"Those who have succeeded at anything and don't mention luck are kidding themselves"
About this Quote
Larry King’s line is a jab at the American success story told with studio-friendly bluntness: if you’ve “made it” and you never say the word luck, you’re performing a fantasy. The genius is in the casual insult baked into “kidding themselves.” He’s not calling people liars exactly; he’s calling them seduced. Success doesn’t just inflate egos, it edits memories. Once you’re on top, the story reorganizes around you as the main cause, and every coincidence gets retrofitted into “grit.”
King’s career gives the point extra bite. He wasn’t a philosopher of meritocracy; he was a professional listener who watched powerful people narrate themselves for a living. Night after night, celebrity and political guests arrived with polished origin myths. King’s job was to keep the conversation moving, but his superpower was recognizing the mechanics of a good self-portrait: a few hardships, a turning point, and a moral. Luck is the messy variable that ruins that arc, because it admits the role of timing, taste-makers, geography, health, and the thin margin between opportunity and oblivion.
The subtext is quietly democratic. If luck is real, then the unsuccessful aren’t automatically defective, and the successful aren’t automatically virtuous. That’s uncomfortable for a culture that wants winners to double as proof that the system is fair. King’s sentence punctures that comfort without moralizing; it just restores realism to the brag.
King’s career gives the point extra bite. He wasn’t a philosopher of meritocracy; he was a professional listener who watched powerful people narrate themselves for a living. Night after night, celebrity and political guests arrived with polished origin myths. King’s job was to keep the conversation moving, but his superpower was recognizing the mechanics of a good self-portrait: a few hardships, a turning point, and a moral. Luck is the messy variable that ruins that arc, because it admits the role of timing, taste-makers, geography, health, and the thin margin between opportunity and oblivion.
The subtext is quietly democratic. If luck is real, then the unsuccessful aren’t automatically defective, and the successful aren’t automatically virtuous. That’s uncomfortable for a culture that wants winners to double as proof that the system is fair. King’s sentence punctures that comfort without moralizing; it just restores realism to the brag.
Quote Details
| Topic | Success |
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