Success Quote by W. Clement Stone

The line lands like a tiny, fussy crime drama staged in the middle of an ordinary workday: not "Where's my lunch?" but "What contemptible scoundrel" dared commit cork-larceny. That exaggerated diction is the whole trick. Stone, a businessman who built a brand on upbeat self-help and managerial confidence, is ventriloquizing a certain species of executive indignation: the instinct to turn inconvenience into a moral failing in someone else. "Contemptible" and "scoundrel" are courtroom adjectives; the missing cork is aggressively minor. The mismatch produces comedy, but it also exposes a temperament.

The subtext is less about hunger than control. A stolen cork means someone crossed an invisible boundary in a shared space. In office life, where power often expresses itself through petty rituals (who touches what, who gets what, whose boundaries matter), the lunch becomes a proxy for status. By framing the culprit as villainous rather than merely annoying, the speaker protects his sense of order: if the world is run by scoundrels, then his irritation is principled, not childish.

Contextually, it evokes an older bourgeois workplace: packed lunches, reusable bottles, small personal property in communal environments. Stone's era prized propriety and respectability; the language performs that propriety even while it overreaches. It's a businessman joke with a stiff collar: the laugh comes from watching authority posture over something that doesn't deserve a posture at all.