Success Quote by Sanford I. Weill

There is a certain nostalgia in Weill framing Latin not as culture, beauty, or even usefulness, but as "logic" and "discipline" - the twin virtues a Wall Street builder most wants to claim as pedigree. The line reads like an origin story for a businessman who rose through systems where rules are both real and conveniently malleable: you honor structure publicly, you exploit flexibility privately. Latin becomes a metaphor for institutional order, the kind that signals seriousness without requiring you to specify any actual moral content.

The phrasing matters. "Some logic" is a modest hedge that keeps him from sounding like a classicist; it's the language of someone selling credibility, not reverence. And "there was a discipline" is even more telling: discipline is impersonal, almost architectural. It's not "it taught me discipline", which would be intimate and human. It's "there was" - discipline as an ambient property of elite training, something you absorb by proximity. That subtle distancing mirrors corporate culture at its most polished: virtues are presented as features of the environment, not choices individuals are accountable for.

The context, too, is social. Latin stands in for an older model of merit and gatekeeping: the kind of schooling that functioned as a sorting mechanism for leadership classes. In a modern business era often criticized for short-termism and moral improvisation, invoking Latin is a way to launder power through the aesthetics of rigor - a reminder that the people running the machine were, at least once, made to conjugate something.