Guns, Germs, and Steel
Jared Diamond · 1997
"Which civilizations ended up conquering others was driven overwhelmingly by geographic and environmental accident — access to domesticable plants and animals, and an east-west continental axis that let farming spread easily — not by any difference in the people themselves."
Diamond built an entire theory of world history around a question a New Guinean politician asked him: why did Europeans end up with so much 'cargo' and New Guineans so little? His answer had nothing to do with people and everything to do with geography.
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The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
"Science doesn't progress through smooth, cumulative accumulation of facts — it alternates between long periods of stable 'normal science' within an accepted paradigm and rare, disruptive 'paradigm shifts' where the entire framework for interpreting evidence is replaced."