Gallup's List of Most Widely Admired People of The 20th Century

Gallup's List of People that Americans Most Widely Admired in the 20th Century is a poll published in December 1999 by The Gallup Organization to determine which people around the world Americans most admired for what they did in the 20th century.

While Gallup has constructed a yearly Gallup's most admired man and woman poll list since 1948, it did not cover the entire century. Therefore they combined the results from those lists with a new preliminary poll to determine the 18 most admired people. They then ran a final poll to produce an ordered list of those 18. This produced the following ranking:

  1. Mother Teresa
  2. Martin Luther King, Jr.
  3. John F. Kennedy
  4. Albert Einstein
  5. Helen Keller
  6. Franklin D. Roosevelt
  7. Billy Graham
  8. Pope John Paul II
  9. Eleanor Roosevelt
  10. Winston Churchill
  11. Dwight D. Eisenhower
  12. Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
  13. Mohandas Gandhi
  14. Nelson Mandela
  15. Ronald Reagan
  16. Henry Ford
  17. Bill Clinton
  18. Margaret Thatcher

Famous quotes containing the words gallup, list, widely, admired, people and/or century:

    “I did not enter the Labour Party forty-seven years ago to have our manifesto written by Dr. Mori, Dr. Gallup and Mr. Harris.”
    —Tony Benn (b. 1925)

    “A man’s interest in a single bluebird is worth more than a complete but dry list of the fauna and flora of a town.”
    —Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    “Give a scientist a problem and he will probably provide a solution; historians and sociologists, by contrast, can offer only opinions. Ask a dozen chemists the composition of an organic compound such as methane, and within a short time all twelve will have come up with the same solution of CH4. Ask, however, a dozen economists or sociologists to provide policies to reduce unemployment or the level of crime and twelve widely differing opinions are likely to be offered.”
    —Derek Gjertsen, British scientist, author. Science and Philosophy: Past and Present, ch. 3, Penguin (1989)

    “Those who are esteemed umpires of taste, are often persons who have acquired some knowledge of admired pictures or sculptures, and have an inclination for whatever is elegant; but if you inquire whether they are beautiful souls, and whether their own acts are like fair pictures, you learn that they are selfish and sensual. Their cultivation is local, as if you should rub a log of dry wood in one spot to produce fire, all the rest remaining cold.”
    —Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    “I never understood exactly why people get engaged—The only time I ever did the most disastrous things happened—but I feel that there’s a great deal to be said for immediate matrimony always. If I once got started I’d probably have to become a mormon to cover my confusion. What I mean is that if he and she are crazy about each other it is sheer tempting God to stay apart, come what may. And if people arent crazy about each other being engaged wont help them.”
    —John Dos Passos (1896–1970)

    “F.R. Leavis’s “eat up your broccoli” approach to fiction emphasises this junkfood/wholefood dichotomy. If reading a novel—for the eighteenth century reader, the most frivolous of diversions—did not, by the middle of the twentieth century, make you a better person in some way, then you might as well flush the offending volume down the toilet, which was by far the best place for the undigested excreta of dubious nourishment.”
    —Angela Carter (1940–1992)