Life & Mortality Quote by Thomas Hobbes

Hobbes skewers the piety we like to wrap around the classics. He’s not denying that ancient writers can be good; he’s denying our innocence in admiring them. The sting is his reversal: what looks like reverence is really rivalry. The dead are safe. They can’t answer back, steal your audience, or expose your mistakes in real time. Praising them becomes a social weapon among the living: a way to signal taste, to outflank contemporaries, to imply that today’s thinkers are small, corrupt, or unserious compared to an imagined golden age.

The subtext is pure Hobbes: status-seeking is the engine under the moral story we tell ourselves. In Leviathan, he treats humans as competitive creatures who crave “glory” and dominance, and culture is just another arena where that contest plays out. “Mutual envy” isn’t a sidebar; it’s the mechanism. Applause for antiquity becomes a kind of intellectual proxy war, a bloodless duel fought with footnotes and quotations.

Context matters. Hobbes is writing in a Europe where classical learning is both currency and cudgel, and where civil conflict has made appeals to tradition politically charged. Invoking the ancients can discipline dissent, or it can shame opponents as uneducated upstarts. Hobbes reads that move as less about truth than about leverage. The line still lands because it diagnoses a familiar pattern: canon-building as a way of managing anxiety about the present, and using “timelessness” to win very timely fights.