"All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind"
About this Quote
Conrad draws a hard moral border around a word we usually treat as value-neutral: ambition. The first clause flirts with permissiveness, almost entrepreneurial in its shrug - go ahead, want what you want. Then the sentence snaps shut on its hinge: the only outlawed ambitions are the ones that rise by standing on people. The verb choice matters. "Climb upward" turns success into a physical act, a boot-on-someone-else motion that feels both ordinary and ugly. It suggests not a single spectacular crime but a steady, socially tolerated ascent.
The pairing of "miseries" and "credulities" is the real tell. Conrad isn't only condemning exploitation of the poor or desperate; he's indicting those who profit from how badly people want to believe. That second target widens the net from factory bosses and colonial administrators to demagogues, grifters, and self-appointed saviors. He writes as a novelist who watched modern power justify itself through stories: civilizing missions, progress, destiny. The subtext is that oppression rarely announces itself as oppression; it recruits our hopes, fears, and gullibility as raw material.
Contextually, this lands in Conrad's larger preoccupation with imperial and commercial systems that launder predation into respectability. He isn't anti-ambition; he's anti-alibi. If your success depends on someone else's brokenness or on selling them a comforting lie, the achievement isn't merely tacky - it's illegitimate. In a culture that loves hustle narratives, Conrad insists on the missing audit: not how high you rose, but what you used as the ladder.
The pairing of "miseries" and "credulities" is the real tell. Conrad isn't only condemning exploitation of the poor or desperate; he's indicting those who profit from how badly people want to believe. That second target widens the net from factory bosses and colonial administrators to demagogues, grifters, and self-appointed saviors. He writes as a novelist who watched modern power justify itself through stories: civilizing missions, progress, destiny. The subtext is that oppression rarely announces itself as oppression; it recruits our hopes, fears, and gullibility as raw material.
Contextually, this lands in Conrad's larger preoccupation with imperial and commercial systems that launder predation into respectability. He isn't anti-ambition; he's anti-alibi. If your success depends on someone else's brokenness or on selling them a comforting lie, the achievement isn't merely tacky - it's illegitimate. In a culture that loves hustle narratives, Conrad insists on the missing audit: not how high you rose, but what you used as the ladder.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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