Success Quote by John Harvey Kellogg

Kellogg is doing the most strategic thing a beleaguered businessman can do: turning a reputational crisis into a moral injury. The line isn’t built to refute; it’s built to recruit sympathy. He opens with a tripod of respectable suffering - “worry, anxiety and hard work” - framing himself as the responsible, overworked steward rather than a man entangled in controversy. That setup quietly implies entitlement: after all he’s endured and produced, the least the public owes him is fair treatment.

“False reports” is deliberately vague. No specifics means no oxygen for the accusations, and it invites listeners to project their own sense of media excess onto his situation. The phrase “going about the country” widens the threat from a private dispute to a national contagion, the kind of rumor that spreads because modern America is suddenly stitched together by mass newspapers, advertising, and celebrity entrepreneurs. This is the era when business leaders start learning that public opinion is a market.

The most revealing pivot is from him to “my friends.” The real pain, he suggests, isn’t just that he’s attacked; it’s that trust is being engineered away from him. “Alienated” makes the rumor-mongers sound like political operatives, not critics, while “being made to believe” casts his audience as manipulated innocents. He’s not merely denying; he’s positioning opponents as propagandists and himself as the victim of a coordinated narrative.

In the Kellogg context - a man whose brand fused health, morality, and authority - credibility isn’t a side issue. It’s the product. When he insists the claims were “absolutely false,” the adverb functions like a seal on a cereal box: certainty as reassurance, because doubt is what would actually spoil the enterprise.