Outliers: Chapters 3–5

At sixteen, he made his way through Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead’s famously abstruse masterpiece Principia Mathematica.

Young L’s erudition was astonishing. His passion for scholarly accuracy and thoroughness set a high standard for accomplishment.

We found that they were doing every bit as well. There was no place we saw any serious discrepancy.

And that was the point I decided I could do without the higher-education system. Even if I couldn’t do without it, it was sufficiently repugnant to me that I wouldn’t do it anymore.

There, Oppenheimer, who struggled with depression his entire life, grew despondent.

Here we have two very brilliant young students, each of whom runs into a problem that imperils his college career.

The gregarious and outgoing nature she displays at home is hidden in this setting.

That word, of course, has negative connotations these days.

He attended the Ethical Culture School on Central Park West, perhaps the most progressive school in the nation, where, his biographers write, students were “infused with the notion that they were being groomed to reform the world.”

“I was brought to [the senior partner], who took it upon himself to tell me that for a boy of my antecedents” — and you can imagine how Bickel must have paused before repeating that euphemism for his immigrant background — “I certainly had come far. But I ought to understand how limited the possibilities of a firm like his were to hire a boy of my antecedents."

And our opponent’s counsel will answer with inordinate demands for all our files and seek endless interrogatories in order to enmesh our client in a hopeless tangle of red tape.

The university is a delightful place; lots of room in the classes and residences, no crowding in the cafeteria, and the professors are solicitous.

For a young would-be lawyer, being born in the early 1930s was a magic time, just as being born in 1955 was for a software programmer, or being born in 1835 was for an entrepreneur.

There the two of them were, the immigrant from rural Poland, his eyes ringed with fatigue, facing off in his halting English against the imperious Yankee.

But he was ecstatic, because the prospect of those endless years of hard labor did not seem like a burden to him.