Success Quote by Russell Lynes

Snobbery, in Lynes's hands, isn’t a personality quirk; it’s a treadmill with a view. "The true snob never rests" frames status-chasing as labor - ceaseless, anxious, and self-renewing. The joke is that the prize is exhaustion: the snob’s identity depends on perpetual dissatisfaction, because satisfaction would collapse the hierarchy that keeps them feeling distinct.

The line’s neat mechanism is its paired escalation. "Always a higher goal to attain" sounds almost Protestant, a self-help mantra about striving. Then Lynes flips it with "by the same token": the same drive that looks like ambition also manufactures contempt. Aspiration and disdain are presented as a single impulse wearing two different outfits. The snob doesn’t merely climb; they must actively produce people beneath them to make the climb meaningful. Without an audience to diminish, the performance fails.

Context matters: Lynes was a mid-century American critic who anatomized social status with a cool, magazine-era precision, when class signals were supposedly democratizing but still ferociously policed through taste - where you vacationed, what you read, what you wore, how you pronounced the wine. His point lands because it exposes snobbery as structurally insatiable. There is no end zone, only a moving ladder and an expanding shadow caste.

The subtext is grimly modern: this is less about old money than about any culture that treats identity as a rank. The snob’s peace is impossible, because peace would require equality.