Quotes About History

Superstar lawyers and math whizzes and software entrepreneurs appear at first blush to lie outside ordinary experience. But they don't. They are products of history and community, of opportunity and legacy. Their success is not exceptional or mysterious. It is grounded in a web of advantages and inheritances, some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky--but all critical to making them who they are. The outlier, in the end, is not an outlier at all.

To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages today that determine success--the fortunate birth dates and the happy accidents of history--with a society that provides opportunities for all.

The sense of possibility so necessary for success comes not just from inside us or from our parents. It comes from our time: from the particular opportunities that our place in history presents us with.

We pretend that success is exclusively a matter of individual merit. But there's nothing in any of the histories we've looked at so far to suggest things are that simple. These are stories, instead, about people who were given a special opportunity to work really hard and seized it, and who happened to come of age at a time when that extraordinary effort was rewarded by the rest of society. Their success was not just of their own making. It was a product of the world in which they grew up.

Each of us has his or her own distinct personality. But overlaid on top of that are tendencies and assumptions and reflexes handed down to us by the history of the community we grew up in, and those differences are extraordinarily specific.

when we understand how much culture and history and the world outside of the individual matter to professional success--then ... We have a way to successes out of the unsucessful.

The people who were right about Hitler were those who knew the least about him personally. The people who were wrong about Hitler were the ones who had talked with him for hours.

The culture of honor hypothesis says that it matters where you're from, not just in terms of where you grew up or where your parents grew up, but in terms of where your great-grandparents and great-great-great-grandparents grew up. That is a strange and powerful fact. It's just the beginning, though, because upon closer examination, cultural legacies turn out to be even stranger and more powerful than that.

Historians start with Cleopatra and the pharaohs and comb through every year in human history ever since, looking in every corner of the world for evidence of extraordinary wealth, and almost 20 percent of the names they end up with come from a single generation in a single country.

The sense of possibility so necessary for success comes not just from inside us or from our parents. It comes from our time: from the particular opportunities that our particular place in history presents us with. For a young would-be lawyer, being born in the early 1930's was a magic time, just as being born in 1955 was for a software programmer, or being born in 1835 was for an entrepreneur.

The most expensive single undertaking of the Second World War was the B-29 Bomber, the Superfortress. The second most expensive was the Manhattan Project, the massive, unprecedented effort to invent and build the world's first atomic bomb. But the third most expensive project of the war? Not a bomb, not a plane, not a tank, not a gun, not a ship. It was the Norden bombsight, the fifty-five-pound

But what truly distinguishes their histories is not their extraordinary talent but their extraordinary opportunities.

movie 2001: A Space Odyssey." Off to the side were dozens of keypunch machines—what passed in those days for computer terminals.

The sense of possibility so necessary for success comes not just from inside us or from our parents. It comes from our time: from the particular opportunities that our particular place in history presents us with.

landowner of those parts. An archway to one side leads to a church, the Madonna del Carmine—Our Lady of Mount Carmine. Narrow stone steps run up the hillside, flanked by closely clustered two-story stone houses with red-tile roofs. For centuries, the paesani of Roseto

the palace of the Saggese family, once the great landowner of those parts. An archway

and they were the subjects of what would become one of the most famous psychological studies in history. For the rest of his life, Terman watched over his charges like a mother hen. They were tracked

Historians start with Cleopatra and the pharaohs and comb through every year in human history ever since, looking in every corner of the world for evidence of extraordinary wealth, and almost 20 percent of the names they end up with come from

If the two countries went to war and Canada chose to fight unconventionally, history would suggest that you ought to put your money on Canada.

the United States' population is ten times the size of Canada's. If the two countries went to war and Canada chose to fight unconventionally, history would suggest that you ought to put your money on Canada.

This person will have been born in a

Cultural legacies are powerful forces. They have deep roots and long lives.

My great-great-great-grandmother

we grew up. The culture we belong to and the legacies passed down by our forebears shape the patterns of our achievement in ways we cannot begin to imagine. It's not