Leland Stanford Quotes

The event happened at noon on May 10, 1869, at Promontory Summit, Utah. That moment was a pivotal episode in world history as Leland Stanford pounded a golden spike with a silver hammer and in an instant ended the isolation of California and the Great West from the eastern half of the United States.

certainly not the elite institution that railroad tycoon Leland Stanford envisioned building when

The children of California shall be our children,” Leland Stanford told his wife, Jane, when they decided to build Palo Alto.

One compelling explanation for the elders’ greater contentment comes from the psychologist Laura L. Carstensen, founding director of the Stanford Center on Longevity. Her hypothesis, which she gave the wonky name “socioemotional selectivity,” is that older people, knowing they face a limited time in front of them, focus their energies on things that give them pleasure in the moment, whereas young people, with long horizons, seek out new experiences or knowledge that may or may not pay off down the line. Young people fret about the things they don’t have and might need later; old people winnow the things they have to the few they most enjoy. Young people kiss frogs hoping they’ll turn into princes. Old people kiss their grandchildren. “It’s hard to get an eighty-five-year-old to take inorganic chemistry,” Carstensen said. Maybe old people live literally like there’s no tomorrow.

You know how the excrement rolls downhill? Leland Stanford, the pope of the bluebloods, says the Chinese are inferior humans.

Incorporated in June 1861, the Central Pacific Railroad of California was the result of conversations that had begun a year and a half earlier between Judah and four Sacramento businessmen: Collis P. Huntington and his partner Mark Hopkins (hardware), Leland Stanford (groceries), and Charles Crocker (dry goods).