Success Quote by Christopher Morley

Morley’s line lands like a champagne cork: loud, brief, and designed to start a mess on purpose. On its face, it’s a provocation - a straight-faced dare that flips the usual male fantasy of being universally pleasing. Underneath, it’s a defense of friction as proof of intimacy. If you’ve never made a woman angry, Morley implies, you’ve never been close enough to matter, never risked disagreement, never tested the boundary where politeness ends and real life begins.

The wit works because it weaponizes a social expectation: that “good men” keep women calm, agreeable, and soothed. Morley’s joke punctures that paternalistic script. Anger here isn’t treated as hysteria to be avoided; it’s evidence of agency, of someone pushing back. The line presumes a relationship sturdy enough to survive conflict - and it teases the timid, the chronically diplomatic, the men who mistake smoothness for character.

Still, the subtext carries the period’s blind spots. Written by a male author in an era when women’s anger was often mocked or medicalized, the quote risks sounding like a boast: stirring up a woman as a masculine credential. The tension is the point. It’s half marriage-comedy realism, half smugness disguised as insight.

Morley’s intent, finally, is less about antagonizing women than about puncturing a shallow model of success. If you want a life with stakes, he suggests, you will occasionally be the villain in someone else’s story - and you’ll have to live with that.