Daily Inspiration Quote by Mercy Otis Warren

Ambition is framed here not as a private virtue but as a predatory system with a long memory. Mercy Otis Warren’s “bulk of mankind” is a deliberately blunt phrase: most people, not a tragic few, get swept up. And “in all countries in their turn” adds a grim, almost theatrical pacing, like a revolving stage where different nations step forward to repeat the same civic mistake. The line is less a lament than an accusation that history keeps rerunning because power keeps finding new costumes.

Warren writes as a Revolutionary-era playwright and political thinker who watched the rhetoric of liberty collide with the reality of faction, ego, and consolidation. In that context, “ambition” points upward: would-be monarchs, demagogues, and self-anointed saviors who translate personal advancement into public necessity. The genius of “prey” is that it denies consent. People aren’t merely misled; they’re hunted, consumed, used. It suggests a public that can be organized, panicked, and flattered into surrendering its interests to someone else’s ascent.

There’s also a warning aimed at the revolutionaries themselves. Having fought one form of domination, Americans could easily reproduce it under a different banner, with charismatic leaders and “patriot” branding substituting for crowns. Warren’s subtext is that freedom isn’t secured by a single uprising; it’s secured by durable suspicion of concentrated power. Her dramatic sensibility shows in the line’s moral staging: ambition is the villain, the masses the recurring casualties, and the setting changes, but the plot stays stubbornly familiar.