The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess success … is our national disease.

The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess success. That — with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word success — is our national disease.

— William James (US psychologist and philosopher, 1842 – 1910), in a letter to H G (Herbert George) Wells, 11 September 1906