"I hate race discrimination most intensely and in all its manifestations. I have fought it all during my life; I fight it now, and will do so until the end of my days."

Nelson Mandela is classic proof of how an individual can effect the course of history. Doubtless, apartheid South Africa could not have survived in a post-cold war world, but without Mandela's example, his limitless capacity to forgive, to see nation before ethnicity, his infectious hunger for peace, the regime's collapse would likely have been violent indeed.