Success Quote by Rube Goldberg

Goldberg’s little stutter - “And I, uh, I wonder” - is doing real cultural work. It’s the sound of a public figure stepping away from the smooth PR script and into something closer to an honest aside. The line reads like modesty, but the subtext is sharper: he’s pushing back against the lazy morality tale we love to paste onto fame, the one where success is either a corrupting force or a magical glow-up that reveals your “true self.” His point is almost deflationary. Success doesn’t alchemize character; it just spotlights it.

Coming from a cartoonist best known for absurdly complicated machines, the irony is rich. Goldberg made a career satirizing modern life’s faith in progress and cleverness - how we build baroque contraptions to avoid straightforward solutions. Here he’s dismantling another contraption: the cultural mechanism that insists status must equal transformation. People need the narrative because it keeps the world legible. If success changes you, then winners are a different species, and everyone else can explain the gap without confronting luck, access, timing, or taste.

The intent, then, isn’t self-congratulation; it’s self-defense and audience correction. He’s saying: don’t mythologize me, don’t scapegoat me, don’t pretend the applause rewired my insides. In an era when celebrity culture was consolidating around mass media, Goldberg is quietly insisting on a human-scale truth: recognition is loud, but it’s not necessarily formative. It mostly reveals how badly the rest of us want a story that ties it all up.