Wealth & Money Quote by P. G. Wodehouse

Wodehouse sneaks a moral fable into a sport that likes to pretend it has none. By pairing “sudden success in golf” with “the sudden acquisition of wealth,” he turns a modest game into a miniature society: a place where status is tracked obsessively, rules are fetishized, and the real competition is often ego. The line lands because it treats achievement not as proof of virtue but as a solvent. Get good quickly, get rich quickly - either way, the danger is that you start believing you deserved it in some cosmic sense. That belief is the deterioration.

The phrasing is doing quiet, British damage. “Apt to” is classic Wodehouse restraint: polite on the surface, merciless underneath. He doesn’t say success corrupts; he says it “unsettle[s],” like a floor shifting under someone who was previously held in place by limitation. Golf, with its rituals of etiquette and its reputation as a gentleman’s test, is the perfect setup. It’s a game where one is supposed to lose gracefully, narrate one’s own failures with charm, and respect the invisible hierarchy of handicaps and clubs. Sudden excellence breaks the social script; it invites bragging, excuses, contempt for slower learners - the small violences of superiority.

Context matters: Wodehouse wrote in and about an England acutely aware of class, money, and the performance of propriety. He’s not preaching so much as smirking at the spectacle of people who mistake a hot streak for a new identity. The joke stings because it’s plausible: character doesn’t just get tested by failure; it gets warped by winning too easily.