74. I strongly agree that rule-breakers are the most memorable people. By departing from the status quo, iconoclasts call attention to themselves, some providing conspicuous mirrors for society, others serving as our primary catalysts for progress. In politics, for example, rule-breakers Mahatma Ghandi and Martin Luther King secured prominent places in history by challenging the status quo through civil disobedience. Renegades such as Ghengus Khan, Stalin, and Hussein, broke all the human-rights rules, thereby leaving indelible marks in the historical record. And future generations will probably remember Nixon and Kennedy more clearly than Carter or Reagan, by way of their rule-breaking activities―specifically, Nixons Watergate debacle and Kennedys extra-marital trysts. In the arts, mavericks such as Dali, Picasso, and Warhol, who break established rules of composition, ultimately emerge as the greatest artists, while the names of artists with superior technical skills are relegated to the footnotes of art-history textbooks. Our most influential popular musicians are the flagrant rule breakers―for example, be-bop musicians such as Charlie Parker and Thelonius Monk, who broke all the harmonic |