Only Sane Man/Real Life

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Stanislav Petrov. Was monitoring the Soviet radar systems that were supposed to warn of a US nuclear attack. He saw 4 missiles heading toward the USSR from America. His job was to report this to his superiors & let them decide what to do (almost certainly an all-out counterstrike). But he decided it didn't make any sense for the US to attack with only 4 missiles and logged it as a technical error. He was right. He gambled the future of the world on his own judgment (and against the orders and procedures he was supposed to follow). You, me, our loved ones, and the entire world owe him our lives.
    • The alternate history 1983: Doomsday involves a world in where Petrov was not present to be right.
    • Tragically, Petrov was vilified for his decision. He was considered little better than a traitor to the USSR and lived out his life in disgrace. That's the thanks you get for averting a balls-out nuclear war.
      • Petrov has stated that claims of him being punished or "forced out of the army" are false and that he was "neither punished nor rewarded for his actions". Make of that what you will.
  • Speaking of Soviets, some would say that Anastas Mikoyan was the most likeable (and stable!) of Stalin's inner circle, a man who went for much more practical (and much less brutal) measures to revive Russia after the Civil War than Stalin. He was also seen as a fairly genteel "traveling salesman" by the West, in comparison to the bombast of those he answered to.** Leon Trotsky could also fit the bill to a certain extent. Yeah, he was as much a murdering bastard as the rest of them (being the original head of the Red Army and all), but he actually wanted Russia to remain true to Marx's original doctrines and avoid becoming a totalitarian bureaucratic state. Unfortunately for him, he lost favor in the communist party due to blunders he made as People's Commissar of Military and Naval Affairs of the Soviet Union, which combined with Joseph Stalin's rise to power, ended with him being exiled and eventually assassinated by the NKVD.
  • Gideon Welles, Secretary of the Navy in U.S. president Abraham Lincoln's cabinet. Between Lincoln, Secretary of State William Seward, Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, Henry Halleck, sometimes commander of the Army of the Potomac George Meade, Generals Grant, Sherman, Fremont, Sheridan, Rosecrans, Custer, etc., there was a lot of insanity to go around.
    • For those who didn't read their history books... Lincoln was melancholic bordering on manic depressive, Seward was an egomaniac constantly trying to control everyone else's department, Stanton was paranoid and contemptuous of pretty much everyone, and the various generals in charge of the war effort had personal issues up the wazoo. Compared to that lot, Welles was normal (and considered the most competent of Lincoln's Cabinet members who took a disorganized and barely functioning U.S. Navy and within months created an effective blockade of Confederate ports).
      • It should be said that the primary source for what historians know about Lincoln's cabinet come from Secretary Welles himself, via his diary. Despite Welles' proven competence, a grain of salt is called for.
      • Seward would later prove to be the Only Sane Man in the cabinet of Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson. While Johnson and the other, Radical Republican members of his cabinet spent most of the administration at each other's throats, Seward was the one guy actually managing to get some stuff done, including purchasing Alaska from the Russians (at the time nicknamed "Seward's Folly," but in retrospect something of a masterstroke).
  • Charles I of Austria-Hungary, who became Emperor right in the middle of a war he didn't want to fight. He proposed a "peace without recriminations" in which all parties would simply lay down their weapons and go home to rebuild their shattered countries. The Allies simply scoffed at the proposal, the Germans were furious about Charles' plan to "abandon" them. Charles was then deposed at the end of the war. He tried to regain the Hungarian throne, but the Allies would never have allowed it, and the sitting ruler of Hungary didn't want trouble from them, even though it meant breaking his former oaths of loyalty to Charles. In the end, Charles died in poverty, exiled to the Portuguese island of Madeira. And after the war, It Got Worse. For everything he had done, he was Beatified by Pope John Paul II, and he will probably be Canonised a saint before long.

Anatole France: Emperor Karl is the only decent man to come out of the war in a leadership position, yet he was a saint and no one listened to him. He sincerely wanted peace, and therefore was despised by the whole world. It was a wonderful chance that was lost.

  • Zhou Enlai was widely regarded as the Only Sane Man amid the excesses of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, quietly working to save as many artists, intellectuals and historical sites as he could.
  • John Keeling, one of the judges at the March 10, 1662 witch trial of Amy Denny and Rose Cullender. While his superior, Matthew Hale, and most of the rest of the town were willing to convict the other two on hatred, and the evidence of children and people who their husbands had owed money to, Keeling (who oddly, was generally regarded as a Jerkass Hanging Judge) went out of his way to ensure that the trial involved things like evidence, and cross-examination. He uncovered many of the petty grievances against the women, and suggested that the deaths of various livestock were probably due to natural causes. He forced the star witnesses, a pair of girls who went into fits whenever they approached Amy and Rose to wear blindfolds, and when this lead to their having fits whenever they approached anyone they were told was one of the defendants, implied that maybe the girls were making it up. He refused to convict on "the words of children" and his general attitude seems to have been one of "She's a witch huh? Sure she is." Records show that Keeling had all but turned the jury around, when his superior, Matthew Hale (who happened to be friends with the father of one of the witnesses) basically told them it was their duty as jurors and Christians to convict, resulting in both women being hanged.
    • In the end, however, it was only through the efforts of a handful of Reverends such as Increase Mather and Samuel Willard and other sane people like the aforementioned judge that the people were finally brought to their senses.
  • There's a better than average chance that all of us have felt this way at some point or another.
  • Winston Churchill felt this way in the run-up to World War II. So did Neville Chamberlain, and Adolf Hitler, towards the end, saw himself as a military genius surrounded by incompetents and cowards.
  • There's a high possibility that some people on The Internet might feel this way. Although with all of the Fan Dumb, Hate Dumb, and GIFT sufferers roaming around, this is most likely inevitable.
  • While his rivals bickered over who was the biggest flip-flopper, Ron Paul consistently cut through the noise to point out the price Americans are having to pay for the policies of massive monetary inflation and perpetual war.
    • Of course, at the same time, while people were attacking Mitt Romney, Romney was the one who, generally, tried to keep attacks pointed at the president and avoid needless civil war in the party.
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