He was trained in fighting with a sword from horseback, in a way of fighting that went back unbroken through many generations to over 2,000 years ago. Then when he was Prime Minister in the 1950's, he had at his command a very different weapon - the atomic bomb. Imagine, in his one lifetime, he went from the weapon at his hand being a sword to being an atomic bomb! How could his mind adapt? The change was so great in that one lifetime, and accelerating more and more. No wonder humanity is having a hard time adjusting. To you younger Mylotters: Churchill was around while many of the adults you know were children or teens. You know these adults, so you're not that far removed - it's the very recent past, in terms of history. You're almost directly connected. So, the rate of change...can humanity handle it?