Success Quote by Philip Guedalla

“Greatness” looks like a moral verdict, but Guedalla treats it as a social convenience: a polite way of applauding the scoreboard without admitting we’re doing it. The line is small, dry, and surgical. “Courteous” is the key insult. It suggests that calling someone great can be less an act of judgment than an act of manners - a verbal tip of the hat to power, wealth, victory, notoriety. Greatness, in this reading, isn’t discovered; it’s conferred, often by people who benefit from the conferral.

As a historian, Guedalla is winking at the machinery of reputation. Nations don’t just remember; they curate. Biographers don’t just narrate; they varnish. The phrase “so often” keeps him from cynicism-by-default: he’s not denying that real greatness exists, only noting how frequently the label functions as a euphemism for outcomes that are measurable and crowd-pleasing. Success is legible; greatness is supposed to be earned in harder currencies - character, vision, sacrifice, consequence over time. Calling success “greatness” collapses that distinction and lets us skip the uncomfortable questions: successful for whom, at what cost, by what means?

The subtext is aimed at a culture that loves winners and then retrofits virtue onto them. In public life especially, “greatness” can become a form of flattery masquerading as evaluation - an honorific that launders ambition into destiny. Guedalla’s irony lands because it reveals how easily our highest praise can be reduced to etiquette.