Success Quote by John Kluge

There is something almost disarmingly clean about Kluge calling “the pursuit of excellence” his “philosophy.” It’s a phrase with the sheen of a commencement podium, but in the mouth of a self-made media billionaire it doubles as a justification engine. Excellence is both aspiration and alibi: a value that sounds universally admirable while quietly sidestepping the messier questions a tycoon’s life invites - power, extraction, timing, luck, and the human costs that rarely fit on a balance sheet.

Kluge’s career rose with the late-20th-century story America loves to tell about itself: the immigrant’s son who climbs, consolidates, and “wins” by being better. In that context, “pursuit” matters as much as “excellence.” It suggests motion, discipline, standards - the idea that wealth was an outcome, not the point. That framing polishes ambition into character. It also converts competitive aggression into something almost moral: not outmaneuvering rivals, but out-performing them.

The subtext is managerial, not mystical. This isn’t excellence as personal enlightenment; it’s excellence as operational doctrine - pick the right assets, scale them, demand performance, keep the machine improving. Spoken late in life, it reads like legacy management: a way to compress decades of deal-making into a single, socially acceptable principle.

The line works because it’s vague enough to be unassailable and specific enough to signal elite self-regard. Who argues with excellence? That’s the rhetorical trick. It invites admiration while controlling the narrative about what, exactly, excellence produced.