Jim Grant on how history doesn't repeat literally

Now nothing says that today is going to repeat the experience of yesteryear.  In fact, rather the odds are against that just simply because history is never so helpful as to repeat itself literally; otherwise imagine how rich the historians would be.

They say, and what they say it true, that one's first experience in markets and with money is deeply formative, imprints itself on you.  And the best investors, the nimblest and most successful, are the ones who can put that formative experience aside, or at least put it into perspective and not imagine that they must repeat the experiences of their youth in their middle years.

~ Jim Grant, interview with William Green, 19:00 mark, August 20, 2022

Edward Snowden on the forming of beliefs at an early age

At the age of 22, when I entered the American intelligence community, I didn't have any politics. Like most young people, I had solid convictions that I refused to accept weren't truly mine but rather a contradictory cluster of inherited principles. My mind was a mashup of the values I was raised with and the ideals I encountered online. It took me until my late twenties to finally understand that so much of what I believed—or what I thought I believed—was just youthful imprinting. We learn to speak by imitating the speech of the adults around us, and in the process of that learning we wind up also imitating their opinions until we've deluded ourselves into thinking that the words we're using are our own.

~ Edward Snowden, "I Went to Work for the Government and I Found a Failed System," Reason.com, November 5, 2019