"Men rise from one ambition to another: first, they seek to secure themselves against attack, and then they attack others"
About this Quote
Security, for Machiavelli, is rarely a resting state; its real function is to clear the runway for the next grab at advantage. The line moves with a grim inevitability: ambition is not a ladder you climb and then step off, but a conveyor belt. First comes the defensive pose - “secure themselves against attack” - the classic legitimizing story every rising power tells itself and sells to others. Then, almost on cue, the same men become the threat they feared. Machiavelli’s bite is in the symmetry: protection and predation are not opposites; they’re stages of the same appetite.
The subtext is a demolition of moral alibis. He’s not merely describing hypocrisy, though hypocrisy is implied; he’s describing a system in which intentions are less important than incentives. If you live in a world where others can ruin you, you stockpile leverage. Once you have it, you’d be foolish (in Machiavelli’s sense) not to use it before the wheel turns again. “Attack” isn’t just war; it’s politics, faction, reputation, law - any instrument that converts fear into control.
Context matters: Machiavelli writes in the churn of Renaissance Italy, a patchwork of city-states, mercenaries, papal schemes, and foreign invasions. Stability is temporary, sovereignty is contested, and virtue alone doesn’t keep armies out. The quote’s intent is diagnostic, not despairing: it trains the reader to see how power narrates itself. The unsettling lesson is that a defensive rhetoric can be perfectly sincere and still end in aggression, because ambition doesn’t retire; it compounds.
The subtext is a demolition of moral alibis. He’s not merely describing hypocrisy, though hypocrisy is implied; he’s describing a system in which intentions are less important than incentives. If you live in a world where others can ruin you, you stockpile leverage. Once you have it, you’d be foolish (in Machiavelli’s sense) not to use it before the wheel turns again. “Attack” isn’t just war; it’s politics, faction, reputation, law - any instrument that converts fear into control.
Context matters: Machiavelli writes in the churn of Renaissance Italy, a patchwork of city-states, mercenaries, papal schemes, and foreign invasions. Stability is temporary, sovereignty is contested, and virtue alone doesn’t keep armies out. The quote’s intent is diagnostic, not despairing: it trains the reader to see how power narrates itself. The unsettling lesson is that a defensive rhetoric can be perfectly sincere and still end in aggression, because ambition doesn’t retire; it compounds.
Quote Details
| Topic | Wisdom |
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