So, in this thread, I propose we share a bit about great people who have made great thing in our country are well known in the country but pherhap not as much in other part of the world.

So let me start with some great people from Quebec:
René Lévesque, politician, creator of the Parti Québécois and one of those who wanted Quebec to pursue a path toward sovereignty.

Samuel de Champlain, also known as the father of New France, is responsible for maping the coast of Quebec (New France at the time) and most of all for the creation of the first settlement, Quebec city.

Jean Talon, the man who made us Quebecers have lots of babies... sound stupid but trust me, its important.

Share some of your country now if you want to. :D

There's only three that come to mind, and all of them instantly.

Copied and pasted from Wikipedia.

Rabindranath Tagore, also written Ravīndranātha Thākura (7 May 1861 – 7 August 1941), was a Bengali polymath who reshaped Bengali literature and music, as well as Indian art with Contextual Modernism in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Author of Gitanjali and its "profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse", he became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913. Sometimes referred to as "the Bard of Bengal", Tagore's poetry was viewed as spiritual and mercurial; however, his "elegant prose and magical poetry" remain largely unknown outside Bengal. Tagore modernised Bengali art by spurning rigid classical forms and resisting linguistic strictures. His novels, stories, songs, dance-dramas, and essays spoke to topics political and personal. Gitanjali (Song Offerings), Gora (Fair-Faced) and Ghare-Baire (The Home and the World) are his best-known works, and his verse, short stories, and novels were acclaimed—or panned—for their lyricism, colloquialism, naturalism, and unnatural contemplation. His compositions were chosen by two nations as national anthems: India's Jana Gana Mana and Bangladesh's Amar Shonar Bangla. Some sources state that Sri Lanka's National Anthem was written by Tagore whilst others state it was inspired by his work.

Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (17 March 1920 – 15 August 1975) was the founding leader of Bangladesh. He served twice as the country's President and was its strongman premier between 1972 and 1975. Rahman was the leader of the Awami League. He is popularly known as the Bangabandhu (Friend of Bengal). He is credited as the central figure in Bangladesh's liberation movement and has been compared with many populist founding fathers of the 20th century. Rahman became the Prime Minister of Bangladesh under a parliamentary system adopted by the new country. His government enacted a constitution proclaiming socialism and secular democracy. The Awami League won a huge mandate in the country's first general election in 1973. However, Rahman faced challenges of rampant unemployment, poverty and corruption. He and most of his family were assassinated by renegade army officers during a coup. In a 2004 BBC Bengali opinion poll, Rahman was voted as the "Greatest Bengali of All Time".

Kazi Nazrul Islam (24 May 1899 – 29 August 1976) was a Bengali poet, writer, musician, and revolutionary. He is the national poet of Bangladesh. Popularly known as Nazrul, he produced a large body of poetry and music with themes that included religious devotion and spiritual rebellion against fascism and oppression. Nazrul's activism for political and social justice earned him the title of "Rebel Poet". His compositions form the avant-garde genre of Nazrul Sangeet (Music of Nazrul). The same genre is also known as Nazrul Geeti (Music of Nazrul) in India. In addition to being revered in Bangladesh, he is equally commemorated and revered in India, especially in the Bengali Speaking states of West Bengal and Tripura.

Tommy Douglas - For Medicare

David Suzuki - Environmentalist

Lester Pearson - Diplomat

In my other nation, the USA

Abraham Lincon - Kept the US together

Chief Joseph - Peace advocate

Martin Luther King Jr. - Civil Rights Leader

Cyrus the great is probably the highest ranked hero for me, he basically invented the human rights so that everyone can live thogheter in peace no matter what religion or race.
He also invented the 'police' called the eye of the king and also the postal service.

Avicenna the founder of book of the modern medicine.

We have many more people who changed the world but these 2 come to mind.

The most famous people from my country are evil lol :(

@Juan: can you name a few and why? lol. Im interested

Austria = Hitler

Austria got mozart and arnold schwarzeneger!

@tuan I'm curious as well, who else other than Hitler do you say was evil and hail from Austria?

Our country is too small, so you only see Slovakia probably just because of sport people like Sagan & others.
But heroes for our country certainly are:
Milan Rastislav Štefánik politician, diplomat, astronomer.
Anton Bernolák & Ľudovít Štúr who created, developed and codified our language.
We also got a lot of inventors who invented parachute, tank pump, air ballon with an air turbine, petrol motor-driven helicopter, fishing reel, electric transformer, gas turbine and others. :)

Portugal:

António Guterres - Actual Secretary General of the United Nations

Luís de Camões - Poet writter of "The Lusiads"

Vasco da Gama - Explorer and the first European to reach India by sea

Cristóvão Colombo (yes, he is portuguese) - Explorer and frist European to discover the new world

Fernando Pessoa - Poet (my favorite poet)

Cristiano Ronaldo - Best football player of all time (just to add some topic to discuss :p)

Egas Moniz - Nobel prize winner of Medicine 1949

José Saramago - Nobel prize winner of literature 1998 (check out this great movie based on his novel: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0861689/)

Amália Rodrigues - The best singer of "FADO" in Portugal history (boring/sad music)

Almeida Garrett - Writter

José Mourinho - Master :p

António Damásio - Scientist and writter of the internacional Best-seller "Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain"

Louis XIV
Guillaume Le Conquérant
Henry IX
LOUIS PASTEUR
JEANNE D' ARC
ROBESPIERRE
CHARLES DE GAULLE
VAUBAN
NAPOLÉON BONAPARTE

My own selection, many traitors were glorified as Heros in History and the opposite is true.

A hero from my country: Siad Barre

Siad was a president of Somalia from 1969-1991. From what family members and Somali elders told me, he was a great leader who really helped Somalia's economy and built the country's structure and educational system. I don't doubt that even a little because when he left, the country went to sh!t from 1992-Present.

A villain from my country: Also Siad Barre

Again, from what I've heard, this man like many tyrants never gave the chance for his people to speak up against him. He really didn't care if you were religious, secular, or subscribed to any other belief as long as you kept your mouth shut.

The one pattern I've noticed with dethroning a tyrant is the fact that the country just loses its balance ex Somalia, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen and others.

@dynastian aren't you from germany?

okay, so I'm from england, bangladesh, and saudi arabia.

Bangladesh:
i got no clue whatsoever about bengali history.

Saudi Arabia:
King Saud: first king of the country and the country was named after him.
king abdullah: ruled just before the current king. he was great!
Prophet muhammad: a prophet.
Barrack obama: for killing ben laden

England:
Winston churchill
Queen elizabeth I
Alfred the great, and many other ancient kings and queens
Isaac newton
Shakespeare
Cromwell
gary lineker
robert peel
hopefully, none of the need explanations.

lmao Barry ain't no Saudi hero haha

^he is, because he killed ben laden. a dude who's ruining saudi's reputation.

Barack Obama is not saudi lmao.

@Lio

No, I'm Bengali. Not German in the slightest. Germany is just my favorite footballing nation.

István Széchenyi is called "the Greatest Hungarian". He was a politician and helped Hungary with his various reforms

He proposed the establishment of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, also donated the full annual income of his estates that year to the Academy.

In 1827, he organized the National Casino, a forum for the patriotic Hungarian nobility. The Casino had an important role in the reform movement by providing an institute for political dialogues.

In his series of political writings, Széchenyi addressed the Hungarian nobility. He condemned their conservatism and encouraged them to give up feudal privileges (e.g. free of taxation status), and act as the driving elite for modernization. Széchenyi envisioned his program for Hungary within the framework of the Habsburg Monarchy. He was convinced that Hungary initially needed a gradual economic, social and cultural development; he opposed both undue radicalism and nationalism. The latter he found particularly dangerous within the multi-ethnic Kingdom of Hungary, where people were divided by ethnicity, language and religion.

Besides his comprehensive political ideas, he concentrated on the development of transportation infrastructure, as he understood its importance for development and communication. Part of this program was the regulation of the flow of waters of the lower Danube to improve navigation, in order to open it to commercial shipping and trade from Buda to the Black Sea. Széchenyi was the first to promote steamboats on the Danube, the Tisza (Theiss), and Lake Balaton, also measures to open up Hungary to trade and development.

He wanted to develop Buda and Pest as a major political, economic and cultural center of Hungary. He supported the construction of the first permanent bridge between the two cities, the Chain Bridge. Besides its improving transportation connections, the Chain Bridge was a symbolic structure, foreshadowing the later unification of the two cities as Budapest, connected across rather than divided by the river.

Yemen, regularly portrayed as the poorest nation in the Arab world, is proving itself to be the richest in courage, resourcefulness and resilience. We have always had this image from the Saudi's, Emirates, Qatari's and all the other Gulf countries to be the country with oil yet no money. It is indeed though the previous President's fault, Ali Abdullah Salah, that he didnt utilize what was in his hands, he just submitted all what he had to the Saudi Arabia. He got his fair share of money and thats that. No care for the Yemenite. This guy was a disgraceful being, that sadly, he was our President. We couldn't do anything at all. Till Tunis, Libya and Egypt started Protesting for a revolution, we had the courage to do the same, but it didnt go as planned. The fear and hatred against our president made us forget about the hatred within the country itself, between the north and south yemen. This may or may not be on topic, but the read below is really interesting and may give you a better view about our country, and our heroes, the Yemenite

Ever since March 2015, some of you may have noticed how oil-rich Saudi Arabia, with the United States at its side, have been waging genocidal war against the Yemeni people.

Yemen are a people under attack by an undeclared super-power coalition comprised of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, US, UK, EU, UAE and Israel. As in Iraq, while the Yemeni people are under attack from super-powers, they are simultaneously being collectively punished by the illegal sanctions imposed by a corrupt United Nations body.
Sanctions imposed by resolution 2216, against 5 named individuals, on the pretext of legitimizing an illegitimate fugitive ex-president, Saudi Arabia and Washington’s hand-picked puppet leader, Mansour Hadi, who demanded that neighbouring Saudi Arabia bomb his own people – even after Hadi had resigned twice from an already over-extended presidential term, before fleeing to his alma mater in Riyadh.

UN sanctions imposed upon 5 named individuals yet being exploited by the US/UK/EU backed Saudi coalition to collectively starve and punish 27 million Yemeni people.
This fact has been consistently omitted and waxed over by western political appeasers and ethically challenged mainstream media apologists – and their ignorant and conceded omission is one of the primary reasons why this conflict has been allowed to go from bad to worse.

To compare Saudi Arabia’s belligerent actions in Yemen to Nazi Germany’s undeclared wars of aggression prior to WWII is no exaggeration. In fact, one could make the argument that this Saudi-US joint venture is much worse, and a far more dangerous precedent. Likewise, the failure of a corrupt UN (who effectively sold Saudi Arabia its seat on at the head of the UN Human Rights Council ), led by an impotent Secretary General in Ban-ki Moon, to censure Saudi Arabia for its flagrant violation of international law, the Nuremberg Principles and the entire Geneva Convention content and implied framework – leaves the UN in the exact same position as the League of Nations in 1938.
This is most certainly the case on paper, and with each passing moment we are nudging ever closer to geopolitical déjà vu.

The Anguish
This is one of the most egregious war crimes we’ve seen so far in Yemen, and considering what Saudi Arabia has already done to date, this is off the scale. On the 9th October 2016, the Saudi ‘coalition’ targeted one of the biggest public halls in Yemen’s capital Sanaa.
Officials said two air strikes hit the grand hall of ceremonies, where a post funeral gathering was held to receive condolences for the late Ali bin Ali al-Ruwaishan, the father of Interior Minister, Jalal al-Ruwaishan.
A total of 4 missiles were launched into crowds of civilians. The first strike, two missiles tore into the hall and surrounding areas leaving dozens dead and dying. Then, as funeral-goers clambered over the smouldering rubble to rescue the injured, Saudi coalition planes returned for the double tap air-strike, targeting the civilian rescuers.

Yesterday, the under secretary of the Public Health Ministry in Yemen told journalist and Middle East commentator, Marwa Osman, the death toll had risen to 458 and hundreds more injured. In an interview with RT, Osman went on to describe, 213 bodies were reported as charred, burned beyond recognition, 67 bodies were completely dismembered and 187 bodies torn apart by shrapnel. The brutality of this attack is evident from the horrific photos that appeared on social media very quickly after the event, as Yemenis were reeling from the scale of the massacre.

The Bloodshed

The US State Department immediately swung into damage limitation mode and cranked up their hypocrisy to protect their Saudi coalition military industrial complex clients. John Kirby even deployed the “self-defence” terminology usually reserved for their other regional, arms guzzling ally with close links to Al Qaeda, Israel.
The bloodshed and suffering of the Yemeni people was reduced to an obscene game of semantics by a cold and calculating US State Department, as their multi billion dollar arms industry registered obscene trading levels with the Saudi coalition in 2015. In the first 21 months of Saudi-US illegal war on Yemen, US arms sales worth $33 Billion were closed Saudi and Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) entities according to Defense News. In total, America’s Nobel Peace Chief Barack Hussein Obama has offered to sell $115 billion in weapons to Saudi Arabia since taking office in 2009 – more than any previous US administration, according to a recent report.
Not to be left out of the party, Britain has also sold more than £3.7 billion in arms to Saudi Arabia since Saudi’s illegal war of aggression began.

In truth, many of these estimates are conservative and do not include many more hundreds of millions in ancillary costs, staffing, support contracting and engineering.

Forgotten Heroes

Even though they’ve been completely redacted by the western media, and also by the myriad of Gulf monarchy media outlets, the real heroes of this conflict are the Yemeni people.

In their reductionist way of thinking and categorizing the world outside of their shores, Americans refer to Middle East populations in sectarian terms – because this is they way they would like to see the world, but it couldn’t be any further from reality. To Americans, the Yemeni war is all because of “Iranian-backed Shia Houthi Rebels.” The first US Congressman ever to say that in public probably read it directly off an AIPAC policy briefing sheet. That’s the sad reality still in Washington – information-poor (and lobby cash-rich) elected representatives are only able to see the world through the Israeli lens.

The reality is much more complex than just “the Houthis.” A genuine Arab Spring has taken place in Yemen and the US and Saudi response was simply to try and crush the people. But the people have resisted fiercely, and together. Unlike other neo-colonial ventures like Iraq and Afghanistan – the people of Yemen have united to a large degree and are determined to realize their own vision of self government. This is something that has been written off by everyone in the US establishment – from the President all the way down the political food chain.

Damning Indictment

The UK/US built, House of Saud, is waging a genocidal war of aggression that has already destroyed entire swathes of Yemeni cultural heritage and decimated entire communities, particularly in the northern, traditionally Ansarullah (Houthi) held areas such as Saada and Hajjah. This was by design. By now, we can see clearly how this was yet another ethnic cleansing programme being endorsed, fuelled and defended by the United States and her allies in the UK, EU, Israel, and of course the neighbouring Gulf States, the majority of whom participated in this dirty war. Oman, a lone, moderate, and independent thinking gulf state, has remained neutral, providing a degree of support to the Yemeni people.

This is yet another war being fought over resources, based upon illegitimate pretexts and murderous hegemony, whose primary victims are the innocent people of Yemen, and above all the children of Yemen whose sunken eyes, distended, starving bellies and bird-like limbs are a stark reminder of the cruelty of the corporatist-imperialist elite branding their road map on the lives of peoples who, in their twisted optic, are nothing more than insignificant obstacles, collateral damage in the ascent to unipolar supremacy.
The height of US hypocrisy was on full display during a US State Department press briefing where the already discredited US spokesman John Kirby shameless danced around a mass-murder by Saudi Arabia – whose airstrikes are supported logistically by the United States. This is the definition of criminality unchecked. Watch: