Daily Inspiration Quote by Robert Morgan

A soldier admitting he forgets the rest of the country exists sounds like a punchline, but it’s really a snapshot of how institutions shrink your map of America. Morgan’s line isn’t bragging about cosmopolitanism; it’s the casual confession of someone whose working life has been organized around a single feeder system of people. “Affinity and rapport” is the language of mentorship, yet it also hints at something more structural: familiarity as a form of selection. When you teach (or train) the same kind of student long enough, you start mistaking pattern for nature.

The humor comes from the reversal. We expect New York exceptionalism to be loud and self-mythologizing. Morgan’s is almost bureaucratically gentle, delivered as an “It surprises me sometimes,” like he’s noticing a clerical error. That understatement is doing heavy lifting. It suggests he’s not trying to dismiss “anywhere else”; he’s revealing how totalizing his experience has been. The world he knows is composed of New York cadences, New York skepticism, New York urgency - and once you can read those signals, other accents feel like static.

Context matters: a 20th-century American soldier could easily have spent decades in training pipelines tied to the city’s dense public-school and immigrant networks, especially in wartime and postwar eras when the military and its academies functioned as massive engines of mobility. The subtext is both affectionate and limiting: rapport can be real care, but it can also become a blind spot. Morgan lets us see how service, ironically, can provincialize you.