Success Quote by William Dampier

Success is the world’s laziest moral shortcut, and Dampier is calling it out with the weary clarity of someone who’s watched reputations rise and sink on the same tide. His line doesn’t just complain about unfairness; it diagnoses a social reflex: we treat outcomes as proof of virtue. Win, and your choices become “bold.” Lose, and those same choices retroactively turn “reckless,” “foolish,” even “dishonorable.” The verdict arrives after the fact, dressed up as common sense.

Coming from an explorer, the subtext carries extra bite. Dampier lived in an era when “adventure” and “plunder” often shared a deck, when imperial ambition was marketed as bravery, and when the difference between a celebrated navigator and a disgraced rogue could be a single failed voyage. Early modern exploration was a high-variance game: storms, scurvy, shifting alliances, bad maps. Yet society preferred a clean story with a clean hero, so it converted contingency into character assessment.

The phrasing “apt to judge” is doing quiet work. It implies instinct, not deliberation: people aren’t carefully weighing evidence; they’re defaulting to a comforting equation where the world is fair and winners deserve their winnings. “Ill fortune” is also pointedly impersonal. Dampier isn’t saying “bad decisions” or “sin,” but luck, circumstance, the chaos that makes expertise look like luck when it works and incompetence when it doesn’t.

It’s a warning to anyone staking their life on uncertain horizons: you’re not just gambling with your body; you’re gambling with your name.