"Any human anywhere will blossom in a hundred unexpected talents and capacities simply by being given the opportunity to do so"
About this Quote
Lessing’s line reads like optimism, but it’s really an indictment. “Any human anywhere” is deliberately sweeping, a universal claim that sidesteps sentimental talk about “potential” and instead aims at the machinery that keeps potential from ever getting a chance. The verb “blossom” matters: it suggests growth as a natural process, not a heroic individual feat. Talent isn’t forged by grit alone; it’s cultivated or choked off by conditions.
The subtext is a rebuke to the cultural obsession with meritocracy. If capacities “simply” emerge when opportunity exists, then the absence of achievement is less a personal failure than an engineered outcome - the predictable result of poverty, sexism, racism, colonial extraction, underfunded schools, and closed doors that are treated as neutral. Lessing’s phrasing also refuses the narrow definition of talent as elite, marketable skill. “A hundred unexpected” capacities implies that what counts as ability is often invisible until the environment stops punishing it. Opportunity doesn’t just reveal talent; it defines it.
Contextually, this fits Lessing’s lifelong suspicion of comforting narratives. Raised in colonial Southern Rhodesia and later writing through the fractures of empire, class, and gender, she understood how “human nature” is frequently invoked to justify inequality that is, in fact, policy and custom. The sentence is aspirational, yes, but its real force is political: it relocates responsibility from the individual’s willpower to society’s willingness to make room.
The subtext is a rebuke to the cultural obsession with meritocracy. If capacities “simply” emerge when opportunity exists, then the absence of achievement is less a personal failure than an engineered outcome - the predictable result of poverty, sexism, racism, colonial extraction, underfunded schools, and closed doors that are treated as neutral. Lessing’s phrasing also refuses the narrow definition of talent as elite, marketable skill. “A hundred unexpected” capacities implies that what counts as ability is often invisible until the environment stops punishing it. Opportunity doesn’t just reveal talent; it defines it.
Contextually, this fits Lessing’s lifelong suspicion of comforting narratives. Raised in colonial Southern Rhodesia and later writing through the fractures of empire, class, and gender, she understood how “human nature” is frequently invoked to justify inequality that is, in fact, policy and custom. The sentence is aspirational, yes, but its real force is political: it relocates responsibility from the individual’s willpower to society’s willingness to make room.
Quote Details
| Topic | Motivational |
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