Daily Inspiration Quote by Joseph Conrad

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.