Parenting & Family Quote by David Rockefeller

The Rockefellers rarely had to announce their power; the world did it for them. That makes David Rockefeller's phrasing here so tellingly careful: "unusual, even exceptional" is modesty performed in a tailored suit. "Unusual" suggests curiosity, "exceptional" hints at destiny, and both dodge the blunt noun everyone else would use: privileged. It is a family self-portrait designed to sound observational rather than triumphant, as if wealth and influence were simply an interesting weather pattern they grew up under.

The real move comes in the second clause: "but the effect was different on each of us". This is the escape hatch from determinism. Rockefeller acknowledges the gravitational force of lineage while insisting on individual interiority, a gentle rebuttal to the suspicion that heirs are interchangeable instruments of a dynasty. Subtext: don't reduce us to the family brand; we still have personal choices, temperaments, and burdens. It's an argument for moral nuance without surrendering the premise that the premise is extraordinary.

Context matters: Rockefeller lived through the century when inherited fortune became both a passport and a liability, when philanthropy functioned as reputation management and when "family" could mean private affection and public governance. The line reads like institutional memory smoothed into memoir: a way to admit the strange pressure of being raised inside an American myth, while preemptively framing it as psychologically complex, not simply socially obscene. The statement is less confession than calibration: humanize the dynasty, keep the aura, concede just enough to sound honest.