Quotes about ambition
page 2

“The others in the dorm thought I wanted to be a writer, because I was always alone with a book, but I had no such ambition. There was nothing I wanted to be.”

Haruki Murakami book Norwegian Wood

Source: Norwegian Wood

Books

“Most people would succeed in small things if they were not troubled with great ambitions.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) American poet

People

“If love is a yearning to be like (even to become) the beloved, then hatred, it must be said, can be engendered by the same ambition, when it cannot be fulfilled.”

Salman Rushdie book The Satanic Verses

Source: The Satanic Verses

Love

“(Men without ambition are boring)
And that attitude, mistress, is why the females of your kind continue to struggle for equality. And why they continue to fail.”

Richelle Mead (1976) American writer

Source: Storm Born

Men

“Some women make it look so easy, the way they cast ambition off like an expensive coat that no longer fits.”

Jenny Offill book Dept. of Speculation

Source: Dept. of Speculation

Women, Way

“If it is true that love is the pursuit in another of qualities we lack in ourselves, then in our love of someone from another culture, one ambition may be to weld ourselves more closely to values missing from our own culture.”

Alain de Botton (1969) Swiss writer

Source: The Art of Travel

Love

“My mouth is full of decayed teeth and my soul of decayed ambitions.”

James Joyce (1882–1941) Irish novelist and poet

Soul

“A man’s worth is no greater than the worth of his ambitions.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

Source: Meditations

“First ambitions are best. We are less brave later.”

Andrew Miller

Pure

“He was contemplation and enthusiasm. Ambition and strong coffee.”

E. Lockhart book We Were Liars

Variant: He was contemplation and enthusiasm. Ambition and strong coffee. I could have looked at him forever.
Source: We Were Liars

Coffee, Strong

“I knew a transsexual guy whose only ambition is to eat, drink, and be Mary.”

George Carlin (1937–2008) American stand-up comedian

Guy, Drink

“Ambition is all very well, my lad, but you must cloak it.”

Jonathan Stroud book The Amulet of Samarkand

Source: The Amulet of Samarkand

“Beware the viper in your closet. Isn’t that another thing you’re always saying, Father? Ambition and jealousy are at the heart of all betrayals. (Ryssa)”

Sherrilyn Kenyon (1965) Novelist

Source: Acheron

Jealousy, Betrayal, Heart

“Without ambition one starts nothing. Without work one finishes nothing. The prize will not be sent to you. You have to win it.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) American philosopher, essayist, and poet

Back To Work

“The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

Universe, Perfection

“But a reader's ambition knows no bounds.”

Alberto Manguel (1948) writer

Source: The Library at Night

“Hit that back-stabber where it hurts, right in the ambition.”

Eoin Colfer Artemis Fowl

Source: Artemis Fowl

Hurt

“My ambition was to live like music.”

Mary Gaitskill (1954) Novelist, short story writer, essayist

Music

“You cannot kill a breeze, a wind, a fragrance; you cannot kill a dream or an ambition.”

Michel Onfray (1959) French philosopher

Dreams

“The ambitions are wake up, breathe, keep breathing.”

Nicole Blackman (1971) American musician

Source: Blood Sugar

“At the age of six I wanted to be a cook. At seven I wanted to be Napoleon. And my ambition has been growing steadily ever since.”

Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) Spanish artist

Age, Cooking

“The whole life is a succession of dreams. My ambition is to be a conscious dreamer, that is all.”

Swami Vivekananda (1863–1902) Indian Hindu monk and phylosopher

Life, Dreams, Success

“I was never a man of great ambition
I cried too easily
I didn't have a head for science
Words often failed me
While others prayed I only moved my lips”

Nicole Krauss The History of Love

Source: The History of Love

Science

“We are men without ambition, and all we want is to be left alone, in peace so that we can try and be happy. So few people will understand this simplicity.”

Upamanyu Chatterjee (1959) Indian writer

Source: English, August: An Indian Story

Men, Happiness, People, Peace

“Poppy had known for years that she was going to marry him. It was one of her two great ambitions, the other being to see the world. She just hadn't gotten around to informing James yet.”

L.J. Smith (1965) American author

Source: Secret Vampire

World

“I've got a great ambition to die of exhaustion rather than boredom.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

Wise

“An average person with average talent, ambition and education can outstrip the most brilliant genius in our society, if that person has clear, focused goals.”

Brian Tracy (1944) American motivational speaker and writer

Education, Personality

“I didn’t really have any ambition at all. I was born very far from where I’m supposed to be, and so, I’m on my way home, you know?”

Bob Dylan (1941) American singer-songwriter, musician, author, and artist

No Direction Home (2005)
Source: No Direction Home: Bob Dylan
Context: I had ambitions to set out and find, like an odyssey or going home somewhere… set out to find… this home that I’d left a while back and couldn’t remember exactly where it was, but I was on my way there. And encountering what I encountered on the way was how I envisioned it all. I didn’t really have any ambition at all. I was born very far from where I’m supposed to be, and so, I’m on my way home, you know?

Way, Home

“Jo's ambition was to do something very splendid; what it was she had no idea, as yet, but left it for time to tell her…”

Louisa May Alcott book Little Women

Source: Little Women

Idea, Time

“What is your greatest ambition in life?'
'To become immortal… and then die.”

Jean-Luc Godard (1930) French-Swiss film director, screenwriter and film critic

Life

“Certain is it that there is no kind of affection so purely angelic as of a father to a daughter. In love to our wives there is desire; to our sons, ambition, but to our daughters there is something which there are no words to express.”

Joseph Addison (1672–1719) politician, writer and playwright

Love, Angels, Daughters, For Father

“I had some ambition. I meant everything to be different with me. I thought I had more strength and mastery. But the most terrible obstacles are such as nobody can see except oneself.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Source: Middlemarch

“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)

“Individual Ambition Serves the Common Good.”

Adam Smith (1723–1790) Scottish moral philosopher and political economist

“It is love and friendship, the sanctity and celebration of our relationships, that not only support a good life, but create one. Through friendships, we spark and inspire one another's ambitions.”

Wallace Stegner book Crossing to Safety

Source: Crossing to Safety

Love, Life, Friendship, Support

“Anxiety is the handmaiden of contemporary ambition.”

Alain de Botton book Status Anxiety

Source: Status Anxiety

“Whether we fall by ambition, blood, or lust,
Like diamonds, we are cut with our own dust.”

John Webster (1578–1634) English dramatist

Act V, scene v.
Duchess of Malfi (1623)

“Dependence begets subservience and venality, suffocates the germ of virtue, and prepares fit tools for the designs of ambition.”

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) 3rd President of the United States of America

Dependency

“A noble man compares and estimates himself by an idea which is higher than himself; and a mean man, by one lower than himself. The one produces aspiration; the other ambition, which is the way in which a vulgar man aspires.”

Marcus Aurelius book Meditations

Source: Meditations

Way, Idea

“He believed in himself, believed in his quixotic ambition, letting the failures of the previous day disappear as each new day dawned. Yesterday was not today. The past did not predict the future if he could learn from his mistakes.”

Daniel Wallace (1959) American author

Source: The Kings and Queens of Roam

Failure, Learning, Past, Future

“Here at last
We shall be free;
the Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure, and in my choice
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven.”

John Milton (1608–1674) English epic poet

Hell, Envy

“We will not be dictated to by men with less intelligence, energy, initiative and ambition than we ourselves possess.”

Elbert Hubbard (1856–1915) American writer, publisher, artist, and philosopher fue el escritor del jarron azul

Men, Intelligence

“I'm a pessimist if I'm not careful, a feminist, a Black,… an oil-and-water combination of ambition, laziness, insecurity, certainty, and drive.”

Octavia E. Butler (1947–2006) American science fiction writer

Water

“But I am happy. And happiness, I have decided, is a noble ambition.”

Seth Grahame-Smith (1976) US fiction author

Source: Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter

Happiness

“A tomato may be a fruit, but it is a singular fruit. A savory fruit. A fruit that has ambitions far beyond the ambitions of other fruits.”

E. Lockhart book The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks

Source: The Disreputable History of Frankie Landau-Banks

“I want to lay up like that, to float unstructured, without ambition or anxiety. I want to inhabit my life like a porch.”

Rebecca Wells book Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood

Source: Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood

Life

“Seek happiness in tranquility and avoid ambition even if it be only the apparently innocent one of distinguishing yourself in science and discoveries.”

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797–1851) English novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer

Happiness, Science

“Then the voice in your head silently tells you to take your foot off your throat because just getting along shouldn’t be an ambition.”

Claudia Rankine book Citizen: An American Lyric

Source: Citizen: An American Lyric

“It has always seemed absurd to suppose that a god would choose for his companions, during all eternity, the dear souls whose highest and only ambition is to obey.”

Robert G. Ingersoll (1833–1899) Union United States Army officer

Source: Individuality From 'The Gods and Other Lectures'

God, Soul

“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

Men, Pain

“If a person holds no ambitions in this world, he suffers unknowingly. If a person holds ambitions, he suffers knowingly, but very slowly.”

Alan Lightman book Einstein's Dreams

Source: Einstein's Dreams

World, Suffering, Personality

“People with ambition don't give a damn what other people think of them.”

Diane Setterfield (1964) English novelist

People, Thinking

“You have to choose the best, every day, without compromise… guided by your own virtue and highest ambition”

Philippa Gregory (1954) English novelist

“Ambition is not a dirty word. Piss on compromise. Go for the throat.”

Steven Erikson book Gardens of the Moon

Source: Gardens of the Moon

“My own ambition, my deepest and truest ambition, is to find within myself someday, somehow, the ability to do likewise, to do NOTHING - and find it enough.”

Edward Abbey (1927–1989) American author and essayist

“If the leader is filled with high ambition and if he pursues his aims with audacity and strength of will, he will reach them in spite of all obstacles.”

Carl von Clausewitz (1780–1831) German-Prussian soldier and military theorist

“We have made it our overriding ambition to escape work, and as a consequence have debased work until it is only fit to escape from. We have debased the products of work and have been, in turn, debased by them.
(pg. 43, "The Unsettling of America")”

Wendell Berry (1934) author

Source: The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

“Discontent follows ambition like a shadow.”

Henry S. Haskins (1875–1957)

Source: Meditations in Wall Street (1940), p. 137

“Woody Allen later wrote in a letter: "My observation was that once a person actually completed a play or a novel, he was well on his way to getting it produced or published, as opposed to a vast majority of people who tell me their ambition is to write, but who strike out on the very first level and indeed never write the play or book. In the midst of the conversation, as I’m now trying to recall, I did say that 80 percent of success is showing up."”

Woody Allen (1935) American screenwriter, director, actor, comedian, author, playwright, and musician

1989 August 13, New York Times, On Language: The Elysian Fields by William Safire.
Attributed

People, Books, Way, Time

“I have been fortunate enough to lead.... an uneventful life. Only on very rare occasions have I ever left Bologna, my native city, and the surrounding province of Emilia. Only twice, for instance, have I been abroad... Besides, I speak only my native language, as you see, and read only Italian periodicals... When I was in my early twenties, my highest ambition was to go abroad study art in Paris.... the material difficulties involved were too great, and I was obliged to remain in Italy. Later I had too many responsibilities, with my teaching and my family [his sisters he lived with] and never managed to go abroad.”

Giorgio Morandi (1890–1964) Italian painter

Source: 1945 - 1964, Interview, 1960, p. 106

Life, Family, Art, Sister

“Ambition will take you
And ride you too far and
Conservatism bring you to boredom once more
Sit down by the river
And watch the stream flow
Recall all the dreams
That you once used to know
The things you've forgotten
That took you away
To pastures not greener but meaner.”

Van Morrison (1945) Northern Irish singer-songwriter and musician

I'm Tired Joey Boy
Song lyrics, Avalon Sunset (1989)

Dreams

“People go into science out of curiosity, not to win awards. But scientists are human and have ambitions. Even the best scientists are often insecure and feel the need for recognition.”

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan (1952) Nobel prize winning American and British structural biologist

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan

People, Feeling, Science

“Your man with a thin skin, a vehement ambition, a scrupulous conscience, and a sanguine desire for rapid improvement is never a happy, and seldom a fortunate politician.”

Anthony Trollope book The Prime Minister

Source: The Prime Minister (1876), Ch. 11

Happiness

“For the sake of this fifth message of peace to Ireland, this farrago of superlative nonsense, the vexatious and costly machinery of a general election is to be put in motion, all business other than what may be connected with political agitation is to be impeded and suspended; trade and commercial enterprise, now suffering sadly from protracted bad times, and which political stability can alone re-invigorate, are to be further harassed and handicapped; all useful and desired reforms are to be indefinitely postponed; the British Constitution is to be torn up; the Liberal party shivered into fragments. And why? For this reason and no other. To gratify the ambition of an old man in a hurry.”

Lord Randolph Churchill (1849–1895) British politician

Address to the electors of South Paddington, quoted in The Times (21 June 1886), p. 6. The "old man in a hurry" was Liberal Party leader William Ewart Gladstone

Peace, Business, Suffering, Time

“The start of a film is like a gateway, a formal entrance-point. The first three minutes of a film make great demands on an audience's patience and credulity. A great deal has to be learnt very rapidly about place and attitude, character and intent and ambition.”

Peter Greenaway (1942) British film director

Watching Water

Patience

“Had the acute-angled rabble been all, without exception, absolutely destitute of hope and of ambition, they might have found leaders in some of their many seditious outbreaks, so able as to render their superior numbers and strength too much even for the wisdom of the Circles. But a wise ordinance of Nature has decreed that, in proportion as the working-classes increase in intelligence, knowledge, and all virtue, in that same proportion their acute angle (which makes them physically terrible) shall increase also and approximate to the comparatively harmless angle of the Equilateral Triangle. Thus, in the most brutal and formidable of the soldier class — creatures almost on a level with women in their lack of intelligence — it is found that, as they wax in the mental ability necessary to employ their tremendous penetrating power to advantage, so do they wane in the power of penetration itself.

How admirable is this Law of Compensation! And how perfect a proof of the natural fitness and, I may almost say, the divine origin of the aristocratic constitution of the States in Flatland! By a judicious use of this Law of Nature, the Polygons and Circles are almost always able to stifle sedition in its very cradle, taking advantage of the irrepressible and boundless hopefulness of the human mind. Art also comes to the aid of Law and Order. It is generally found possible — by a little artificial compression or expansion on the part of the State physicians — to make some of the more intelligent leaders of a rebellion perfectly Regular, and to admit them at once into the privileged classes; a much larger number, who are still below the standard, allured by the prospect of being ultimately ennobled, are induced to enter the State Hospitals, where they are kept in honourable confinement for life; one or two alone of the more obstinate, foolish, and hopelessly irregular are led to execution.”

Edwin Abbott Abbott book Flatland

Source: Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884), PART I: THIS WORLD, Chapter 3. Concerning the Inhabitants of Flatland

Life, Wisdom, Women, Law

“There never was yet a people who must not have somebody or something to represent the dignity of the state, the majesty of the people, call it what you will — a doge, an avoyer, an archon, a president, a consul, a syndic; this becomes at once an object of ambition and dispute, and, in time, of division, faction, sedition, and rebellion.”

John Adams (1735–1826) 2nd President of the United States

Letter LV: Conclusion http://www.constitution.org/jadams/ja1_55.htm <br class="br">1780s, A Defence of the Constitutions of Government (1787)

People, Time

“Is it wise to say to men of rank and property, who, from old lineage or present possessions have a deep interest in the common weal, that they live indeed in a country where, by the blessings of a free constitution, it is possible for any man, themselves only excepted, by the honest exertions of talents and industry, in the avocations of political life, to make him-self honoured and respected by his countrymen, and to render good service, to the slate; that they alone can never be permitted to enter this career? That they may indeed usefully employ themselves, in the humbler avocations of private life, but that public service they never can perform, public honour they never shall attain? What we have lost by the continuance of this system, it is not for man to know. What we may have lost can more easily be imagined. If it had unfortunately happened that by the circumstances of birth and education, a Nelson, a Wellington, a Burke, a Fox, or a Pitt, had belonged to this class of the community, of what honours and what glory might not the page of British history have been deprived? To what perils and calamities might not this country have been exposed? The question is not whether we would have so large a part of the population Catholic or not. There they are, and we must deal with them as we can. It is in vain to think that by any human pressure, we can stop the spring which gushes from the earth. But it is for us to consider whether we will force it to spend its strength in secret and hidden courses, undermining our fences, and corrupting our soil, or whether we shall, at once, turn the current into the open and spacious channel of honourable and constitutional ambition, converting it into the means of national prosperity and public wealth.”

Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston (1784–1865) British politician

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1813/mar/01/mr-grattans-motion-for-a-committee-on in the House of Commons in favour of Catholic Emancipation (1 March 1813). <br class="br">1810s

Life, Men, Secret, Education

“It must be admitted that, although I possessed a certain degree of ambition, like every other active human being, I was never animated by the desire to obtain "a post." For me "what I am" was always of less importance than "what I can," that is to say, what I was in a position to accomplish. In this way I, too, had my ambition and it was especially noticeable there where I stood with my whole heart and soul in the struggle, where the issue was the abolition of the slavery of working women.”

Alexandra Kollontai (1872–1952) Soviet diplomat

The Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated Communist Woman (1926)

Women, Way, Soul, Heart

“That the sacred name of religion which sounds nothing but sanctity, peace and integrity should be so universally abused to patronize ambition, impiety and contention! And that what is our highest interest perfectly to understand, should (for reasons afterward to be laid open) both be maintained to be obscure, and very industriously made so!”

John Toland book Christianity not Mysterious

Christianity not Mysterious (1696), Preface

Peace, Religion, Understanding, Universe

“One of my central missions in politics is to encourage the people of Scotland to share a restored belief in themselves. A sense of the possible. A sense of ambition. A restless eye for national advancement.”

Alex Salmond (1954) Scottish National Party politician and former First Minister of Scotland

St Andrew's Day (November 30, 2007)

People, Sense

“Let us say that the freedom exists, but it is limited to the one unique act of choosing the profession. Afterward all freedom is over. When he begins his studies at the university, the doctor, lawyer, or engineer is forced into an extremely rigid curriculum which ends with a series of examinations. If he passes them, he receives his license and can thereafter pursue his profession in seeming freedom. But in doing so he becomes the slave of base powers; he is dependent on success, on money, on his ambition, his hunger for fame, on whether or not people like him. He must submit to elections, must earn money, must take part in the ruthless competition of castes, families, political parties, newspapers. In return he has the freedom to become successful and well-to-do, and to be hated by the unsuccessful, or vice versa.”

Hermann Hesse book The Glass Bead Game

The Glass Bead Game (1943)

Money, Hunger, Hate, People

“Hillary Clinton did what she did for the sake of her agenda of personal ambition, carefully planned and worked out over months in which she was using and abusing the state of New York — because she looked at several other states--as a platform for her personal ambition. I, on the other hand, have responded to the call of the people of Illinois who have asked me to come and help them with a crisis situation. It doesn't violate my principal understanding of federalism, because federalism has two parts: state sovereignty and national unity.”

Alan Keyes (1950) American politician

Alan Keyes on CNN's American Morning, August 11, 2004. http://www.renewamerica.us/archives/media/interviews/04_08_11cnn.htm. <br class="br">2004 Illinois U.S. Senate race

People, Understanding, Help, Parting

“It was the realisation of a lifelong ambition to be the MP for my home town. It was by no means the end of a journey, but rather the beginning of a new chapter both for me and for the people of Batley and Spen.”

Jo Cox (1974–2016) UK politician

Column: Jo Cox – After a hard day’s night, the real work starts http://www.batleynews.co.uk/news/local/column-jo-cox-after-a-hard-day-s-night-the-real-work-starts-1-7264438 (16 May 2015)

People, Home

“I had a consuming ambition to possess a miller's thumb. I believe I have never since wanted anything more desperately than I wanted my right thumb to be flattened as my father’s had become, during his earlier years of a miller’s life.”

Jane Addams (1860–1935) pioneer settlement social worker

Source: Twenty Years at Hull-House (1910), Ch. 1

Life

“A woman's whole life is a history of the affections. The heart is her world: it is there her ambition strives for empire; it is there her avarice seeks for hidden treasures. She sends forth her sympathies on adventure; she embarks her whole soul on the traffic of affection; and if shipwrecked, her case is hopeless — for it is a bankruptcy of the heart.”

Washington Irving book The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.

"The Broken Heart".
The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon (1819–1820)

Life, World, Soul, History

“Writing stories was not easy. When they were turned into words, projects withered on the paper and ideas and images failed. How to reanimate them? Fortunately, the masters were there, teachers to learn from and examples to follow. Flaubert taught me that talent is unyielding discipline and long patience. Faulkner, that form – writing and structure – elevates or impoverishes subjects. Martorell, Cervantes, Dickens, Balzac, Tolstoy, Conrad, Thomas Mann, that scope and ambition are as important in a novel as stylistic dexterity and narrative strategy. Sartre, that words are acts, that a novel, a play, or an essay, engaged with the present moment and better options, can change the course of history. Camus and Orwell, that a literature stripped of morality is inhuman, and Malraux that heroism and the epic are as possible in the present as is the time of the Argonauts, the Odyssey, and the Iliad.”

Mario Vargas Llosa (1936) Peruvian writer, politician, journalist, and essayist

Nobel Lecture (2010)

History, Literature, Idea, Learning

“What is to be the nature of the domestic legislation of the future? (Hear, hear.) I cannot help thinking that it will be more directed to what are called social subjects than has hitherto been the case.—How to promote the greater happiness of the masses of the people (hear, hear), how to increase their enjoyment of life (cheers), that is the problem of the future; and just as there are politicians who would occupy all the world and leave nothing for the ambition of anybody else, so we have their counterpart at home in the men who, having already annexed everything that is worth having, expect everybody else to be content with the crumbs that fall from their table. If you will go back to the origin of things you will find that when our social arrangements first began to shape themselves every man was born into the world with natural rights, with a right to a share in the great inheritance of the community, with a right to a part of the land of his birth. (Cheers.) But all these rights have passed away. The common rights of ownership have disappeared. Some of them have been sold; some of them have been given away by people who had no right to dispose of them; some of them have been lost through apathy and ignorance; some have been stolen by fraud (cheers); and some have been acquired by violence. Private ownership has taken the place of these communal rights, and this system has become so interwoven with our habits and usages, it has been so sanctioned by law and protected by custom, that it might be very difficult and perhaps impossible to reverse it. But then, I ask, what ransom will property pay for the security which it enjoys? What substitute will it find for the natural rights which have ceased to be recognized?”

Joseph Chamberlain (1836–1914) British businessman, politician, and statesman

Speech to the Birmingham Artisans' Association at Birmingham Town Hall (5 January 1885), quoted in ‘Mr. Chamberlain At Birmingham.’, The Times (6 January 1885), p. 7.
1880s

Life, Men, Happiness, People

“Gratitude looks to the past and love to the present; fear, avarice, lust, and ambition look ahead.”

Clive Staples Lewis book The Screwtape Letters

Letter XVI
The Screwtape Letters (1942)

Love, Fear, Past, Gratitude

“Ambition has but one reward for all:
A little power, a little transient fame,
A grave to rest in, and a fading name.”

William Winter (1836–1917) American writer

"The Queen's Domain", The Queen's Domain, and other Poems (1858).

“In the field of modern business, so rich in opportunity for the exercise of man's finest and most varied mental faculties and moral qualities, mere money-making cannot be regarded as the legitimate end. Neither can mere growth of bulk or power be admitted as a worthy ambition. Nor can a man nobly mindful of his serious responsibilities to society view business as a game; since with the conduct of business human happiness or misery is inextricably interwoven.”

Louis Brandeis (1856–1941) American Supreme Court Justice

"Business — The New Profession", La Follette's Weekly Magazine, Volume 4, No. 47 (November 23, 1912), p. 7.
Extra-judicial writings

Money, Happiness, Exercises, Game

“I confidently trust that the American people will prove themselves … too wise not to detect the false pride or the dangerous ambitions or the selfish schemes which so often hide themselves under that deceptive cry of mock patriotism: "Our country, right or wrong!" They will not fail to recognize that our dignity, our free institutions and the peace and welfare of this and coming generations of Americans will be secure only as we cling to the watchword of true patriotism: "Our country — when right to be kept right; when wrong to be put right."”

Carl Schurz (1829–1906) Union Army general, politician

Speech expanding upon his famous statement in the Senate many years before, at the Anti-Imperialistic Conference, Chicago, Illinois (17 October 1899)

People, Peace, Confidence, Falseness

“The dearest ambition of a slave is not liberty but to have a slave of his own.”

Richard Francis Burton (1821–1890) British explorer, geographer, translator, writer, soldier, orientalist, cartographer, ethnologist, spy, lin…

The Book of The Thousand Nights And A Night (1885) When it was the Three Hundred and Sixtieth Night, footnote

“It was imperative to make common cause with the oppressed, in order to secure a new system opposed to the ambitions and governing habits of the oppressors.”

José Martí (1853–1895) Poet, writer, Cuban nationalist leader

Our America (1881)

“Be humane, be just and recognise that, over all ambitions, intrigues and hatred, there is the Motherland, the eternal of the people, and we always have to meet there, even though we disagree sometimes.”

Ion Antonescu (1882–1946) prime minister and conducător of Romania during World War II

People

“When I think of the artist Yves Klein, I think of those absolutists who preceded him by a generation or two, those who vanished, think of the boxer and Dadaist poet Arthur Cravan who in 1918 was supposed to leave Mexico to meet his new wife in Argentina but was never seen again; of Everett Ruess, the bohemian who might have become an artist or writer had he not disappeared into the canyons of Utah at the age of twenty in 1934, leaving behind a final signature carved into the rock: “Nemo” or “no one”; of the aviator Amelia Earhart who disappeared over the Pacific in 1937; of the pilot Antoine de Saint Exupéry who left behind several lapidary books before his plane too disappeared, in 1944, in the Mediterranean. They were all saddled with a desire to appear in the world and a desire to go as far as possible that was a will to disappear from it. In the ambition was a desire to make over the world as it should be; but in the disappearances was the desire to live as though it had been made over, to refashion oneself into a hero who disappeared not only into the sky, the sea, the wilderness, but into a conception of self, into legend, into the heights of possibility.”

Rebecca Solnit (1961) Author and essayist from United States

A Field Guide to Getting Lost (2005)

Books, Age, World, Thinking

“As we look to secure our ambitions for this nation's future, we must recognise that a vibrant Gaelic language and culture are central to what it means to be Scottish in the modern world.”

Alex Salmond (1954) Scottish National Party politician and former First Minister of Scotland

Sabhal Mòr Ostaig Lecture (December 19, 2007)

World, Future

“There was something else in the example of my father's life which impressed me very deeply when I was a young man, and which has greatly influenced me since I took up a public career. I suppose most people think of him as a great Colonial Secretary and tariff reformer, but before he ever went to the Colonial Office he was a great social reformer, and it was my observance of his deep sympathy with the working classes and his intense desire to better their lot which inspired me with an ambition to do something in my turn to afford better help to the working people and better opportunities for the enjoyment of life.”

Neville Chamberlain (1869–1940) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech in the Albert Hall, London (12 May 1938), quoted in The Times (13 May 1938), p. 11.
Prime Minister

Life, People, Thinking, Help

“Dear friends, on 9 October 2012, the Taliban shot me on the left side of my forehead. They shot my friends, too. They thought that the bullets would silence us, but they failed. And out of that silence came thousands of voices. The terrorists thought they would change my aims and stop my ambitions. But nothing changed in my life except this: weakness, fear and hopelessness died. Strength, power and courage was born. I am the same Malala. My ambitions are the same. My hopes are the same. And my dreams are the same. Dear sisters and brothers, I am not against anyone. Neither am I here to speak in terms of personal revenge against the Taliban or any other terrorist group. I am here to speak for the right of education for every child. I want education for the sons and daughters of the Taliban and all the terrorists and extremists. I do not even hate the Talib who shot me.”

Malala Yousafzai (1997) Pakistani children's education activist

UN speech, June 2013

Life, Hate, Education, Fear

“All that we call human history—money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery—the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.”

Clive Staples Lewis book Mere Christianity

Book II, Chapter 3, "The Shocking Alternative"
Mere Christianity (1952)

Money, God, War, Happiness

“Sir, there was once a time when close relations of amity were established between the Governments of England and France. It was in the reign of the later Stuarts; and it marks a dark spot in our annals, because it was an union formed in a spirit of domineering ambition on the one side, and of base and vile subserviency on the other. But that, Sir, was not an union of the nations; it was an union of the Governments. This is not be an union of the Governments; it is to be an union of the nations.”

William Ewart Gladstone (1809–1898) British Liberal politician and prime minister of the United Kingdom

Speech http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1860/feb/10/customs-acts-committee-the-financial in the House of Commons (10 February 1860) on the Anglo-French Commercial Treaty <br class="br">1860s

Time

“There has to be this pioneer, the individual who has the courage, the ambition to overcome the obstacles that always develop when one tries to do something worth while, especially when it is new and different.”

Alfred P. Sloan (1875–1966) American businessman

Variant: There has to be this pioneer, the individual who has the courage, the ambition to overcome the obstacles that always develop when one tries to do something worth while, especially when it is new and different.
Source: Adventures of a White-Collar Man. 1941, p. 127

Courage