I originally started saving birth lottery quotes in an ongoing Twitter thread of humans who understand the lottery of birth (aka ovarian lottery, lucky sperm club, lucky egg club, etc).
Eventually, the thread got so long I turned it into this post. I’ll continue to add more lottery of birth quotes as I come across them. Enjoy!
🔒 Premium members also have access to the companion posts:
· Lottery of Birth Synthesis: How to See Yourself and the World Drastically Differently (+ Infographic)
· Behind the Scenes: Dissecting my own Lottery of Birth Ticket
Quick Housekeeping:
- All content in “quotation marks” is directly from the original authors (otherwise it’s minimally paraphrased).
- All content is organized into my own themes.
- Emphasis has been added in bold for readability/skimmability.
Post Contents:
50+ Birth Lottery Quotes to Question Who You Are
Birth Lottery Overview:
“Birth is life’s first lottery ticket.” — Jeffrey Archer
“We do not choose to exist. We do not choose the environment we will grow up in. We do not choose to be born Hindu, Christian or Muslim, into a war-zone or peaceful middle-class suburb, into starvation or luxury. We do not choose our parents, nor whether they’ll be happy or miserable, knowledgeable or ignorant, healthy or sickly, attentive or neglectful. The knowledge we possess, the beliefs we hold, the tastes we develop, the traditions we adopt, the opportunities we enjoy, the work we do – the very lives we lead – depend entirely on our biological inheritance and the environment to which we are exposed. This is the lottery of birth.” — Raoul Martinez
“When I was a kid, I got all kinds of good things. I had the advantage of a home where people talked about interesting things, and I had intelligent parents and I went to decent schools. I don’t think I could have been raised with a better pair of parents. That was enormously important. I didn’t get money from my parents, and I really didn’t want it. But I was born at the right time and place. I won the ‘Ovarian Lottery‘ … No great credit to me. I just was lucky at birth … I shouldn’t delude myself into thinking I’m some superior individual because of that.” — Warren Buffett
“Thinking about the lottery of birth draws our attention to a simple fact: we do not create ourselves … Our starting point in life is one of complete dependence on forces—genetic and environmental—that we don’t control … The people we become, the lives that we lead, the beliefs and values that we learn to hold, owe much to the lottery of our birth.” — Raoul Martinez
“Speaking of privilege, we (the authors) often say we are lucky to have won the birth lottery. Not only were we not born into slavery, but we were also not born into almost any disadvantaged group. At birth, we were no more deserving of an easier run at life than a child who was born into poverty, or with a disability, or any other type of disadvantage. Yet we are the ones who won this lottery since we do not have these disadvantages.” — Gabriel Weinberg & Lauren McCann
“The particulars of our birth largely determine who we become and the representations of reality we construct in our minds. Our environment channels our vast potential into a particular identity. How we end up speaking, thinking, feeling and acting owes much to the examples, opportunities and ideas to which we are exposed. From childhood until the day we die we are subject to a steady stream of influences – familial, corporate, state, school, religious, cultural – working to shape our habits, beliefs, assumptions, ideals and aims: our picture of reality. The goals that appear valuable to us, and the best route to achieving them, emerge from the confluence of these and other forces.” — Raoul Martinez
“We are born without choosing to, to parents we haven’t chosen, into bodies and borders we haven’t chosen, to exist in a region of spacetime we haven’t chosen for a duration we don’t choose.” — Maria Popova
“Everyone is an ape adrift in an alien world, born into a struggle they did not choose, bullied by impulses they cannot control, searching for answers they will not find, and condemned to a fate they do not deserve. Go easy on them.” — Gurwinder Bhogal
“Here’s the thing: People from different generations, raised by different parents who … held different values, in different parts of the world … with different degrees of luck, learn very different lessons.” — Morgan Housel
“You know that if you’d lived in a different place or time, read different books, had different friends, you’d have different beliefs. And yet, you’re convinced that your current beliefs are correct. So, are you wrong, or the luckiest person ever?” — Gurwinder Bhogal
“Humans make choices – but they are never independent choices. Every choice depends on a lot of biological, social and personal conditions that you cannot determine for yourself. I can choose what to eat, whom to marry and whom to vote for, but these choices are determined in part by my genes, my biochemistry, my gender, my family background, my national culture, etc – and I didn’t choose which genes or family to have.” — Yuval Noah Harari
“We are mostly the products of our circumstances. For example, most people will end up accepting the belief system they are born to. So it hardly seems fair to blame people for the one thing in their life they had zero control over, the situation into which they were born. We’re all the product of our opportunities, our mentors, and our peers, in addition to the neurological proclivities with which we were endowed.” — Steven Novella
“An individual cannot be held responsible for either his genes or his environment. From this simple analysis, surely it follows that individuals cannot logically be held responsible for their behavior.” — Anthony Cashmore
“You’re not ultimately responsible for what you do because you didn’t make yourself the way you are … You are a thing made not ultimately by you.” — Galen Strawson
“When a man acts in ways that annoy us we wish to think him wicked, and we refuse to face the fact that his annoying behavior is the result of antecedent causes which … will take you beyond the moment of his birth … events for which he cannot be held responsible.” — Bertrand Russell
“The mind is determined to this or that choice by a cause which is also determined by another cause, and this again by another, and so on … This doctrine teaches us to hate no one, to despise no one, to mock no one, to be angry with no one, and to envy no one.” — Baruch Spinoza
“We have to eliminate this lottery of birth. If you can’t control your race, your gender, your sexual orientation, or the family income you were born in, it should not limit how you can change the world.” — Stephanie Lampkin
“Is it not that very infinitesimally tiny sperm cell which is now so proud of his achievements? … Did you have anything to do with being born to these particular parents? … Consider if you could possibly be proud of what you have ‘achieved.'” — Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj
“We come into the world as the result of others’ actions. We survive here in dependence on others. Whether we like it or not, there is hardly a moment of our lives when we do not benefit from others’ activities.” — Tenzin Gyatso (14th Dalai Lama)
“One doubts existence of free will because every action determined by heredity, constitution, example of others or teaching of others. This view should teach one profound humility, one deserves no credit for anything…nor ought one to blame others.” — Charles Darwin
“There is something about feeling that you received something that you don’t get to take credit for—that someone else was born into a situation that if you were born into you’d be doing less well—and that you were fortunate to get to have these experiences, and that you owe something to them and to the future world because of that fortune. I think that’s really important.” — Daniel Schmachtenberger
“Any clear-thinking person knows that no single factor leads to such events. Rather, there are hundreds, thousands, an infinite number of factors that add up. Still, we keep trying to pin the blame on just one … The fallacy of the single cause is as ancient as it is dangerous. We have learned to see people as the ‘masters of their own destinies.’ Aristotle proclaimed this 2,500 years ago. Today we know that it is wrong. The notion of free will is up for debate. Our actions are brought about by the interaction of thousands of factors—from genetic predisposition to upbringing, from education to the concentration of hormones between individual brain cells. Still we hold firmly to the old image of self-governance. This is not only wrong but also morally questionable. As long as we believe in singular reasons, we will always be able to trace triumphs or disasters back to individuals and stamp them ‘responsible.’ The idiotic hunt for a scapegoat goes hand in hand with the exercise of power—a game that people have been playing for thousands of years.” — Rolf Dobelli
Socialization & Conditioning:
“This chain of training from human to human, from generation to generation, is perfectly normal in human society. You don’t need to blame your parents for teaching you to be like them. What else could they teach you but what they know? They did the best they could, and if they abused you, it was due to their own domestication, their own fears, their own beliefs. They had no control over the programming they received, so they couldn’t have behaved any differently.” — Don Miguel Ruiz
“Who we think we are depends on the historical context, geographic place, economic circumstances, education, the overall structure of the society, and many other factors that are part of shaping us. We have far less control over being ‘molded’ than we previously understood. Socialization, it turns out, is relentless and ongoing from the day we enter the world. It begins with the earliest inculcation of what are considered desirable thoughts, feelings, values, and behavior and what is not. It continues through schooling and is reinforced at every moment via the media, commerce, and, most subtly, by the very nature of one’s native language and communication patterns. While the discursive habit is essential for learning and vertical development, it also poses an invisible danger by its deep and unconscious place in most people’s consciousness.” — Susanne Cook-Greuter
“The personal conditioning of each of our minds is not simply the product of each of our minds. For instance, your mind is conditioned to speak English. You were conditioned by your culture to speak English. You are not personally responsible for the fact that you speak English. You were conditioned by something that is much bigger than your own mind to speak English, although the fact that you speak English is a personal conditioning of your mind … And, that goes for all the conditioning of all of our minds. The separate self is an impersonal conditioning. We have been conditioned by our parents, our communities, our nations. We have been conditioned to feel we are separate selves. We are not personally responsible for feeling that we are personal people, for feeling that we are separate selves. The ego is an impersonal conditioning … There is nobody who is personally responsible for their personal conditioning.”— Rupert Spira
“The way we see the world is a product of our knowledge about the world, our cultural background and language, our psychological nature, our moral and ethical views, the religious doctrine or worldview to which we subscribe, and the way we see beauty … Each perspective is made up of interwoven beliefs, values, feelings, and assumptions that together create the lens through which we see the world and form the basis for our actions in the world.” — Patricia Cranton
“We are caught in our own histories. However good we are at making sense of our experiences, we all have to start with what we have been given and operate within horizons set by ways of seeing and understanding that we have acquired through prior learning. This formative learning occurs in childhood both through socialization (informal or tacit learning of norms from parents, friends, and mentors that allows us to fit into society) and through our schooling. Although we are encouraged to become increasingly self-directed in our learning as we grow older, the learning provided by our particular culture and by the idiosyncratic requirements of parents or parent surrogates is the learning that is rewarded. Approved ways of seeing and understanding, shaped by our language, culture, and personal experience, collaborate to set limits to our future learning.” — Jack Mezirow
“Socialization involves inherent inequality. Parents and mentors, who have an identity investment in their own interpretations and values, define a child’s reality, including such fundamentals as ways of recognizing social threat, relating to authority, reacting to rejection and failure, being competitive, role playing, and using time responsibly … Socialization involves internalizing the definitions, assumptions, and arbitrary typifications taken for granted and communicated by significant others. The image of an autonomous individual free from oppression thus is illusory, although the individual’s unique social biography, perspectives, and awareness of different interpretive schemes assure that he or she is never entirely the victim of determinism. In view of the nature of socialization, the familiar and simplistic dichotomy between oppression and freedom loses its credibility. We can never be totally free from our past.” — Jack Mezirow
“For the most part we take for granted and are unaware of these social norms and cultural codes, which distribute power and privilege. Our meaning perspectives mirror the way our culture and those individuals responsible for our socialization happen to have defined various situations. Our parents’ location in the social structure and their own personal biographies and idiosyncrasies influence our conception of reality. As children, we internalize the rules, roles, conventions, expectations, and attitudes of our parents or mentors in the context of an emotionally charged relationship. We then apply them in abstract form to the rest of society.” — Jack Mezirow
“In primary socialization there is no problem of identification. There is no choice of significant others. Society presents the candidate for socialization with a predefined set of significant others, whom he must accept as such with no possibility of opting for another arrangement. Hic Rhodus, hic salta. One must make do with the parents that fate has regaled one with. This unfair disadvantage inherent in the situation of being a child has the obvious consequence that, although the child is not simply passive in the process of his socialization, it is the adults who set the rules of the game. The child can play the game with enthusiasm or with sullen resistance. But, alas, there is no other game around. This has an important corollary. Since the child has no choice in the selection of his significant others, his identification with them is quasi-automatic. For the same reason, his internalization of their particular reality is quasi-inevitable. The child does not internalize the world of his significant others as one of many possible worlds. He internalizes it as the world, the only existent and only conceivable world, the world tout court. It is for this reason that the world internalized in primary socialization is so much more firmly entrenched in consciousness than worlds internalized in secondary socializations. However much the original sense of inevitability may be weakened in subsequent disenchantments, the recollection of a never-to-be-repeated certainty—the certainty of the first dawn of reality—still adheres to the first world of childhood. Primary socialization thus accomplishes what (in hindsight, of course) may be seen as the most important confidence trick that society plays on the individual—to make appear as necessity what is in fact a bundle of contingencies, and thus to make meaningful the accident of his birth.” — Peter Berger & Thomas Luckmann
“Each person finds himself placed at birth in some particular position in some particular society, and the nature of this position materially affects his life prospects … The initial endowment of natural assets and the contingencies of their growth and nurture in early life are arbitrary from a moral point of view.” — John Rawls
“We do not deserve our place in the distribution of native endowments, any more than we deserve our initial starting place in society … It seems clear that the effort a person is willing to make is influenced by his natural abilities and skills and the alternatives open to him. The better endowed are more likely, other things equal, to strive conscientiously, and there seems to be no way to discount for their greater good fortune. The idea of rewarding desert is impracticable.” — John Rawls
“The intuitive notion here is that this structure contains various social positions and that men born into different positions have different expectations of life determined, in part, by the political system as well as by economic and social circumstances. In this way the institutions of society favor certain starting places over others. These are especially deep inequalities. Not only are they pervasive, but they affect men’s initial chances in life; yet they cannot possibly be justified by an appeal to the notions of merit or desert.” — John Rawls
“The extent to which natural capacities develop and reach fruition is affected by all kinds of social conditions and class attitudes. Even the willingness to make an effort, to try, and so to be deserving in the ordinary sense is itself dependent upon happy family and social circumstances. It is impossible in practice to secure equal chances of achievement and culture for those similarly endowed, and therefore we may want to adopt a principle which recognizes this fact and also mitigates the arbitrary effects of the natural lottery itself.” — John Rawls
“The natural distribution is neither just nor unjust; nor is it unjust that persons are born into society at some particular position. These are simply natural facts. What is just and unjust is the way that institutions deal with these facts. Aristocratic and caste societies are unjust because they make these contingencies the ascriptive basis for belonging to more or less enclosed and privileged social classes. The basic structure of these societies incorporates the arbitrariness found in nature. But there is no necessity for men to resign themselves to these contingencies.” — John Rawls
“That we deserve the superior character that enables us to make the effort to cultivate our abilities is also problematic; for such character depends in good part upon fortunate family and social circumstances in early life for which we can claim no credit. The notion of desert does not apply here.” — John Rawls
Biology & Behavior:
“If you want to understand a behavior—whether it’s an appalling one, a wondrous one, or confusedly in between—you’ve got take into account what happened a second before to a million years before and everything in between … You’d better be real careful, real cautious before you conclude you know what causes a behavior.” — Robert Sapolsky
“What were your ancestors doing? What sort of cultures were they inventing? Because that’s going to influence how you are going to turn into that adult that you are. What sort of cultures did they invent turns out to be very sensitive to what sort of ecosystems they lived in … Ecosystems shape cultures, shape brains, shape behaviors, and some of these differences are manifest within minutes of birth. In other words, brains and bodies and behaviors and cultures and genes all co-evolve.”— Robert Sapolsky
“If as a fetus you were exposed to a lot of stress hormones through your mother, epigenetics is going to produce your amygdala in adulthood as a more excitable form, and you’re going to have elevated stress hormone levels … We have early environment shaping all sorts of aspects of how the brain and the endocrine systems are put together, and most importantly, thanks to these epigenetic changes starting during fetal life environment does not begin at birth, these changes can be long-lasting, life-long, even multi-generational … Some of these acquired traits will influence the next generation’s fetal environment.”— Robert Sapolsky
“Genes and environment interact. What’s happening one second before (a behavior) reflects your lifetime of those gene-environment interactions … Genes don’t really know what they’re doing. Genes are being regulated by environment, and the critical thing is, different environments regulate the same genes in different ways … Don’t ask what a gene does; ask what it does in a particular environment.”— Robert Sapolsky
“Everything about adolescent behavior is explained by two facts. First off, your dopamine system is going full blast by the time you’re about 11 or 12. Second, your frontal cortex is half-baked when you’re a teenager. Frontal cortex is not fully online amazingly enough until you’re about 25 years old. In other words, this is why juveniles behave in juvenile ways: impulse issues and sensation seeking and novelty seeking and peer effects and conformity … Late adolescence early adulthood is when environment is having its biggest affects on what kind of frontal cortex you’re going to have as an adult … If the frontal cortex is the last part of the brain to come online, by definition it’s the part of the brain least shaped by your genes and most shaped by your experience and environment. And, it’s got to be that way because what’s the difficult, subtle ‘doing the right thing when it’s the harder thing to do’ kind of stuff that takes forever to master? Cultural relativity, context-dependent rules, ‘thou shalt not kill’ but it’s really good to kill them, and ‘you don’t lie’ but this is a good time to lie, and hypocrisy and self-serving—and no genes are going to code for that. Your frontal cortex needs 25 years to master stuff like that.”— Robert Sapolsky
Brain & Neuroscience:
“You didn’t choose your parents. You didn’t choose the society into which you were born. There is not a cell in your body or brain that you—the conscious subject—created. Nor is there a single influence coming from the outside world that you brought into being.” — Sam Harris
“It seems clear that we can’t decide what to think or feel, any more than we can decide what to see or hear. A highly complicated convergence of factors and past events—including our genes, our personal life history, our immediate environment, and the state of our brain—is responsible for each next thought.” — Annaka Harris
“When it comes to nature and nurture, the important point is that you choose neither one. We are each constructed from a genetic blueprint and born into a world of circumstances about which we have no choice in our most formative years. The complex interactions of genes and environment means that the citizens of our society possess different perspectives, dissimilar personalities, and varied capacities for decision making. These are not free-will choices of the citizens; these are the hands of cards we’re dealt. Because we did not choose the factors that affected the formation and structure of our brain, the concepts of free will and personal responsibility begin to sprout with question marks.”— David Eagleman
“The bawling baby eventually stops crying, looks around, and absorbs the world around it. It molds itself to the surroundings. It soaks up everything from local language to broader culture to global politics. It carries forward the beliefs and biases of those who raise it. Every fond memory it possesses, every lesson it learns, every drop of information it drinks—all these fashion its circuits to develop something that was never pre-planned, but instead reflects the world around it.” — David Eagleman
“We generally go through life thinking there’s me and there’s the world. But, who you are emerges from everything you’ve interacted with: your environment, all of your experiences, your friends, your enemies, your culture, your belief system, your era—all of it. Although we value statements such as ‘he’s his own man’ or ‘she’s an independent thinker,’ there is in fact no way to separate yourself from the rich context in which you’re embedded. There is no you without the external. Your beliefs and dogmas and aspirations are shaped by it, inside and out, like a sculpture from a block of marble.” — David Eagleman
“Early experience becomes foundational. It develops into the architecture upon which everything subsequent is built. Everything new is understood through the filter of the old.”— David Eagleman
“The differences between a baby and an adult are easy to see, but the neural transition from one to the other does not happen in a smooth line. Instead, it is like a door that swings closed. Once it shuts, large-scale change is over … A fact of life: to get good at one thing is to close the door on others. Because you possess only a single life, what you devote yourself to sends you down particular roads, while the other paths will forever remain untrodden by you. Thus, I began this book with one of my favorite quotations from the philosopher Martin Heidegger: ‘Every man is born as many men and dies as a single one.'”— David Eagleman
“From the point of view of your neural networks, what does it mean to descend into pattern and habit? Imagine two towns a few miles apart. People interested in caravanning from one settlement to the other take all possible paths: some travelers walk the scenic route along the ridgetops, some prefer the shade of the cliffside, some move among slippery rocks by the river, and others take the riskier but faster route through the woods. With time and experience, one route proves more popular. Eventually the path becomes grooved where the most people have walked, and it starts to become the standard. After some years the local government lays down roadways. After some decades, this expands into highways. Broad optionality reduces to the standard. Similarly, brains begin with many possible routes through the neural networks; with time, the practiced pathways become difficult to exit. Unused paths become thinned away. Neurons that can’t find success with the world eventually fold up shop and commit suicide. Through decades of experience, the brain comes to physically represent the environment, and your decisions follow the remaining, hard-paved paths. The upside is that you end up with lightning-fast ways of solving problems. The downside is that it’s harder to attack problems with wild unstructured inventiveness. Beyond the diminishing optionality in the pathways, there is a second reason that older brains are less flexible: when they change, they do so only in small spots. In contrast, baby brains modify across vast territories. Using broadcast systems like acetylcholine, infants transmit announcements throughout the brain, allowing pathways and connections to modify. Their brains are changeable everywhere, slowly coming into focus like a Polaroid photograph. An adult brain changes only little bits at a time. It keeps most of its connections locked into place, to hold on to what has been learned, and only small areas are made flexible via a combination lock of the right neurotransmitters. An adult brain is like a pointillist artist who modifies the hue of only a few dots in an almost-finished painting.” — David Eagleman
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