20 Ridiculed Historical Figures Owed an Apology By Society

A lot of things we know today — eggs are tasty, governments perform horrifying experiments on their citizens, disease is caused by tiny little gremlins that crawl into our body holes — would sound completely wackadoo if we didn’t already know them. But someone had to be the first to figure them out; so before they had enough evidence to convince the public, they were often shunned by society as paranoid, delusional egg eaters.

Even in modern times, speaking out against atrocity and corruption can ruin your career by making you look like some kind of overreactive radical, at least until everyone realizes the atrocities and corruption were real. Oopsie.

From the scientists who first figured out how the world really works to the pop stars who suggested that war might not always be good, we as a society owe apologies to a whole lot of people. That’s why, when user TheCheeryStranger asked r/AskReddit, “What ‘crazy’ person (in) history was right the whole time?,” Reddit had a long list of people wronged for being right.