"Ambition, if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others"
About this Quote
Ambition is rarely the clean, self-powered rocket we like to picture; Sontag frames it as a scavenger species, living off the heat other people generate. The line is engineered to puncture the inspirational poster version of striving. “If it feeds at all” is the knife twist: ambition isn’t guaranteed to nourish you, and when it does, the meal is often someone else’s hunger, someone else’s ladder.
Sontag’s phrasing turns ambition into an ecosystem with predators and prey, but the cynicism is cooler than that. She’s less interested in individual villainy than in the social mechanics that make “success” legible. Careers, reputations, cultural capital: these are comparative currencies. You don’t merely achieve; you outpace. Even admiration can be extractive, a way of consuming another person’s drive as proof that you’re serious, that you belong among the serious.
As an author who moved through the crowded prestige economies of postwar American letters, Sontag knew how status circulates: who gets reviewed, who gets invited, whose intellect becomes a brand, whose “ambition” reads as vision versus vulgarity. The subtext is a warning about the moral camouflage of aspiration. Ambition loves to dress itself up as discipline, merit, even destiny. Sontag yanks off the costume and shows the dependence underneath: wanting something isn’t neutral when the thing you want is a position, a spotlight, a finite slot in the story.
It’s not a command to stop striving. It’s a demand to notice what your striving requires from other people - and what it quietly takes.
Sontag’s phrasing turns ambition into an ecosystem with predators and prey, but the cynicism is cooler than that. She’s less interested in individual villainy than in the social mechanics that make “success” legible. Careers, reputations, cultural capital: these are comparative currencies. You don’t merely achieve; you outpace. Even admiration can be extractive, a way of consuming another person’s drive as proof that you’re serious, that you belong among the serious.
As an author who moved through the crowded prestige economies of postwar American letters, Sontag knew how status circulates: who gets reviewed, who gets invited, whose intellect becomes a brand, whose “ambition” reads as vision versus vulgarity. The subtext is a warning about the moral camouflage of aspiration. Ambition loves to dress itself up as discipline, merit, even destiny. Sontag yanks off the costume and shows the dependence underneath: wanting something isn’t neutral when the thing you want is a position, a spotlight, a finite slot in the story.
It’s not a command to stop striving. It’s a demand to notice what your striving requires from other people - and what it quietly takes.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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