Success Quote by Phyllis McGinley

Success is supposed to be the victory lap, but McGinley flips it into a trapdoor. "Nothing fails like success" lands because it treats achievement as a destabilizer, not a finish line. The moment you win, the world starts auditing your win: expectations harden, rivals regroup, and the very conditions that made success possible change under its glow. Success doesn’t just raise the bar; it moves the game.

The second clause sharpens the blade. A "Cause" that was "triumphant" yesterday is "defeated" today, not necessarily because it was wrong, but because triumph fossilizes it. Once a movement becomes the new normal, its moral electricity drains. What was insurgent turns managerial; what was visionary becomes policy, branding, or etiquette. Yesterday’s banners become today’s bureaucracy. McGinley understands how quickly public attention punishes any cause that keeps asking to be treated like an emergency after it has, supposedly, won.

Her intent feels less like cynicism for its own sake and more like a warning against complacency and self-mythology. The subtext: winning can make you careless, arrogant, even dull; it can turn allies into gatekeepers and arguments into slogans. Context matters here. Writing in mid-century America, McGinley watched fashions of belief and reform cycle fast through a mass-media culture that crowned heroes quickly and discarded them just as fast. The line captures that modern whiplash: today’s triumph is tomorrow’s outdated certainty, and success is often the first step toward irrelevance.