Success Quote by John Foster Dulles

Success, in Dulles's formulation, is less a trophy than a diagnostic. The line rejects the comforting idea that hardship is proof of importance. Everyone has tough problems; the question is whether your toughness is productive or merely repetitive. By making time the yardstick ("last year"), he smuggles in a bureaucrat's suspicion: institutions, like people, can confuse motion with progress and treat recurring crises as evidence of indispensability.

As a Cold War diplomat, Dulles lived in a world where "problems" weren't abstract self-help obstacles but geopolitical knots: Soviet expansion, fragile alliances, nuclear brinkmanship. His intent reads like a warning to policy shops that survive by managing emergencies rather than resolving them. If you are still arguing the same case, fighting the same insurgency, or shoring up the same unstable partner, you're not steering history; you're administering stagnation. It's an implicit critique of the permanent-crisis ecosystem, where yesterday's headline becomes tomorrow's job security.

The subtext cuts personally, too. Repetition suggests either denial (refusing to change strategy) or cowardice (choosing familiar pain over uncertain reform). The sentence is built to sting: it doesn't flatter perseverance; it interrogates competence. Dulles frames success as learning, adaptation, and closure - the hard, unglamorous work of making certain problems disappear rather than becoming fluent in their management.