Parenting & Family Quote by Quintilian

Ambition gets indicted and quietly reinstated in the same breath. Quintilian labels it a vice, then turns around and credits it as the engine that produces virtue, a rhetorical pivot that feels less like contradiction than diagnosis. He’s writing as an educator inside an imperial system where status is public, scarce, and relentlessly contested. In that world, “pure” moral instruction isn’t enough; you need a motive powerful enough to compete with greed, fear, and vanity. Ambition, he implies, is that motive.

The subtext is pragmatic: people rarely choose discipline, courage, or eloquence for their own sake. They choose them because they want something - recognition, advancement, the ability to matter. Quintilian doesn’t excuse ambition’s uglier instincts (self-importance, domination), but he refuses the sentimental fantasy that virtue springs from unpressured goodness. He’s making a teacher’s bargain with human nature: harness the flawed drive, then shape its outputs.

Context matters here: Quintilian’s project in the Institutio Oratoria is to form the “good man skilled in speaking,” a civic ideal shadowed by the realities of Roman power. Rhetoric could be a tool of justice or a weapon of careerism; ambition is the volatile fuel in either case. By calling ambition a “parent,” he suggests genealogy rather than purity: virtues can have compromised origins and still be real. It’s a warning to moralists who demand spotless motives, and a warning to strivers that their drive can be redirected - toward public service, self-mastery, and excellence - or left to rot into vanity.