Success Quote by Mark Zuckerberg

Silicon Valley needed a battle cry that made recklessness sound like rigor, and Zuckerberg supplied one. "Move fast and break things" turns disruption into a moral virtue: speed is framed not as a tradeoff but as proof of seriousness. The syntax is blunt, almost athletic. "Move fast" is the clean metric; "break things" is the visible scoreboard. If nothing shatters, you must not be trying.

The subtext is managerial as much as motivational. It gives cover to a particular kind of power: the ability to treat other people's time, attention, privacy, and social fabric as malleable product surfaces. "Things" is doing a lot of work here. It sounds like harmless code or a few features shipping rough, but it conveniently blurs what actually breaks when a platform scales: trust, norms, elections, mental health, local journalism, the idea that some systems should be stable by design. The line also recasts accountability as cowardice. Caution becomes slowness; dissent becomes lack of ambition.

Context sharpens the irony. Facebook popularized this mantra while racing to dominate a network-effects market where being first matters. It was an internal permission slip: ship, iterate, apologize later. Over time, the company itself quietly walked it back (the motto shifted to "Move fast with stable infrastructure") because the cost of breakage rose with scale. The quote survives because it captures a real startup truth about learning loops, but it also exposes the industry's favorite sleight of hand: calling collateral damage "innovation" when it mostly benefits the innovator.