Wealth & Money Quote by Lucille Ball

Lucille Ball treats "luck" the way a seasoned comic treats a cheap gag: suspicious, overused, and usually hiding lazy craft. The opening feint - "Luck? I don't know anything about luck" - plays like a setup line, but the punch is moral, not comedic. She rejects luck as a credit-claiming device, the story people tell to make success feel random and failure feel blameless. When she says she's "afraid of people who do" bank on it, she's really naming a kind of entitlement: the belief that the world owes you a break if you wait long enough.

Then she pulls the trick that made her such a force on-screen: she redefines the terms. "Luck to me is something else" is a controlled pivot from superstition to agency. Hard work is the visible part, the hours and repetition. The sharper subtext is the second clause: "realizing what is opportunity and what isn't". That's not hustle-poster grit; it's pattern recognition. It's the unglamorous skill of knowing when a door is actually open and when it's painted on a wall.

Context matters: Ball came up through an era that routinely minimized women's ambition as charm or accident. Calling her success "luck" would have been a tidy way to dismiss both her labor and her strategic intelligence - the precision of timing, the willingness to risk looking ridiculous, the business acumen that helped build an empire. Her line insists on authorship. If "luck" exists, she implies, it looks a lot like preparation meeting clarity, then having the nerve to step into the frame.