Success Quote by Josiah Stamp

Stamp’s line lands like a spreadsheet with a moral edge: you can juggle the inputs, but the ledger still has to balance. Coming from a businessman who lived through the rise of corporate modernity and the shocks of World War I and the Great Depression, the quote reads less like a self-help mantra and more like a diagnosis of a system that rewards short-term evasion until reality submits its invoice.

The craft is in the double use of “dodge.” The first dodge is social: the little maneuvers people and institutions use to avoid blame, hard choices, or inconvenient duties. The second is physical and inevitable: consequences are not an argument you can talk your way out of. Stamp compresses a whole theory of accountability into a neat chiasmus-like turn, making the sentence feel airtight. You hear the click of a trap closing.

The subtext is pointedly anti-magical thinking. Responsibility is negotiable in the moment because it’s often enforced by norms, not physics: you can delay, deflect, outsource, lawyer up. Consequences operate on a different schedule. They’re cumulative, often impersonal, and they don’t care how persuasive your excuses sounded at the meeting. That’s why the quote still plays in today’s culture of “move fast,” risk externalization, and plausible deniability. It’s a warning to anyone tempted by the corporate version of moral hazard: you can privatize rewards, but you can’t indefinitely socialize costs without blowback.

Stamp isn’t pleading for virtue; he’s describing a mechanism. Ignore it, and you don’t get freedom. You get interest.