Success Quote by Arnold H. Glasow

Hope gets marketed as noble, but Glasow gives it a receipt and finds the numbers don’t add up. "Expecting something for nothing" sounds like a childish fantasy, yet he calls it the most popular form of hope, a phrase that lands because it reframes a virtue as a consumer preference. This isn’t optimism; it’s wishful thinking with entitlement baked in, the emotional equivalent of a too-good-to-be-true deal.

The line works the way good business aphorisms work: it names a hidden demand in plain language. "Popular" is the tell. He’s not scolding a few naive people; he’s pointing to a mass habit, a default setting in modern life where effort feels negotiable and outcomes feel owed. The subtext is less about individual laziness than about how societies and markets train us to expect frictionless rewards: instant credit, overnight success, shortcuts masquerading as hacks. "Hope" becomes the respectable label we slap on avoidance.

As a businessman, Glasow is speaking from a world where inputs and outputs are supposed to balance, where someone always pays even when the buyer doesn’t see it. That’s why the joke has bite: it exposes the invisible ledger behind "free". You can hear the caution aimed at get-rich-quick schemes, magical thinking in politics, and the quiet self-deception of personal improvement fantasies. The sting is that he doesn’t deny hope; he demotes a cheap version of it. Real hope, implied here, costs something: time, risk, work, humility.