Success Quote by Carl Sandburg

Sandburg’s line lands like a grim Midwestern shrug: if everything we do ends up in the same ditch, why pretend some gestures are purer than others? The ellipsis is doing real work here. “All human actions are equivalent...” reads first as a democratic comfort - your small life is not less “real” than anyone else’s grand project. Then the second clause snaps the comfort into fatalism: “and all are on principle doomed to failure.” Not doomed by bad luck or incompetence, but “on principle,” as if the universe itself has a standing policy against our plans.

The intent isn’t simply to wallow. Sandburg, a poet of labor and ordinary people, often treats “principle” as a double-edged American word: it can mean moral backbone, but it can also mean an ideology so rigid it becomes self-defeating. Under that reading, the line critiques a culture addicted to heroic narratives - progress, success, legacy - while quietly living with the evidence that history erases most victories and corrupts plenty of the rest.

The subtext is a dare to recalibrate what counts as meaningful. If failure is baked in, then worth can’t hinge on outcomes alone. The phrase “equivalent” flattens the hierarchy of ambition; the phrase “doomed” punctures the fantasy that effort guarantees reward. Contextually, Sandburg writes in the shadow of industrial modernity, war, and economic upheaval - eras that made “making it” look less like merit and more like timing. The line works because it sounds like despair but behaves like an ethic: act anyway, without the alibi of guaranteed success.