Success Quote by Mitt Romney

“Lifted up” versus “dragged down” is classic Romney: moral physics dressed as campaign rhetoric. The line turns economic debate into a character test. Success becomes not just an outcome but a kind of civic virtue, an engine that elevates the whole community. Resentment, by contrast, is framed as a corrosive emotion that literally weighs the nation down. It’s an argument about policy, yes, but it’s delivered as a diagnosis of attitude.

The intent is to disarm redistributionist impulses by recoding them as envy. If you’re skeptical of the winners, the quote implies, you’re not advocating fairness; you’re nursing a grudge. That move is politically useful because it shifts scrutiny away from how success is produced (market power, inherited advantage, structural barriers) and toward how critics feel about it. The subtext flatters aspirational voters: you’re the kind of person motivated by ambition, not bitterness. It also offers donors and high earners a comforting portrait of themselves as symbols of national uplift, not targets of warranted accountability.

Context matters: Romney emerged from the post-2008 climate of populist anger, Occupy rhetoric, and intensified fights over taxes and inequality. His “different path” is a promise to restore an optimism-centered capitalism, where growth is the main social policy and moral legitimacy flows upward from achievement. The elegance of the line is its asymmetry: “desire to succeed” sounds constructive and future-facing, while “resentment of success” sounds petty and backward. It’s a neat rhetorical trap, because once the debate is about resentment, you’re already on defense.