Mother Teresa

The line most people know from her is the instruction to start with whoever is nearest — the person in front of you, not the abstraction. That was the whole method. Born Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu in Skopje in 1910, she joined a religious order and worked as a teacher in India before deciding that her place was directly among the destitute. What began as simple acts of care on the streets of Kolkata became the Missionaries of Charity, an order that went on to run homes for the dying, orphanages and clinics.

The practical shape of the work was small and repetitive: washing, feeding, sitting with someone and listening. She treated those routines as a training in compassion rather than a stopgap, and she argued that a person's dignity has nothing to do with their wealth or their usefulness. Her framing was religious — she spoke of seeing Christ in the most vulnerable — and her plain sari and sandals were meant to read as solidarity rather than costume. Her language in public was correspondingly direct, and she used platforms without cultivating fame around herself.

Attention brought money and it brought examination. She took donations while stressing humility and accountability inside the order. Critics questioned aspects of the medical practice and the theology, which opened a longer argument about suffering and how care should be delivered. The Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, along with other awards, funded further houses, and she travelled to open them in war zones and slums, adjusting to what each place needed. Her letters, published later, show long stretches of spiritual dryness running alongside the work.

She died in 1997. The order kept operating internationally, she was canonised in the Catholic tradition, and hospitals and shelters carrying her name work alongside civic partners. Supporters and critics tend to agree on at least one thing: she moved enormous numbers of volunteers and directed public attention towards people who had been written off. Her sentences still circulate widely as moral shorthand, largely because they ask something small and immediate of whoever reads them.