Success Quote by David Brinkley

Success here isn’t charm or destiny; it’s salvage. Brinkley frames achievement as an act of conversion: take what was meant to wound you and turn it into architecture. The image does two jobs at once. First, it flatters resilience without romanticizing victimhood. Bricks are heavy, blunt, and thrown with force; they’re not “lessons” delivered gently by fate. Second, it smuggles in a cold, almost newsroom pragmatism: you don’t get to choose the material conditions of your life, but you can choose how to stack them.

Coming from a journalist who spent decades translating conflict into nightly coherence, the metaphor feels like a professional credo. Brinkley’s era ran on public scrutiny and institutional pressure: the McCarthy years, Vietnam, Watergate, the rise of TV news as performance and accountability. In that world, criticism isn’t a side effect; it’s the weather. The subtext is that public life - and any serious work - invites projectiles. The “successful man” isn’t the one who avoids being targeted; it’s the one who expects it and builds anyway.

There’s also a neat moral sleight of hand: the throwers remain unnamed. Brinkley doesn’t grant them the dignity of motive. He denies them narrative power by reducing their malice to raw material. That’s the quiet flex of the line: it imagines success as a kind of editorial control, turning other people’s contempt into your own foundation story.