At nuclear and subnuclear distances a force manifests itself that keeps together the quarks, the elementary building blocks of matter, inside neutrons, protons and other hadronic particles. This interaction exhibits peculiar and unexpected properties, the most striking feature being that it becomes weak at high energies and yet is strong enough to permanently confine quarks inside the observed particles. The modern theory of the strong interactions, Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD), was the last cornerstone of what we now call the Standard Model of fundamental interactions. The public lecture will cover in the first part the early history of QCD, reviewing how physicists succeeded in unravelling the seeming paradoxes of the strong interactions. In the second part the fascinating world of the strong interactions will be presented and its contemporary challenges and opportunities highlighted: from tests of QCD in current experiments, at the high-energy and high-density frontiers at LHC at CERN and at the planned FAIR facility in Germany, to the astrophysical and cosmological implications and to the impact on new physics searches.