Nelson Mandela

South African anti-apartheid revolutionary who spent 27 years in prison on Robben Island and emerged to lead the negotiated end of apartheid and become South Africa's first democratically elected president — whose moral authority and capacity for forgiveness made him the most admired political leader of the late 20th century.

Demonstrated that the person who forgives their oppressors is more powerful than the person who defeats them — Mandela's refusal to become the bitterness he had every right to feel, and his insistence on national reconciliation over retribution, transformed what could have been a bloodbath into a democratic transition.