Tung Chee-hwa has Lee Kuan Yew, Deng Xiaoping and Margaret Thatcher. Hillary Rodham Clinton has Eleanor Roosevelt. Tsang Yok-sing has made reference to Qian Xuesen, a mainland rocket scientist.
They are our role models: people we admire and respect for their talent, their intelligence, their achievements, their values.
Whom we revere may tell us much about the qualities we consider to be important, what we value not only in other people, but what perhaps we hope to emulate ourselves.
Although teachers and parents, the ones who have the most direct and immediate impact on our lives, are perhaps the most influential people, public figures also have a great role to play. Several people share their role models with us.
Au Heung, 54, insists on sitting on a park bench near a basketball court in Mongkok; an interview in his caged residence nearby is out of the question.
His life, he says, was supposed to turn out very differently.