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Someone Asks “Who Are Some Of The Most Badass People In History?”, 29 People Deliver
We may think of Che Guevara, Julius Caesar, and Cleopatra as some of the coolest people who have ever lived. But there are also unsung heroes and less known historical figures, who have forever changed the history of humankind.
From doctors to pirates, fighters and spies, scientists and inventors, outsiders and society’s outcasts, although their stories are worthy of history books, only a few of them have made it into them. So today, we are taking a look at these two illuminating Reddit threads (this and this) where people share who they think are the most badass people that ever lived.
We wrapped up some of the most interesting stories about them, so scroll down and upvote the ones you liked the most. After you're done, be sure to share our previous feature with more of the coolest people in history.
This post may include affiliate links.
#1
There is no way Stanislav Petrov isn't the most badass person ever.
On September 26, 1983, Lt. Colonel Stanislav Petrov was in command at Serpukhov-15, a bunker where the Soviets monitored their satellite-based detection systems. Shortly after midnight, panic broke out when an alarm sounded signaling that the United States had fired five Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles, or ICBMs, toward Russia. The warning was a false alarm—one of the satellites had misinterpreted the glint of sunlight off clouds near Montana as a missile launch—but to the Soviets, it appeared the United States had started a nuclear war.
Protocol demanded that Serpukhov-15 report any signs of a missile launch to the Soviet high command, but Petrov had a hunch the warning was an error. He knew the new satellite system was mistake-prone, and he also reasoned that any nuclear strike by the Americans would come in the form of hundreds of missiles, not just five. With only minutes to make a decision, Petrov chose to ignore the blaring warning alarms and reported the launch as a false alarm—a move that may have averted a nuclear holocaust. The incident remained classified until after the Cold War ended, but Petrov later received several humanitarian awards for his extraordinary actions, and was even honored by the United Nations.
#2
Mary E. Walker - doctor, and first and only woman to have the Congressional Medal of Honor from actions in the US Civil War.
She was the daughter of active abolitionists and the only woman to graduate with a medical degree when she attended Syracuse Hospital (and one of the first). When she was refused from medical military service, she started treating the wounded who were dragging themselves home. She eventually was allowed in the military in 1863 as an assistant surgeon. The infantry she served with (Ohio 52nd) had lower casualty rates. Attended battle-ground wounded and crossed enemy lines to attend women and children and civilians injured. She was captured by the Confederates in 1864. She treated her fellow POWs while held, refusing to dress or 'act' like a lady.
She then worked in Tennessee at a woman’s and orphan asylum through outbreaks of tuberculosis, fever. The hospital records of her service do not name her work, in favor of her male supervisors, but a medical award now is given in her name. Also campaigned, with risk of imprisonment, for women's right to vote. Respect for her service kept her from arrest.
#3
The unidentified 'Tank Man' who stood in front of a column of tanks during the Tiananmen Square Protests.
#4
I'm gonna go with Chinese pirate queen Ching Shih. Started as a prostitute, ended as the leader of a fleet of 300 ships and 20'000 to 40'000 pirates.
#5
Odette Sansom Hallowes, later Odette Churchill, a French SOE agent during the second world war. Arrested in 1943 by the gestapo, she was sent with fellow SOE agent Peter Churchill (no relation to the Prime Minister) to Fresnes Prison. At Fresnes, she was interrogated and tortured 14 times by the Gestapo, including having her toenails torn out, her back scorched by a red hot poker, and locked in a dark basement for 3 days at a time. During interrogation, she lied to the Gestapo agents saying Peter Churchill was her husband and the nephew of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, as if the Germans thought she was a relative of his then she'd be kept alive as a bargaining tool. In 1943, she was sentenced to death twice, to which she responded, "Then you will have to make up your mind on what count I am to be executed, because I can only die once." Infuriated, the Gestapo agent sent her to Ravensbruck Camp. At Ravensbruck, she was kept on a starvation diet in a cell where other prisoners could be heard being beaten. After D-Day, all food was removed for a week, all light was blocked from her cell, and the heat was turned up. She was expected to die after a few weeks but instead only fell unconscious and was relocated to solitary confinement. As a child she'd been blind and bedridden from serious illnesses for 3.5 years, so the darkness didn't bother her, and as she was considered a "difficult child" (likely due to her illnesses) during her convent education, she was used to starvation punishments. As the Allies approached Ravensbruck, the commandant drove her to a nearby American base to surrender, hoping to use Odette as a bargaining tool to escape execution. She survived the war and was the first woman to be awarded the George Cross, and remains woman to have been awarded the medal whilst alive. Her George Cross was stolen in 1951 when her home was burgled, but later returned with an apology note after an appeal by Odette's mother. The film 'Odette' is about her, and she was technical advisor on the film 'Carve Her Name With Pride' about her fellow SOE agent Violet Szabo.
#6
Simo Hayha.
Finnish farmer. Got drafted. Killed 505 Russians in the Winter War, making him the deadliest sniper ever. Didn't use a scope. He also killed 200 more with his machine gun
#7
Harriet Tubman - take a look at her bio - she went on over a dozen missions into the south to rescue salves from plantations and was a spy for the US army. Her bio is such a rollercoaster and is so fascinating and inspiring.
#8
Hands down Olga of Kiev
Her husband was killed, and eventually the tribe that did the deed started pestering her to marry one of their princes. Does she start a war? No, she plays nice, claims the emissaries got lost, and has them all buried alive.
Does she stop there? Hell no.
She sends a messenger asking for an honor guard of their best men. She insists on stopping at a bathhouse on the way, where she locks all the honor guard inside and burns it to the ground.
Does she stop there? Hell no.
She invites thousands of the to a funeral feast where she Red Weddings 5000 of them, then lays siege to the city. The settlement sues for peace.
Does she stop there? Hell no.
She tells them that she will give them peace in exchange for six birds from the rafters of every home in the city. Once she has the birds she ties burning sulfur to them and releases them. They all fly back to their roosts, setting the entire city ablaze. She massacred the fleeing survivors and left the remnant to pay tribute.
Bad. F**king. A*s.
#9
Ben L. Salomon. He was a front line surgeon in WW2. During the battle of Saipan he was in a surgical tent helping wounded soldiers, when he noticed a Japanese soldier bayoneting one of the injured men. He shot the Japanese soldier and then quickly dispatched several other Japanese soldiers who came into the tent. He then took control of a mounted machine gun and went to town. When they found his body, he was shot and stabbed 24 times and had killed 98 Japanese soldiers. He repositioned the machine gun 4 times due to him not being able to shoot over the mountains of bodies. He was given the Medal of Honor in 2002.
#10
Terry Fox.
Lost his leg to cancer when he was still a teenager. Decided to raise awareness of cancer by running across Canada.
With only 1 leg, he ran a marathon a day for 143 days, before it was discovered that his cancer had returned and he died.
#11
Julie d'Aubigny. She was the bisexual daughter of Louis XIV's Master of the Horse. She was trained in swordsmanship and horsemanship. She ran away with her boyfriend, to live as exhibition duelists, drinking and fighting their way across France. Until she got bored. At which point she hooked up with a nobleman's daughter. When the nobleman found out, he did what you do with misbehaving daughters, in the 18th century: place them in a convent. A convent that Julie then joined to have hot, sexy, illicit lesbian nun sex. They then escaped the convent together, that Julie burned the f**k down, because Julie d'Aubigny gives zero f**ks. Her girlfriend, understandably freaked out, ran back to her parents, who had Julie convicted of kidnapping in absentia. The King pardoned her, she had an illustrious career at the French Opera, sexing up noblemen's wives and fighting duels. She died at 33, after living the most James Bond life I can ever imagine anyone living, ever.
TL;DR: French bisexual swordfighting noblewoman joins convent to sleep with her girlfriend, swordfights all of France, somehow gets invited to the King's court
#12
Christopher Lee was a pretty big bad a*s of our time. RAF. Actual spy. Terrific actor, appearing in the James Bond, Lord of the Rings, and Star Wars franchises. Released multiple metal albums while in his late 80s/early 90s.
#13
Phung Thih Chinh, a Vietnamese noblewoman who protected the central flank of the Trung sisters' army against Chinese invaders in 43AD. She was 9 months pregnant at the time and during battle with Chinese forces, she stopped to give birth then returned to open the enemy's ranks with the sword in one arm and her newborn on the other, blood and afterbirth still staining her clothes.
63
#14
Audie Murphy
Here are some highlights: -Kept enlisting until the military took him in WWII- he weighed around 100 pounds and was sickly. He also had falsified his papers because he was too young.
held off a charging army (soldiers and TANKS) with a machine gun while the vehicle was on fire and likely to explode, he was holding them off so his fellow soldiers could retreat. This took an hour. His reason for doing this: “They were killing my friends.”
became one of the most decorated U.S. soldiers in the war. He was so heroic that other countries awarded him their medals.
fought the war while battling malaria
became addicted to pain meds after the war and kicked the habit by locking himself in a hotel room to go cold turkey
became a movie star, partly by playing himself, and had a 21 year career
#15
Raoul Wallenberg.
He saved thousands of Jews in Hungary, by giving them Swedish passports.
One of his drivers said
".. he climbed up on the roof of the train and began handing in protective passes through the doors which were not yet sealed. He ignored orders from the Germans for him to get down, then the Arrow Cross men began shooting and shouting at him to go away. He ignored them and calmly continued handing out passports to the hands that were reaching out for them. I believe the Arrow Cross men deliberately aimed over his head, as not one shot hit him, which would have been impossible otherwise. I think this is what they did because they were so impressed by his courage. After Wallenberg had handed over the last of the passports he ordered all those who had one to leave the train and walk to the caravan of cars parked nearby, all marked in Swedish colours. I don't remember exactly how many, but he saved dozens off that train, and the Germans and Arrow Cross were so dumbfounded they let him get away with it"
#16
Hugh Glass ,
While on a fur trapping expedition, Hugh was attacked and mauled by a grizzly bear. He was able to kill the giant bear with some help, then passed out. His group left him thinking he would never survive the wounds or the journey which was 200 miles away from the nearest town. Glass regained consciousness only to find himself abandoned, without weapons or equipment. He was suffering from a broken leg, the cuts on his back were exposing bare ribs, and all his wounds were festering. So he cleaned his wounds with maggots, made a boat, fought off wolves and 6 weeks later made it back to civilization, crawling a large portion of the way.
#17
Teddy Roosevelt. Went to give a speech, nearly got assassinated. Shot in the chest, but survived. Says, "F**k it," and gives the speech anyway.
#18
Witold Pilecki
TL;DR He was voluntarily imprisoned in Auschwitz just to tell the world about Holocaust and to organise resistance movement.
During World War II, Pilecki volunteered for a Polish resistance operation that involved being imprisoned in the Auschwitz concentration camp in order to gather intelligence and later escape. While in the camp, he organized a resistance movement and informed the Western Allies of Nazi Germany's Auschwitz atrocities as early as 1941. He escaped from the camp in 1943 after nearly 2½ years of imprisonment.
#19
This dude Thayr that I worked with at a hotel. He was a middle aged middle eastern that never really socialized. One day, this ghetto white kid got mad at him for something, and seriously asked Thayr if he wanted to fight. Thayr's response was to clarify, "With weapon, or with hand?" So he's my vote.
#20
Michael Malloy.
Malloy was a homeless alcoholic man. Five men took out life insurance policies on him and tried to get him to drink himself to death by giving him unlimited credit at a bar that one of them owned (so that they could collect the money from the insurance company). This wasn't working fast enough, so they started putting anti-freeze in his drink... then turpentine, then horse tranquiliser, and finally rat poison. None of them killed Malloy.
The men then tried feeding him raw oysters with wood alcohol and poisoned, spoiled sardine sandwiches (filled with carpet nails). Again, none of this worked, so they waited for him to pass out drunk one night, then dragged his body out into the -26 °C night and left him there to sleep (pouring 20 litres of water on him for good measure). The next day, Malloy came into the bar and ordered another drink.
The group then ran him over with a car at 70km/h. This hospitalised him for a few weeks, but again, didn't kill him. Eventually they succeeded by putting a gas pipe down his throat (after he passed out drunk of course) and pumping gas into him for an hour. The group were later convicted of murder (due, in no small part, to the fame of Malloy's durability), with four of them receiving the death penalty.
#21
Tsutomu Yamaguchi, the Japanese man who was unfortunate enough to be present in the blast radius of both atomic bombs and lucky enough to not only survive both, but subsequently live all the way into the 2000s.
#22
Neil Armstrong. He was a very modest, quiet and withdrawn man who barely spoke of his trip to the Moon.
#23
Mary Read— a badass female pirate.
In a nutshell;
Mother dressed Mary as her dead brother for financial reasons where then Mary worked for money. Then later on she eventually joined the British navy (still disguised as a man). A ship she was on was taken by pirates where she willingly joined (yet again, still dressed as a man).
It gets rowdy from here— there was another pirate (Anne Bonny) who revealed to Mary that she was a woman (because she found Mary attractive) but then Mary revealed that she too, was a woman. Then these two badass ladies become some of the most infamous pirates.
Fast forward, both Anne and Mary were arrested and were on trial to hang when they both said they were pregnant, which meant that they’re hanging is delayed. Unfortunately Mary died in prison from an illness, it’s assumed that Mary died before the child was born.
#24
Abdissa Aga- To avenge Italy's defeat by Ethiopia, Mussolini started the 2nd Ethio-Italian war in 1936. Major Abdisa Aga and his regiment were surrounded, they took him as a prisoner of war from Ethiopia in 1936 to the island of Sicily, Italy under max security, but he penetrated the prison camp and fled to the woods with ammunition and trucks full of supplies in the heart of Italy. The Italian govt did all it could to catch him. Abdisa helped free many other prisoner and they battled the Italians fiercely. Aftter the 2nd world war started the Allied force, Britain, USA, France and Russia recognized Abdisa Aga and the rest of the partisan and supplied them with arms and provisions. Major Abdisa was chosen to lead the international partisan army which consisted of Americans, French, English, Ethiopians and other nationals. This way the partisan weekend the Italian army and contributed to their defeat. Major Abdisa Aga was the first hero who entered and captured Rome, sitting in a jeep, waving first and foremost the flag of Ethiopia. The British made Abdisa the commander of the British police force and sent him to Germany to fight the Nazi. After many battles and capturing cities from the Nazi's, he entered Berlin, again Waving Ethiopian flag. Abdisa Aga passed away after 1974 Ethiopian Revolution in his motherland Ethiopia.
#25
Genghis Khan.
The answer to any "Who are/were the most bad a*s bad asses in history" is always the Mongols, and Genghis was their daddy.
#26
Musashi. At the end of the feudal era in Japan but before imperialism took over, many a samurai found themselves with a sword and the accompanying skillset but no master to serve. It was the time of the wandering swordsman.
Of all these swordsmen, Musashi was the best. Over time his legend grew and with it came any and every would-be upstart looking to take that title from him. None could match his skill though.
However, there did arise one known as Kojiro who had begun to make his own name for himself. It was said that Kojiro could swing his blade so quickly that the eye couldn't see it move.
Word spread quickly that Kojiro wanted to face Musashi and prove himself the better swordsman. Musashi agreed and the fight was to take place along the bank of a large river.
The day of the fight came and Kojiro, along with a large group of onlookers, showed up at the agreed-upon location. Musashi arrived on the opposite bank with nothing but a small knife. He paid a ferryman to take him across the wide belt of the river and grabbed a spare oar.
Musashi used the knife to whittle the side of the oar into a sharper edge as he was taken to the crowd awaiting him.
As soon as he saw Musashi with the oar in hand, he laughed and began to mock someone he saw as an old feeble-minded man. The crowd joined in, but Musashi remained unfazed.
Soon the fight was started and Kojiro began swinging his sword around in a graceful display of his prowess. Musashi stood there, waiting patiently. Kojiro finally moved to strike, but Musashi was quicker and snapped the oar out. It caught Kojiro in the temple, killing him instantly. Without a word to the stunned crowd, he dropped his makeshift weapon and took the ferry back across the river and into legend.
#27
Xiahou Dun, a 2nd-century Chinese warrior who got his eye shot with an arrow and *f*****g ate it* before cleaving the dude who shot him in two.
#28
Miyamoto Musashi.
He was undefeated in the 60 duels he fought, and he won one of them with a wooden sword.
#29
Diogenes- a homeless Greek philosoper who lived in a barrel and m*sturbated in public:
He also had an epic encounter with Alexander the Great:
while Diogenes was relaxing in the sunlight in the morning, Alexander, thrilled to meet the famous philosopher, asked if there was any favour he might do for him. Diogenes replied, "Yes, stand out of my sunlight". Alexander then declared, "If I were not Alexander, then I should wish to be Diogenes", to which Diogenes replied, "If I were not Diogenes, I should also wish to be Diogenes.
In another account of the conversation, Alexander found the philosopher looking attentively at a pile of human bones. Diogenes explained, "I am searching for the bones of your father but cannot distinguish them from those of a slave."
**M***********G BADASS**
What do you think ?
Monday 2 years ago
So many people in the comments seem to misunderstand what being "badass" means. Nobody is saying all these people are to be respected and revered, just that they were tough, uncompromising, or intimidating or a combination of the three.
Fred L. 2 years ago
As these 72 were collected from many more entries in reddit - why the double mentions?
Kristin Ingersoll 2 years ago
Because nobody edits anything anymore. It's pathetic.
Load More Replies...
Creature Cargeaux 2 years ago
I just skipped thru & only read the ones about women. They were indeed bad fucken a*s
Monday 2 years ago
So many people in the comments seem to misunderstand what being "badass" means. Nobody is saying all these people are to be respected and revered, just that they were tough, uncompromising, or intimidating or a combination of the three.
Fred L. 2 years ago
As these 72 were collected from many more entries in reddit - why the double mentions?
Kristin Ingersoll 2 years ago
Because nobody edits anything anymore. It's pathetic.
Load More Replies... Creature Cargeaux 2 years ago
I just skipped thru & only read the ones about women. They were indeed bad fucken a*s
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