48 Photos From Around The World That Hit Harder Than Words Ever Could

Wurm42: For anyone not familiar, this is Canadian athlete Terry Fox. After having his right leg amputated due to cancer, he started the "Marathon of Hope," trying to raise money for cancer research by running across Canada.
Terry started in St. Johns, Newfoundland, running the equivalent of a full marathon (26.2 miles) every day. He ran more than 2,400 miles (4,000 km) and reached Thunder Bay, Ontario before he had to stop.
Terry stopped because it turned out he'd been doing all the running after his cancer came back, and it had reached his lungs. He died nine months later.
He is an inspirational figure for Canadians and disabled people all over the world.

An east German (GDR) soldier fleeing to Westberlin during the construction of the Berlin Wall in August 1961.

Live Aid, 1985. Wembley stadium jam packed and roughly one in every three people worldwide watched it. One of the last great humanitarian projects almost every country contributed to and one of the last great events hosted in the UK.

27 April 1994 - our first democratic election where everyone has the right to vote. This is a line at the ballot box.

This one is pretty cool.

Kharkiv. 2014. Leninopad “Leninfalls.”

The last photo taken of a wild Barbary Lion. Taken in 1924.

Belgium, 1927.
Einstein. Curie. Bohr. Planck. Heisenberg. Schrödinger. Dirac.
The greatest scientific gathering ever photographed.

Ruby Bridges, New Orleans, 1960.

Cacafuego: Pride is all Americans should feel, looking at this photo. Pride in tough-as-nails little Ruby and all of our fellow countrymen who stood up and claimed the freedom and equality we are promised. Forget about everything else for the moment. That's an American right there.

CrazeMase. In case anyone wants to know how recent this was, she is 71 now. She's still alive, she currently does political activism.

Quarkonium2925: Just another Tuesday in Iceland.

Polish Women’s Strike 2020.

Statue of kelpies, a Scottish mythical creature.

Baltic Way, 1989 - peaceful protest of Baltic people against the USSR regime by creating a live human chain across the 3 Baltic countries. This exact picture should be taken in Lithuania.

I have many (including some from the 1956 revolution), but this is the one that still sticks with me.

Not Photoshop, it was the aftermath of the "red mud" disaster that happened in 2010. A faulty wall broke down, and a 2-meter-high wave of liquid bauxite residue (causing chemical burns) flooded the nearby village, [fatal to]10 people. There are many iconic photos from this incident as well, but this is probably my favorite.

It's the eruption of Mt. St. Helens. The photographer is Richard Lasher (I think!). It's a pretty famous photo in my state.

Canuck the downtown Eastside crow. Stealing a knife from a crime scene.

blondzie: That’s the most Australia thing I’ve seen.

The Blitz.

Professor Simona Kossak, Polish zoologist and ecologist, with her pet wild boar in her hut in the Białowieża Primeval Forest.

Australian volunteer firefighter, Daniel Knox, during a controlled burn.

During the 2021 protests.

Some of the thousands of volunteers that cleaned the Galician coast after the "Prestige" oil spill.

A heroic young man destroying a statue of the exdictator Hugo Chavez during the 2024 protests.

This photo after the 8.8 magnitude earthquake that happened in 2010 always stayed with me.

Sinking of the oil tanker Amoco Cadiz in 1978 off the coast of Brittany.

October 2025: Storm Benjamin hits the coast at Vlissingen, the Netherlands.

K-2, Chogori casts its shadow over China.

Moon Landing.

jjtnd1: Winner winner. Maybe the hardest pic humanity has taken to date

This is Singha Durbar (Lion's palace) that had most administrative centers of Nepal Government. It was burnt during GenZ protest last September.

The president of Finland in the 1970s.

This was the start of India's space program -- the first sounding rocket being transported on a bicycle in 1963. And in 2023, we became the fourth country to get to the Moon.

Sidney Crosby just after scoring the golden goal in 2010. Canada has so many war and forest fire photos that I feel like a positive photo is way harder.

Destruction of earthquake photos.. City of Kahramanmaraş/Turkey.

Tornado of Beaver City, Nebraska (1989) by Merrilee Thomas, depicting their daughter Audra and a tornado.

Fajr prayer in a shelter in eastern Saudi Arabia during the Gulf war.

An Indian Air Force Sukhoi 30MK-1 with the Umaid Bhawan Palace as the backdrop.

I will look for ANY EXCUSE to show this image of Nixon bowling.