Working really hard is what successful people do... - Malcolm Gladwell

Harlan that allowed them to reproduce in the New World the culture of honor they had created in the Old World. “To the first settlers, the American backcountry was a dangerous environment, just as the British borderlands had been,” the historian David Hackett Fischer writes in Albion’s Seed. Much of the southern highlands were “debatable lands” in the border sense of a contested territory without established government or the rule of law. The borderers were more at home

When you have nothing to lose, you have the freedom to thumb your nose at the rules set by others.

the futility of something is not always (in love and in politics) a sufficient argument against it.