Men rise from one ambition to another: first, they seek to secure themselves against attack, and then they attack others.

The line expresses a bleak, realist view of political and human motivation: security is rarely an endpoint. Once people (or states) have insulated themselves from threats, the same drive that sought safety often turns outward into domination. In Machiavellian terms, fear and ambition are intertwined—defensive measures create capacity and appetite for offense, and power tends to seek expansion to prevent future vulnerability. The observation also implies a cyclical dynamic in politics: today’s fortifications become tomorrow’s instruments of aggression, making stable peace difficult because the pursuit of safety can itself generate new threats.