Success Quote by Timothy Dexter

Dexter’s insult lands because it doesn’t sound like a sermon; it sounds like a man who’s watched commerce turn people feral. The image is deliberately low: a hog, face down, shoveling in acorns. Gratitude, in this framing, isn’t a warm virtue. It’s basic situational awareness. If you can’t even look up, you’re not just rude; you’re intellectually incurious and morally stunted.

The intent is disciplinary. Dexter isn’t pleading for appreciation so much as enforcing a social contract that made early American business possible: favors, credit, introductions, and toleration of risk. In a world where reputations were currency and networks were infrastructure, “ungrateful” wasn’t merely a personality flaw; it was a threat to the ecosystem. The hog metaphor quietly warns: people like this will keep eating, keep taking, and never acknowledge the source, which means they won’t protect it, invest in it, or reciprocate when the tree needs defending.

Subtextually, the line flatters the speaker’s own position. Dexter casts himself (or people like him) as the tree: the producer, the benefactor, the stabilizing presence above the mud. That’s not humble gratitude-talk; it’s hierarchy. The ungrateful man isn’t just blind to generosity, he’s blind to power and dependence.

Context matters, too. Dexter was a self-made businessman with a reputation for eccentricity and bluntness, operating in a culture newly allergic to aristocracy but still dependent on patronage-like relationships. The quote marries frontier plainspokenness to a merchant’s paranoia: don’t mistake your intake for self-sufficiency. Look up, or you’ll end up livestock.