Success Quote by Sue Sanders

“Nothing succeeds like reports of success” is a pressure point disguised as a proverb: it’s not success that moves institutions, it’s the story that success happened. Sue Sanders, an activist whose work has long lived in the friction between lived experience and official recognition, is naming the machinery of legitimacy. In politics, schools, nonprofits, even movements that claim to be anti-establishment, “proof” often means metrics, headlines, case studies, awards, and the soothing language of outcomes. The report is the passport; the reality is just the applicant.

The intent has an edge: it’s both tactic and critique. On one hand, Sanders is offering a survival lesson for people working on the margins. If you want resources, allies, policy traction, you learn to translate messy human change into legible success. On the other, she’s warning that the system rewards narration over transformation. Once “success” becomes a communicable product, it can be manufactured, amplified, and recycled, regardless of whether conditions improved for anyone.

The subtext is about power’s attention span. Decision-makers rarely witness change directly; they consume it through summaries. That creates a perverse incentive: optimize for what can be reported, not what actually matters. Activism, in particular, gets pulled toward fundable victories and photogenic milestones, while slower, less glamorous work (care, safety, cultural shift) becomes harder to justify.

It works because it flips a familiar maxim into an accusation. The line sounds comforting until you hear the implication: in a report-driven culture, the appearance of progress can outrun progress itself.