Success Quote by Ambrose Bierce

Bierce doesn’t dress up self-doubt as a cute quirk of sensitivity; he indicts it as treason. The image is deliberately militaristic and humiliating: you don’t merely hesitate, you defect. You “enlist” with the enemy, “bear arms,” and become the saboteur inside your own lines. It’s classic Bierce - a journalist with a veteran’s eye for how defeat is engineered, and a satirist’s instinct to make the moral feel like a punchline with teeth.

The intent isn’t motivational-poster optimism. It’s a grim piece of strategy: the first conquest any opponent wants is your consent. Bierce’s subtext is that failure often arrives less as a dramatic blow than as paperwork signed in advance. If you’re “the first person to be convinced” you’ll lose, you’ve already done the enemy’s job for them; the battle after that is just logistics.

Context matters: Bierce came of age in a United States marinated in Civil War memory and, later, Gilded Age cynicism, where lofty rhetoric and cheap self-deception coexisted comfortably. His journalism thrives on stripping away sentimental alibis. So the metaphor lands because it weaponizes shame: self-doubt isn’t portrayed as tragic; it’s depicted as collaboration. That sting is the mechanism. Bierce wants the reader to feel how absurd it is to fight on behalf of their own defeat - and, in feeling it, to stop.