“I have no ambition to govern men; it is a painful and thankless office.”
Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America
“Ambition often puts men upon doing the meanest offices; so climbing is performed in the same posture with creeping.”
Thoughts on Various Subjects from Miscellanies (1711-1726)
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Jonathan Swift141
Anglo-Irish satirist, essayist, and poet 1667–1745Related quotes
“It is the same woman, I know, for she is always creeping, and most women do not creep by daylight.”
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860–1935) American feminist, writer, commercial artist, lecturer and social reformer
Source: The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories
“Well is it known that ambition can creep as well as soar.”
Edmund Burke (1729–1797) Anglo-Irish statesman
No. 3
Letters On a Regicide Peace (1796)
“Men are more often bribed by their loyalties and ambitions than by money.”
Robert H. Jackson (1892–1954) American judge
United States v. Wunderlich, 342 U.S. 98, 103 (1951)
Judicial opinions
“To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.”
William Wordsworth (1770–1850) English Romantic poet
Intimations of Immortality Stanza 11.
Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Jean de La Bruyère book Les Caractères
Le sage guérit de l'ambition par l'ambition même; il tend à de si grandes choses, qu'il ne peut se borner à ce qu'on appelle des trésors, des postes, la fortune et la faveur.
Aphorism 43
Les Caractères (1688), Du mérite personnel
Avram Davidson book Masters of the Maze
Source: Masters of the Maze (1965), Chapter 7 (p. 85)
Robert F. Kennedy (1925–1968) American politician and brother of John F. Kennedy
Day of Affirmation Address (1966)
Context: All do not develop in the same manner, or at the same pace. Nations, like men, often march to the beat of different drummers, and the precise solutions of the United States can neither be dictated nor transplanted to others. What is important is that all nations must march toward increasing freedom; toward justice for all; toward a society strong and flexible enough to meet the demands of all its own people, and a world of immense and dizzying change.