Daily Inspiration Quote by Walter Lippmann

Success, in Lippmann's telling, is less a reward than a slow calcification. The line turns the usual morality tale upside down: instead of hard work producing wisdom, it produces rigidity. "Success makes men rigid" is blunt enough to sting, but the real bite is in how he anatomizes the psychology of the winner. Stability gets "exalt[ed]" not because it's inherently virtuous, but because it protects the arrangements that made success possible. The subtext is self-defense dressed up as principle.

His phrasing also carries a journalist's suspicion of power. "Tired of the effort of willing" suggests that ambition is not just labor but a sustained act of imagination - choosing, risking, revising. Once you're on top, the appetite for that kind of mental exertion fades. Conservatism becomes less an ideology than a sedative: a way to stop having to want anything new, a way to call fatigue "prudence."

Lippmann wrote through the churn of industrial capitalism, world wars, and the New Deal era - decades when institutions were being rewritten in real time. In that context, he's warning that the people most able to adapt society often become the people most invested in freezing it. The phrase "fanatics about conservatism" is the kicker: he isn't describing careful stewardship, but zealotry. It's a critique of elites who confuse their comfort with social order, and treat change not as a debate but as a threat.