"Ambition is but avarice on stilts, and masked"
About this Quote
Landor’s line takes a vice we’re taught to admire and yanks off its respectable costume. “Ambition” usually arrives dressed as striving, merit, destiny - a word that flatters the speaker and reassures the audience that success was earned. Landor refuses the compliment. He calls it “avarice on stilts,” a comic image that’s also diagnostic: greed, only elevated, elongated, made visible from farther away. Stilts don’t change what you are; they change how you look, how you tower over others, how you command attention. The ambition here isn’t a nobler impulse than avarice, just a more legible one.
“And masked” sharpens the accusation. Ambition doesn’t merely want; it wants to be praised for wanting. The mask is social: institutions reward the hungry person who can translate appetite into acceptable rhetoric - “legacy,” “impact,” “excellence,” “calling.” Landor’s subtext is that public virtue often functions as camouflage for private acquisition, and that culture is complicit because it prefers its self-interest aestheticized.
Context matters: Landor writes from the long 19th century, when Britain’s class order is straining under capitalism’s new winners and old moral languages. The era manufactures careers, reputations, and “great men” narratives at scale, then sanctifies the climb as character. Landor, a poet with a patrician bite and a lifelong allergy to cant, aims at that sanctification. The sentence works because it’s both metaphor and mini-satire: one brisk image collapses the distance between aspiration and hoarding, between the heroic ladder and the predatory reach.
“And masked” sharpens the accusation. Ambition doesn’t merely want; it wants to be praised for wanting. The mask is social: institutions reward the hungry person who can translate appetite into acceptable rhetoric - “legacy,” “impact,” “excellence,” “calling.” Landor’s subtext is that public virtue often functions as camouflage for private acquisition, and that culture is complicit because it prefers its self-interest aestheticized.
Context matters: Landor writes from the long 19th century, when Britain’s class order is straining under capitalism’s new winners and old moral languages. The era manufactures careers, reputations, and “great men” narratives at scale, then sanctifies the climb as character. Landor, a poet with a patrician bite and a lifelong allergy to cant, aims at that sanctification. The sentence works because it’s both metaphor and mini-satire: one brisk image collapses the distance between aspiration and hoarding, between the heroic ladder and the predatory reach.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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