Success Quote by Robert Menzies

Menzies is taking a swing at the cult of the “successful” man before it had TED Talks and LinkedIn applause. The line is built like a compliment and lands like a reprimand: “tough, concentrated, successful” piles up the approved virtues of capitalist masculinity, then pivots on “and never” to strip them of civic meaning. The sting is in the final phrase, “a horrible example,” which reframes private achievement as public harm. He’s not arguing that wealth is sinful; he’s warning that wealth pursued as a self-justifying end becomes anti-patriotic in practice, because it models a society where the only scoreboard is money.

As a statesman, Menzies is also doing politics. He’s drawing a boundary around what counts as contribution: not just taxes paid or jobs created, but character, restraint, and a sense of obligation that can’t be itemized. The adjective “concentrated” is telling - it suggests narrowed attention, a life compressed into acquisition. That compression is the subtext: a person can be highly functional in markets and functionally absent in nationhood.

The context is a mid-century Commonwealth moral economy, where leaders still felt permitted to talk about duty and example as instruments of governance. “Example” is a conservative word with radical implications: it says society is shaped less by slogans than by who gets celebrated. If the hero is merely the money-maker, the country inherits his methods, his ethics, his omissions. Menzies is asking what kind of citizen a nation manufactures when it crowns profit as virtue.