The awareness that health is dependent upon habits that we control makes us the first generation in history that to a large extent determines its own destiny.

Carter’s line frames modern public health as a turning point in human history: once disease and early death were widely experienced as fate, but advances in medical knowledge and epidemiology increasingly tied outcomes to modifiable behaviors—diet, exercise, smoking, alcohol use, preventive care, and environmental choices. The quote emphasizes personal and collective agency: if health depends substantially on habits “we control,” then individuals bear responsibility for daily choices, and societies bear responsibility for creating conditions that make healthy choices feasible. Its larger significance is ethical and political as well as medical, implying that destiny is no longer merely inherited or imposed, but shaped through informed self-governance and public policy.