Quotes about ambition
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Yoshida Kenkō (1283–1350) japanese writer

Tsurezure-Gusa (Essays in Idleness)

“Ambition has its disappointments to sour us, but never the good fortune to satisfy us.”

Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) American author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, inventor, civic activist, …

"On True Happiness", Pennsylvania Gazette (20 November 1735).
1730s

Disappointment

“I had given up [around 1950] any ambition of making a career as an artist... I had lost all interest in the art shown in galleries and museums, and I no longer aspired to fit in that world. I loved the paintings done by children, and my only desire was to do the same for my own pleasure.”

Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985) sculptor from France

Source: posthumous, Batons rompus, 1986, pp. 7-8

Love, Children, Pleasure, World

“If I was accused of neglecting my art, or sacrificing my ideas for the sake of stupid ambition, then I would understand the critics; but as that isn't the case, there is nothing to be said. I sent a picture to the Salon for purely commercial reasons. Anyway, it is like some medicines – even if it does no good, it does no harm.”

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919) French painter and sculptor

other impressionist artists then refused to send in their work to the Salon
Source: 1880's, Renoir – his life and work, 1975, p. 128 : in a letter to art-dealer Durand-Ruel, March 1881

Stupidity, Art, Idea, Understanding

“To succeed in brilliant businesses, to achieve great success, that is what the ambition and efforts of the majority of men aim at (or direct at or have their eyes on, "c'est ce à quoi visent l'ambition et les efforts de la majorité des hommes" Fr.) but after all (or at the end of the day), what do they get for it ("Qu'est-ce qu'ils en retirent", Fr.) Softer cushions, better meat (Here there seems to be a mistake in the book of Hélène Claparède-Spir, for it is written "une meilleure chère", what one may translate by 'a better dear'… whether its homonymous, chair, is 'meat'), more outward thoughtfuls ("prévenance extérieures", Fr.), maybe decorations (or medals)… that is all. And to think that there are found serious men who consume (or waste, "consument", Fr.) their whole existence in the pursuit and the expectation of these trivialities.”

African Spir (1837–1890) Russian philosopher

Source: Words of a Sage : Selected thoughts of African Spir (1937), p. 49.

Men, Books, Business, Thinking

“Don Quixote thought he could have made beautiful bird-cages and toothpicks if his brain had not been so full of ideas of chivalry. Most people would succeed in small things, if they were not troubled with great ambitions.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) American poet

Table-Talk (1857)

People, Beauty, Idea, Bird

“So Henry Adams, well aware that he could not succeed as a scholar, and finding his social position beyond improvement or need of effort, betook himself to the single ambition which otherwise would scarcely have seemed a true outcome of the college, though it was the last remnant of the old Unitarian supremacy. He took to the pen. He wrote.”

Henry Adams (1838–1918) journalist, historian, academic, novelist

The Education of Henry Adams (1907)

Effort

“I began to think about William Shakespeare, the great literary figure. I would reckon he thought of himself as a dramatist. The thought that he was writing literature couldn't have entered his head. His words were written for the stage. Meant to be spoken not read. When he was writing Hamlet, I'm sure he was thinking about a lot of different things: "Who're the right actors for these roles?" "How should this be staged?" "Do I really want to set this in Denmark?" His creative vision and ambitions were no doubt at the forefront of his mind, but there were also more mundane matters to consider and deal with. "Is the financing in place?" "Are there enough good seats for my patrons?" "Where am I going to get a human skull?"”

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

I would bet that the farthest thing from Shakespeare's mind was the question "Is this literature?"
Nobel Banquet Speech

Literature, Question, Thinking, Reading

“The California Institute of Technology (CalTech) rose to prominence when Robert A. Millikan was called to Pasadena in 1921 as new university president. Millikan was known for his far-reaching ambitions both as a physicist and as a science manager. He put CalTech on the map as a top university by inviting the world's most renowned scientists for guest lectures and by hiring internationally distinguished scientists to new chairs. With theoretical physicist Paul Epstein, a pupil of Sommerfeld's, Millikan brought modern atomic physics to CalTech in the early 1920s, and with Kármán, he pursued the same strategy a few years later in order to lure the best available aerodynamicist from Europe to Pasadena.”

Robert Andrews Millikan (1868–1953) American physicist

[Michael Eckert, The Dawn of Fluid Dynamics: A Discipline Between Science and Technology, https://books.google.com/books?id=GxIUCQ6Yai8C&pg=PA201, 27 June 2007, John Wiley & Sons, 978-3-527-61074-7, 201]

World, Universe, Science

“Avarice is generally the last passion of those lives of which the first part has been squandered in pleasure, and the second devoted to ambition.”

Samuel Johnson The Rambler

No. 151 (27 August 1751). http://books.google.com/books?id=VvhDAAAAYAAJ&q=%22avarice+is+generally+the+last+passion+of+those+lives+of+which+the+first+part+has+been+squandered+in+pleasure+and+the+second+devoted+to+ambition%22&pg=PA262#v=onepage The Rambler (1750–1752)

Pleasure, Passion, Parting

“My ambition is to unfold the sources of India in the profound plane of human nature.”

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan (1888–1975) Indian philosopher and statesman who was the first Vice President and the second President of India

Quotations by 60 Greatest Indians, Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology http://resourcecentre.daiict.ac.in/eresources/iresources/quotations.html,

Nature

“O fading honours of the dead!
O high ambition, lowly laid!”

Walter Scott The Lay of the Last Minstrel

Canto II, stanza 10.
The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805)

Dead

“Ambition prompted many to become deceitful; to keep one thing concealed in the breast, and another ready on the tongue; to estimate friendships and enmities, not by their worth, but according to interest; and to carry rather a specious countenance than an honest heart.”
Ambitio multos mortales falsos fieri subegit, aliud clausum in pectore, aliud in lingua promptum habere, amicitias inimicitiasque non ex re, sed ex commodo aestimare, magisque vultum quam ingenium bonum habere.

Sallust (-86–-34 BC) Roman historian, politician

Variant translation: It is the nature of ambition to make men liars and cheats, to hide the truth in their breasts, and show, like jugglers, another thing in their mouths, to cut all friendships and enmities to the measure of their own interest, and to make a good countenance without the help of good will.
Source: Bellum Catilinae (c. 44 BC), Chapter X, section 5

Friendship, Heart

“Within sociology there have been several system theories, differing from one another in the extent to which, for example, human agency, creativity, and entrepreneurship are assumed to play a role in system formation and reformation; conflict and struggle are taken into account; power and stratification are part and parcel of the theory; structural change and transformation – and more generally, historically developments – are taken into account and explained. What the various system theories have in common is a systematic concern with complex and varied interconnections and interdependencies of social life. Complexity has been a central concept for many working in the systems perspective. The tradition is characterized to a great extent by a burning ambition and hope to provide a unifying language and conceptual framework for all the social sciences.”

Tom R. Burns (1937) American sociologist

Source: Systems theories (2006), p. 1.

Life, Hope, Science, Change

“Wisdom is corrupted by ambition, even when the quality of the ambition is intellectual. For ambition, even of this quality, is but a form of self-love…”

Henry Taylor (1800–1886) English playwright and poet

Wisdom.
Notes from Life (1853)

Love, Wisdom

“Why should I be more ‘cautious, careful,’ as you say? I stay in the big leagues as long as I do because I play only one way. I know I take too many, maybe. I know I should not sometimes dive for the ball—or hit the wall trying to catch it— as much as I do. But you catch the ball, you help your team. You don’t catch it, you don’t help your team. I believe playing, how you say, ‘all out’ has prolonged my career. If a ballplayer starts loafing, he tends to lose that little push that is so necessary, so important. You get lazy, won’t take even the smallest chance; kind of lose interest. Your rhythm, I guess it is, gets all messed up. Fly balls start falling on you, when they should not. And you find yourself not getting around on the ball like you should. Once you lose this ‘little push,’ then it is awfully hard to get back in the groove… get yourself going again. Your ambition – desire – suffers. And you become the kind of ballplayer you don’t want to be.”

Roberto Clemente (1934–1972) Puerto Rican baseball player

As quoted in "‘Never Let Up,’ Says Clemente" by Hal Hayes, in The Atlanta Constitution (Tuesday, May 5, 1970), p. 2-C
Baseball-related, <big><big>1970s</big></big>, <big>1970</big>

Way, Suffering, Chance, Help

“Beware of those who come pretending to help education when they are trying to seize control of education. Socialist and Communist planners have ambitions to eliminate all local control - which means the teachers themselves would lose control.”

W. Cleon Skousen book The Naked Communist

The Naked Communist (1958)

Education, Teachers, Help

“There has been a revolution, then, but a silent one. It has taken place with such stealth, and so gradually, that people have become accustomed to it little by little. I am reminded of the famous Chinese executioner whose ambition it was to be able to cut off a head so that the victim would not realize what had happened. For years he worked on his skill, and one day he cut off a head so perfectly that the victim said: "Well, when are you going to do it?"”

Kenneth Minogue (1930–2013) Australian political theorist

The executioner gave a beatific smile and said: "Just kindly nod."
Introduction, p. viii. ; quoted in The Feminist Crusades: Making Myths and Building Bureaucracies (c. 2007) Zepezauer ISBN 9781425972868
How Civilizations Fall

People, Smile

“The thought of Mr. J. L. B. Matekoni nursing secret, unfulfilled ambitions saddened Mma Ramotswe, as did the thought of people wanting something very much indeed and not getting the thing they yearned for. When we dismiss or deny the hopes of others, she thought, we forget that they, like us, have only one chance in this life.”

Alexander McCall Smith book Tea Time for the Traditionally Built

Tea Time for the Traditionally Built, chapter 11.
The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series

Life, People, Secret, Hope

“Its no secret that a Conscience can sometimes be a Pest, Its no Secret that Ambition bites the Nails of Success”

Bono (1960) Irish rock musician, singer of U2

"The Fly"
Lyrics, Achtung Baby (1991)

Secret, Success

“My ambition has always been to reduce a building’s support to a minimum. The more we diminish supporting structures, the more audacious and important the architecture is. That has been my life’s work.”

Oscar Niemeyer (1907–2012) Brazilian architect

Quoted in "Architect of Optimism," Angel Gurria-Quintana, Financial Times (2007-04-13).

Life, Support

“When you say ambition to me, that's when you get me started! My greatest ambition is to be the whoppingest best actress in Hollywood. You can't blame a girl for trying! I don't want to be classed as a "personality," something to stare at. I want to have my talents respected, not only by the public but by myself.”

Lizabeth Scott (1922–2015) American actress and singer

McFadden, Robert D. (February 6, 2015). " Lizabeth Scott, Film Noir Siren, Dies at 92 https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/07/movies/lizabeth-scott-film-noir-siren-dies-at-92.html". The New York Times.

Girl, Personality

“The exercise of letters is sometimes linked to the ambition to construct an absolute book, a book of books that includes the others like a Platonic archetype, an object whose virtues are not diminished by the passage of time.”

Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986) Argentine short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator, and a key figure in Spanish language literature

"Note on Walt Whitman" ["Nota sobre Walt Whitman"]
Discussion (1932)

Books, Exercises, Time

“I didn't decide to run for president to start a national crusade for the political reforms I believed in, or to run a campaign as if it were some grand act of patriotism. In truth, I wanted to be president because it had become my ambition to be president.”

John McCain (1936–2018) politician from the United States

Source: 2000s, 2002, Worth the Fighting For (2002), p. 373

Truth

“I will be satisfied if my epitaph shall be written thus: "Here lies one who never rose to any eminence, who only courted the low ambition to have it said that he striven to ameliorate the condition of the poor, the lowly, the downtrodden of every race and language and color."”

Thaddeus Stevens (1792–1868) American politician

Speech (13 January 1865), as quoted in History of the Antislavery Measures of the Thirty-seventh and Thirty-eighth Congress (1865) by Henry Wilson, p. 388
1860s

Color

“There are always obstacles and competitors. There is never an open road, except the wide road that leads to failure. Every great success has always been achieved by fight. Every winner has scars. The men who succeed are the efficient few. They are the few who have the ambition and will power to develop themselves.”

Herbert N. Casson (1869–1951) Canadian journalist and writer

Herbert N. Casson in: National Printer Journalist Vol 51 (1933), Nr. 7-12. p. 28; Cited in Arthur Tremain (1951) Successful Retailing: A Handbook for Store Owners and Managers p. xi
1920s-1940s

Men, Failure, Success, Fight

“I cannot but add that I have always been a supporter and defender of your policy when you were Prime Minister. I am sure that it was right. In view of the attitude of France and of the unreadiness of this country for which you were in no way to be blamed, it would have been folly to precipitate then a war with Germany. It was your strength of will and purpose and self-restraint that saved us from that mistake. When the time to meet the challenge of Hitler came, you had made it plain to the whole impartial world that you had done everything possible to keep Europe from war, and to fix the blame for that calamity on the unbridled ambition of Hitler. You enabled your country to enter the war with a clear conscience and a united will.”

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

Archbishop of Canterbury Cosmo Gordon Lang to Chamberlain (6 October 1940), quoted in Keith Feiling, Neville Chamberlain (London: Macmillan, 1946), pp. 462-463.
About

War, World, Way, Support

“Ambition is like love, impatient
Both of delays and rivals.”

John Denham (1615–1669) English poet and courtier

The Sophy: A Tragedy, Act I, scene ii.

Love

“Were the talents and virtues which heaven has bestowed on men given merely to make them more obedient drudges, to be sacrificed to the follies and ambition of a few? Or, were not the noble gifts so equally dispensed with a divine purpose and law, that they should as nearly as possible be equally exerted, and the blessings of Providence be equally enjoyed by all?”

Samuel Adams (1722–1803) American statesman, Massachusetts governor, and political philosopher

Speech in Philadelphia (1776)

Men, Law

“A pen is certainly an excellent instrument to fix a man's attention and to inflame his ambition.”

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

14 November 1760
1750s, Diaries (1750s-1790s)

“The battle of Iraq is one victory in a war on terror that began on September the 11th, 2001 and still goes on. That terrible morning, 19 evil men, the shock troops of a hateful ideology, gave America and the civilized world a glimpse of their ambitions. They imagined, in the words of one terrorist, that September the 11th would be the beginning of the end of America. By seeking to turn our cities into killing fields, terrorists and their allies believed that they could destroy this nation's resolve and force our retreat from the world. They have failed.”

George W. Bush (1946) 43rd President of the United States

2000s, 2003, Mission Accomplished (May 2003)

Men, Hate, War, World

“Ambition breaks the ties of blood, and forgets the obligations of gratitude.”

William Scott, 1st Baron Stowell (1745–1836) British politician

As quoted in History of the Anti-Corn Law League (1853), by Archibald Prentice, p. 54; around 1876 this began to began to be cited to W. Scott, and then around 1880 sometimes to Walter Scott, but without citations of source, including a variant: "Selfish ambition breaks the ties of blood, and forgets the obligations of gratitude" in a publication of 1907.

Forgetting, Gratitude

“His picture to me seems always to have the enthusiasm and freshness of youth, moved with the high-minded and patriotic purpose of maturity. He displayed the same ambition for faithful service, whether he was leading his soldiers in the last charge for American liberty at Yorktown or rebuking the mob at Paris for its proposal to make him king. His part in the French Revolution is well known. He served the cause of ordered liberty in America; he was unwilling to serve any other cause in France. His admirers might say of him on the first anniversary of Bastile Day, 'He is galloping through the ages' But he refused to be a man on horseback. He knew that the welfare of his country lay in moderation. The people trusted him, but the extremists, whether Jacobin or Royalist, feared him. He urged the National Assembly to establish by constitutional guarantees what the Revolution had gained.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Ordered Liberty and World Peace (1924)

People, Youth, Age, Fear

“The issue of prisoner swap is highly emotional and delicate. We have to carefully tread within the ambit of a particular country’s laws, which we would also like other countries to respect ours. But as a government, it behooves us to do everything within our capacity to give our people what the government should – to protect its people in and out of the country.”

Francis Escudero (1969) Filipino politician

Zamboanga Today http://www.zamboangatoday.ph/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=3233:dfa-sets-prisoner-swap-talks-with-china&catid=26:inside-stories&Itemid=182 2011

People, Law, Country

“The second proposition admits and encourages the very practice we censure so justly, for which the saint [ Augustine of Hippo ] was so famous, and by which he contributed so much to promote contentions in his own days, and to perpetuate them to ours. The practice of deducing doctrines from the scriptures that are not evidently contained in them… Who does not see that the direct tendency of this practice is exactly the same as the event has proved it to be? It composes and propagates a religion, seemingly under the authority of God, but really under that of man. The principles of revelation are lost in theology, or disfigured by it: and whilst some men are impudent enough to pretend, others are silly enough to believe, that they adhere to the gospel, and maintain the cause of God against infidels and heretics, when they do nothing better, nor more, than espouse the conceits of men, whom enthusiasm, or the ambition of forming sects, or of making a great figure in them, has inspired. If you ask now what the practice of the christian fathers, and of other divines, should have been, in order to preserve the purity of faith, and to promote peace and charity, the answer is obvious… They should have adhered to the word of God: they should have paid no regard to heathen philosophy, jewish cabala, the sallies of enthusiasm, or the refinements of human ingenuity: they should have embraced, and held fast the articles of faith and doctrine, that were delivered in plain terms, or in unequivocal figures: they should not have been dogmatical where the sense was doubtful, nor have presumed even to guess where the Holy Ghost left the veil of mystery undrawn.”

Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke (1678–1751) English politician and Viscount

Lord Bolingbroke's Philosophical Works http://books.google.com/books?id=E6ATAAAAQAAJ (1754) Vol.III, Essay IV, Sect XVI

Men, God, Peace, Faith

“Since 1968, the Baath have been trashing the only idea that can hold the great social diversity of Iraq together: the idea of Iraq. Their answer to the question "Who am I?" was: You are either one of us, or you are dead. True to their word, they killed anyone who dared to say he was a Kurd or a Shiite or a leftist, or a democrat and a liberal. Contrary to what many Iraqi Shiites tend to think nowadays, the Baath never wanted to build a Sunni confessional state in Iraq. Anti-Shiite sectarianism was introduced on a large scale after the uprising of 1991. The state that the Baath built in Iraq up until the 1991 Gulf War was worse than sectarian. It thrived on the distrust, suspicion and fear that it went about inculcating in everyone. In this sense it was consistently egalitarian. Atomizing society by breeding hate and a thirst for revenge was the regime's highest ambition and principal tool of social control. Every Iraqi -- Kurd or Arab, Muslim or Christian, Shiite or Sunni -- became both complicit in the Baathist enterprise and its victim at the same time.”

Kanan Makiya (1949) American orientalist

"The Shiite Obligation", Wall Street Journal (February 7, 2005)

Hate, War, Fear, Idea

“Young women with ambitions should be very crafty and cautious, lest mayhap they be caught in the soft, silken mesh of a happy marriage, and go down to oblivion, dead to the world.”

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

Source: The Note Book of Elbert Hubbard (1927), p. 54.

Women, Marriage, Happiness, World

“All sins have their origin in a sense of inferiority, otherwise called ambition.”

Cesare Pavese (1908–1950) Italian poet, novelist, literary critic, and translator

This Business of Living (1935-1950)

Sense

“Praise enough
To fill the ambition of a private man,
That Chatham's language was his mother tongue.”

William Cowper The Task

Source: The Task (1785), Book II, The Timepiece, Line 235.

“It is too true, however disgraceful it may be to human nature, that nations in general will make war whenever they have a prospect of getting anything by it; nay, absolute monarchs will often make war when their nations are to get nothing by it, but for the purposes and objects merely personal, such as thirst for military glory, revenge for personal affronts, ambition, or private compacts to aggrandize or support their particular families or partisans. These and a variety of other motives, which affect only the mind of the sovereign, often lead him to engage in wars not sanctified by justice or the voice and interests of his people.”

John Jay Federalist Papers

Federalist No. 4 (7 November 1787) Full text from Wikisource http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Federalist/4. 1780s, The Federalist Papers, Federalist No. 4 (1787)

War, People, Family, Justice

“I must tell the House that the Falkland Islands and their dependencies remain British territory. No aggression and no invasion can alter that simple fact. It is the Government's objective to see that the islands are freed from occupation and are returned to British administration at the earliest possible moment…We cannot allow the democratic rights of the islanders to be denied by the territorial ambitions of Argentina.”

Margaret Thatcher (1925–2013) British stateswoman and politician

Speech in the House of Commons (3 April 1982) http://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/104910 First term as Prime Minister

Housing, Dependency

“GENTLEMEN: Before the Senate adjourns, I desire to return my thanks for the very kind and complimentary resolution unanimously passed on Saturday last, and to assure the Senate that so long as I shall have the honor of continuing Presiding Officer, my highest ambition will be to retain the personal regard and confidence of my colleagues. In pursuance of the resolution adopted on Saturday last, I now declare the Senate adjourned sine die”

William R. King

The Congressional globe, 33rd United States Congress (1853-04-11)

Confidence, Personality

“We had ambition, and ascended into Hell.”

Michael Swanwick book Vacuum Flowers

Source: Vacuum Flowers (1987), Chapter 14, “Girlchild” (p. 224)

Hell

“From the standpoint of the present, the future is always a derangement of ambitions.”

Antonella Gambotto-Burke book The Pure Weight of the Heart

Source: The Pure Weight of the Heart (1998), P. 55.

Future

“I haven't the arrogance to say I can carry the mighty load of His Cross, but I do try to walk in its shadow. He wants to carve your life like a crucifix. Every calamity is a crucifixion, crucifying your ambition, your lust. Each is a tiny lesson, and then the imprint of the crucifixion is on your life. What is your plan of sacrifice today? You and I, petty souls, sacrifice for our children. Christ sacrificed for tomorrow's whole world. Whenever I see slum-dwellers, with their hunger and poverty, that obscene poverty, I feel He is crucified like that. When I come across a person suffering from leprosy, foul smelling, ulcerous, I can see the imprint of His lips, His kiss. What did they not do to sufferers of leprosy in His time, yet the carpenter's son cared for them and touched them. That hand is an emblem for me, that hand which cared for the loneliest and the lost. The Christian is … he who not only lights the darkest corner in the world but also the darkest corner in his own heart.”

Baba Amte (1914–2008) Indian freedom fighter, social worker

On Christ
Baba Amte's Words of Wisdom

Life, Hunger, Children, World

“I am no longer in pictures for money. I am in them because I love them. I am not in vain. I do not care about giving a smashing personal performance. My one ambition is to create fine entertainment.”

Mary Pickford (1892–1979) Canadian-American actress

Herbert Howe, "Mary Pickford's Favorite Stars and Films". Photoplay, January 1924, p. 28-29. (Photoplay Publishing Company). https://archive.org/stream/pho26chic#page/n31/mode/2up

Love, Money, Personality

“The worst thing is to feel that as a photographer I'm benefiting from someone else's tragedy. This idea haunts me. It's something I have to reckon with every day, because I know that if I ever allow genuine compassion to be overtaken by personal ambition, I will have sold my soul. The only way I can justify my role is to have respect for the other person's predicament. The extent to which I do that is the extent to which I become accepted by the other and to that extent I can accept myself.”

James Nachtwey (1948) American photographer

War Photographer, documentary, 2001

Way, Feeling, Soul, Idea

“There was no God in his heart, he knew; his ideas were still in riot; there was ever the pain of memory; the regret for his lost youth — yet the waters of disillusion had left a deposit on his soul, responsibility and a love of life, the faint stirring of old ambitions and unrealized dreams.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American novelist and screenwriter

Quoted, This Side of Paradise (1920)

Love, Life, God, Pain

“Ambition! powerful source of good and ill!”

Edward Young Night-Thoughts

Source: Night-Thoughts (1742–1745), Night VI, Line 399.

“Peace of mind is very essential in anything that you do--particularly in music. But in my case, it was just the opposite. What new things could I learn when I was constantly disturbed and unhappy? And I tell you, this whole concept of getting lost in music and forgetting the world around you, is a myth. In my case, I can openly say that my troubles and problems were not forgotten by just holding the tanpura in my hand. When I would sit down for riyaz, I would, on the contrary, break down and cry over the daily scene. Over the question of just surviving through the next day. And it wasn't for me that I was worried, but for the entire family that I supported. I personally never thought of becoming rich, of having a new car or house. Those ambitions never entered my mind. All I knew then was the money was not enough. There were many humiliations I had to face because of this. A certain lady musician in Pune invited me over to her house one day. Her mother asked how much I charged for a concert. I told her Rs 125. She suggested that I move over to Pune and accept all her daughter's rejected programmes. They knew I was very badly off. I was insulted by this suggestion and left their house immediately. But later I thought that maybe they were trying to be helpful.”

Gangubai Hangal (1913–2009) Indian singer

In "On Gangubai Hangal by Sabina Sehgal Computer Science & Engineering - University of Washington".

Money, World, Family, Peace

“What I have achieved has been largely a matter of chance. Many problems I thought about at length with no success. With other problems, there was the inspiration—indeed, some that astound me today. Certainly the best times were when I was alone with mathematics, free of ambition and of pretense, and indifferent to the world.”

Robert Langlands (1936) Canadian mathematician

Source: "Mathematical retrospections," 2013, p. 142

World, Mathematics, Problem, Chance

“The events of these last few days constitute one of the greatest diplomatic defeats that this country and France have ever sustained. There can be no doubt that it is a tremendous victory for Herr Hitler. Without firing a shot, by the mere display of military force, he has achieved a dominating position in Europe which Germany failed to win after four years of war. He has overturned the balance of power in Europe. He has destroyed the last fortress of democracy in Eastern Europe which stood in the way of his ambition.”

Clement Attlee (1883–1967) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Speech https://api.parliament.uk/historic-hansard/commons/1938/oct/03/prime-ministers-statement#column_52 in the House of Commons (3 October 1938) against the Munich Agreement. 1930s

War, Way, Democracy, Victory

“the most remarkable piece of reading that you may be recommended to take and try if you can study is a book by Goethe—one of his last books, which he wrote when he was an old man, about seventy years of age—I think one of the most beautiful he ever wrote, full of mild wisdom, and which is found to be very touching by those who have eyes to discern and hearts to feel it. It is one of the pieces in "Wilhelm Meister's Travels." I read it through many years ago; and, of course, I had to read into it very hard when I was translating it (applause), and it has always dwelt in my mind as about the most remarkable bit of writing that I have known to be executed in these late centuries. I have often said, there are ten pages of that which, if ambition had been my only rule, I would rather have written than have written all the books that have appeared since I came into the world.”

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

1860s, On The Choice Of Books (1866)

Wisdom, Books, Age, World

“Years later I saw the gabbia at Piacenza; a harsh black canary-cage strung up high the side of the the towering campanile, in which prisoners were once left to starve to death and rot in full view of the town below. And looking up at it, I remembered that winter in Greece, that Gabbia I had constructed for myself out of light, solitude and self-delusions. My feelings at the end of that wretched term, were those of a man who knows he is in a cage, exposed to the jeers of all his old ambitions until he dies.”

John Fowles book The Magus

Introduction (1977 edition)
The Magus (1965)

Death, Feeling, Solitude, Light

“Love's but a frailty of the mind,
When 'tis not with ambition joined.”

William Congreve The Way of the World

Act III, scene xii
The Way of the World (1700)

Love

“Mr. Hussein's dogged insistence on pursuing his nuclear ambitions, along with what defectors described in interviews as Iraq's push to improve and expand Baghdad's chemical and biological arsenals, have brought Iraq and the United States to the brink of war.”

Judith Miller (journalist)

"U.S. Says Hussein Intensifies Quest for A-Bomb Parts http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/08/international/middleeast/08IRAQ.html?ex=1121140800&en=76eddceb628af81e&ei=5070, New York Times, September 8, 2002

War, Dogs

“Make no mistake, the real power resides not where present authority is exercised but where it is expected that authority will in future be exercised. The magnetic attraction of power is exercised by the prospect long before the reality is achieved; and the trek towards the rising sun, which is already in progress in 1972, would swell to an exodus before long. What do you imagine is the reason why Roy Jenkins is prepared to resign the front bench and divide his party in the endeavour to give a Conservative Prime Minister a majority in the House of Commons? The motive is not ignoble or discreditable—I am not asserting that—but it is a motive which it behoves people in Britain well to understand. It is the ambition to exercise his talents on the stage of Europe and to participate in taking decisions not for Britain here at home but for Europe in Brussels, Paris, Luxembourg or wherever else the imperial pavilions may be pitched. He does not, I assure you, forsee his future triumphs and achievements where his predecessors have seen them in the past – at the despatch box in the House of Commons or in the Cabinet room at Downing St. These are not good enough: the vision splendid beckons elsewhere.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

Speech at Millom, Cumberland (29 April 1972), from A Nation or No Nation? Six Years in British Politics (Elliot Right Way Books, 1977), p. 42. Jenkins had resigned from the Shadow Cabinet and as deputy leader of the Labour Party due to Labour's opposition to British entry into the EEC. Jenkins wrote to Powell to claim what he said was "totally untrue". Four years later Jenkins would leave front line British politics to become President of the European Commission.
1970s

People, Exercises, Home, Imagination

“Ambition is the death of thought.”

Elias Canetti (1905–1994) Bulgarian-born Swiss and British jewish modernist novelist, playwright, memoirist, and non-fiction writer

Ehrgeiz ist der Tod des Denkens.
J. Agee, trans. (1989), p. 41
Das Geheimherz der Uhr [The Secret Heart of the Clock] (1987)

Death

“In grammar school—and as new to American history as to the American tongue—I nevertheless puzzled through several junior biographies of Franklin because young Ben’s ambition magnified my own. I kept lists in those years of the books I read. I recognized the yearning to escape the limits of family—“a strong inclination for the sea”—as well as some more vertical yearning: a boy becomes a man by gaining wisdom; each book a rung therefore; each rung a classical tag. I weighed the shame of the sordid candle shop where Franklin was forced to work for his father against the optimism of old New England.”

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)

Wisdom, Books, School, Family

“Abstraction and luxury are the guard dogs of the upper class. The upper class wants people to have ambition and gumption because, if you do, you will participate and you'll move through society into a different class structure.”

Jeff Koons (1955) American artist

"From Full Phantom Five," 1988

People, Dogs

“There is an idea, which is not without its advocates, that a vigorous Executive is inconsistent with the genius of republican government. The enlightened well-wishers to this species of government must at least hope that the supposition is destitute of foundation; since they can never admit its truth, without at the same time admitting the condemnation of their own principles. Energy in the Executive is a leading character in the definition of good government. It is essential to the protection of the community against foreign attacks; it is not less essential to the steady administration of the laws; to the protection of property against those irregular and high-handed combinations which sometimes interrupt the ordinary course of justice; to the security of liberty against the enterprises and assaults of ambition, of faction, and of anarchy.”

Alexander Hamilton Federalist Papers

Federalist No. 70 (18 March 1788) http://thomas.loc.gov/home/histdox/fed_70-2.html The Federalist Papers (1787–1788)

Truth, Justice, Law, Hope

“Let a certain saving ambition invade our souls so that, impatient of mediocrity, we pant after the highest things and (since, if we will, we can) bend all our efforts to their attainment.”
Invadat animum sacra quaedam ambitio ut mediocribus non contenti anhelemus ad summa, adque illa (quando possumus si volumus) consequenda totis viribus enitamur.

Giovanni Pico della Mirandola book Oration on the Dignity of Man

10. 50; translation by A. Robert Caponigri
Variant translation by Robert Hooker:
Let a holy ambition enter into our souls; let us not be content with mediocrity, but rather strive after the highest and expend all our strength in achieving it.
Oration on the Dignity of Man (1496)

Soul, Effort

“Despite the roar of voices wanting to equate strategy with ambition, leadership, “vision,” planning, or the economic logic of competition, strategy is none of these. The core of strategy work is always the same: discovering the critical factors in a situation and designing a way of coordinating and focusing actions to deal with those factors.”

Richard Rumelt (1942) American economist

Source: Good Strategy Bad Strategy, 2011, p. 3

Way

“It’s good to test yourself and develop your talents and ambitions as fully as you can and achieve greater success; but I think success is the feeling you get from a job well done, and the key thing is to do the work.”

Peter Thiel (1967) American entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and hedge fund manager

Forbes: "Peter Thiel: 'Don't Wait to Start Something New'" https://www.forbes.com/sites/carolinehoward/2014/09/10/peter-thiel-dont-wait-to-start-something-new/#3c8e20f71e69 (10 September 2014)

Feeling, Thinking, Success

“There's a great deal of criticism about the United States, but there is one thing that nobody criticizes the United States. Nobody thinks the United States went to strike against Iraq in order to gain land or water or oil, nobody thinks America has any ambitions about real estate. As it happened in the 20th century, the American boys went to fight in two world wars, many of them lost their lives. The United States won the wars, won the land, but you gave back every piece of it. America didn't keep anything out of her victories for herself. You gave back Japan, an improved Japan, you gave Germany, an improved Germany, you've heard the Marshall Plan. And today, I do not believe there is any serious person on earth who thinks the United States, whether you agree or don't agree with this strike, has any egoistic or material purposes in the war against Iraq. The reason is, for this strike, that you cannot let the world run wild. And people who are coming from different corners of our life, attack and kill women and children and innocent people, just out of the blue. And I think the whole world is lucky that there is a United States that has the will and the power to handle the new danger that has arrived on the 21st century.”

Shimon Peres (1923–2016) Israeli politician, 8th prime minister and 9th president of Israel

Speech at Harvard University (20 October 2004)

Life, Women, War, Children

“Methinks I am like a man, who having struck on many shoals, and having narrowly escap'd shipwreck in passing a small frith, has yet the temerity to put out to sea in the same leaky weather-beaten vessel, and even carries his ambition so far as to think of compassing the globe under these disadvantageous circumstances.”

David Hume book A Treatise of Human Nature

Part 4, Section 7
A Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40), Book 1: Of the understanding

Thinking, Weather, Sea

“As Hamas's charter makes clear, Hamas's immediate goal is to destroy Israel. But Hamas has a broader objective. They also want a caliphate. Hamas shares the global ambitions of its fellow militant Islamists. That’s why its supporters wildly cheered in the streets of Gaza as thousands of Americans were murdered on 9/11. And that's why its leaders condemned the United States for killing Osama bin Laden, whom they praised as a holy warrior.So when it comes to their ultimate goals, Hamas is ISIS and ISIS is Hamas. And what they share in common, all militant Islamists share in common. Boko Haram in Nigeria; Ash-Shabab in Somalia; Hezbollah in Lebanon; An-Nusrah in Syria; The Mahdi Army in Iraq; And the Al-Qaeda branches in Yemen, Libya, the Philippines, India and elsewhere. Some are radical Sunnis, some are radical Shi'ites. Some want to restore a pre-medieval caliphate from the 7th century. Others want to trigger the apocalyptic return of an imam from the 9th century. They operate in different lands, they target different victims and they even kill each other in their quest for supremacy. But they all share a fanatic ideology. They all seek to create ever expanding enclaves of militant Islam where there is no freedom and no tolerance – Where women are treated as chattel, Christians are decimated, and minorities are subjugated, sometimes given the stark choice: convert or die. For them, anyone can be an infidel, including fellow Muslims. Ladies and Gentlemen, Militant Islam's ambition to dominate the world seems mad. But so too did the global ambitions of another fanatic ideology that swept to power eight decades ago. The Nazis believed in a master race. The militant Islamists believe in a master faith. They just disagree about who among them will be the master… of the master faith. That's what they truly disagree about. Therefore, the question before us is whether militant Islam will have the power to realize its unbridled ambitions.”

Benjamín Netanyahu (1949) Israeli prime minister

Speech at the United Nations General Assembly (September 2014), New York City, New York. As quoted in The Jerusalem Post https://web.archive.org/save/http://www.jpost.com/Arab-Israeli-Conflict/Full-text-of-Prime-Minister-Netanyahus-UN-speech-376626. 2010s, 2014

Women, World, Faith, Question

“He said nothing to gratify curiosity, or to satisfy man's ambition by opening doors to worldly greatness. In all His teaching, Christ brought the mind of man in contact with the Infinite Mind. He did not direct the people to study men's theories about God, His word, or His works. He taught them to behold Him as manifested in His works, in His word, and by His providences.
Christ did not deal in abstract theories, but in that which is essential to the development of character, that which will enlarge man's capacity for knowing God, and increase his efficiency to do good. He spoke to men of those truths that relate to the conduct of life, and that take hold upon eternity.”

Ellen G. White book Christ's Object Lessons

Source: Christ's Object Lessons (1900), Ch. 1, p. 23

Life, Men, God, People

“Five enemies of peace inhabit with us — avarice, ambition, envy, anger, and pride; if these were to be banished, we should infallibly enjoy perpetual peace.”

Francesco Petrarca book De vita solitaria

De vita solitaria (1346) as quoted in Wisdom for the Soul: Five Millennia of Prescriptions for Spiritual Healing‎ (2006) by Larry Chang, p. 144

Peace, Envy, Anger

“It's very simple and it has nothing to do with identifiable goals. It is to keep thinking about what architecture can be, in whatever form. That is an answer, isn't it? I think that S, M, L, XL has one beautiful ambiguity: it used the past to build a future and is very adamant about giving notice that this is not the end. That's how it felt to me, anyway. That is in itself evidence of a kind of discomfort with achievement measured in terms of identifiable entities, and an announcement that continuity of thinking in whatever form, around whatever subject, is the real ambition.”

Rem Koolhaas (1944) Dutch architect (b.1944)

Rem Koolhaas Interview with Jennifer Sigler in Index Magazine http://www.indexmagazine.com/interviews/rem_koolhaas.shtml, (2000)

Beauty, Thinking, Past, Future

“The doctrine of Right and Wrong, is perpetually disputed, both by Pen and the Sword: Whereas the doctrine of Lines, and Figures, is not so; because men care not, in that subject what be truth, as a thing that crosses no mans ambition, profit, or lust. For I doubt not, but if it had been a thing contrary to any mans right of dominion, or to the interest of men that have dominion, That the three Angles of a Triangle, should be equall to two Angles of a Square; that doctrine should have been, if not disputed, yet by the burning of all books of Geometry, suppressed, as far as he whom it concerned was able.”

Thomas Hobbes book Leviathan

The First Part, Chapter 11, p. 80-81
Leviathan (1651)

Men, Truth, Books

“The indwelling deity who presides over the destiny of the race has raised in man's mind and heart the idea, the hope of a new order which will replace the old unsatisfactory order, and substitute for it conditions of the world's life which will in the end have a reasonable chance of establishing permanent peace and well-being…. It is for the men of our day and, at the most, of tomorrow to give the answer. For, too long a postponement or too continued a failure will open the way to a series of increasing catastrophes which might create a too prolonged and disastrous confusion and chaos and render a solution too difficult or impossible; it might even end in something like an irremediable crash not only of the present world-civilisation but of all civilisation…. The terror of destruction and even of large-scale extermination created by these ominous discoveries may bring about a will in the governments and peoples to ban and prevent the military use of these inventions, but, so long as the nature of mankind has not changed, this prevention must remain uncertain and precarious and an unscrupulous ambition may even get by it a chance of secrecy and surprise and the utilisation of a decisive moment which might conceivably give it victory and it might risk the tremendous chance.”

Sri Aurobindo (1872–1950) Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru and poet

April, 1950 (From a Postcript Chapter to The Ideal of Human Unity.)
India's Rebirth

Life, Men, People, World

“When I asked Amin [Husain] and Katie [Davison] what Occupy Wall Street’s ultimate goal was, they said, “A government accountable to the people, freed up from corporate influence.” … Organizers described Occupy Wall Street as “a way of being,” of “sharing your life together in assembly.” … The ambitions of the core group of activists were more cultural than political, in the sense that they sought to influence the way people think about their lives. “Ours is a transformational movement,” Amin told me with a solemn air. Transformation had to occur face to face; what it offered, especially to the young, was an antidote to the empty gaze of the screen.
In meetings and elsewhere, this Tolstoyan experience of undergoing a personal crisis of meaning, both political and of the soul, seemed deeply shared. Apart from Amin, I’ve met an architect, a film editor, an advertising consultant, an unemployed stock trader, a spattering of lawyers, and people with various other jobs who, after joining OWS, found themselves psychologically unable to go about their lives as before. … Michael Ellick, the minister at Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village, said that when he first visited Zuccotti Park he was reminded of his years at a monastery. “When people enter a monastery, they don’t know why they’ve come,” said Ellick. “They are there to find out why they are there, why they were compelled to leave the other world.””

Michael Greenberg (1952) American author

“What Future for Occupy Wall Street?” The New York Review of Books, vol. 59, no. 2, February 9, 2012

Life, People, World, Way

“If we can't have religion, we need a substitute that is as much like it as science can provide. Enter secular humanism, a doctrine, dare I say, "designed" to do this job. It hasn't worked (…) Scientism recognizes that the ambitions of the secular humanism are unattainable.”

Alexander Rosenberg (1946) American philosopher

The Atheist's Guide to Reality (2011)

Religion, Science

“At court, far from regarding ambition as a sin, people regard it as a virtue, or if it passes for a vice, then it is regarded as the vice of great souls, and the vices of great souls are preferred to the virtues of the simple and the small.”

Louis Bourdaloue (1632–1704) French serman writer

as quoted in The Bourgeois: Catholicism vs. Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France (1927), p. 137

People, Soul

“Gentlemen, the melancholy event of yesterday reads to us an awful lesson against being too much troubled about any of the objects of ordinary ambition. The worthy gentleman, who has been snatched from us at the moment of the election, and in the middle of contest, whilst his desires were as warm, and his hopes as eager as ours, has feelingly told us, what shadows we are, and what shadows we pursue.”

Edmund Burke (1729–1797) Anglo-Irish statesman

Speech at Bristol on declining the poll (9 September 1780), referring to a Mr. Richard Coombe.
1780s

Hope, Reading

“Longevity for a columnist is a simple proposition: once you start, you don't stop. You do it until you die, or can no longer put a sentence together. It has always been my intention to die at my desk, although my most cherished ambition is to outlive the estate tax.”

Charles Krauthammer (1950–2018) American journalist

Column, 18 December 2009, An anniversary of sorts http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/krauthammer121809.php3#.WzW2c8KWyUk at jewishworldreview.com. 2000s, 2009

“Love is not to be reason'd down, or lost
In high ambition, and a thirst of greatness;
'Tis second life, it grows into the soul,
Warms every vein, and beats in every pulse.”

Joseph Addison book Cato

Act I, scene i.
Cato, A Tragedy (1713)

Love, Life, Soul

“There is a direct relationship between the absence of celebrity and the presence of good-to-great results. Why? First, when you have a celebrity, the company turns into “the one genius with 1,000 helpers.” It creates a sense that the whole thing is really about the CEO. At a deeper level, we found that for leaders to make something great, their ambition has to be for the greatness of the work and the company, rather than for themselves.”

James C. Collins (1958) American business consultant and writer

James C. Collins, in interview in: Fast Company online magazine, October 2001.

Sense

“We Scots are proud Europeans. By history Scotland is - and by our ambition Scotland will remain - a European nation, a full member of the European Union. This is the starting point of our engagement with Europe. We will always play our full part and work to advance common European interests.”

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

Vision for Scotland in the European Union (December 12, 2007)

History, Parting

“Manifestly, in any organization men should move from the bottom up to the top. That develops loyalty, ambition and talent, because there is a chance for promotion. Never inject a man into the top if it can be avoided. In a big organization to have to do that, I think, is a reflection on management. Of course there are always exceptional cases. As the years have passed, developing, as they naturally have, emergencies at times, I have been gratified to find that we have, with very few exceptions, been able to find right within ourselves some individual capable of assuming a greater responsibility, and he has always been given the opportunity.”

Alfred P. Sloan (1875–1966) American businessman

Source: Adventures of a White-Collar Man. 1941, p. 137

Men, Nature, Thinking, Chance

“Your imagination is notoriously poor. Not everyone holds identical ambitions to your own!”

Michael Moorcock (1939) English writer, editor, critic

Book 2, Chapter 4 (p. 560)
The Dragon in the Sword (1986)

Imagination

“A youthful mind is seldom totally free from ambition; to curb that, is the first step to contentment, since to diminish expectation is to increase enjoyment.”

Frances Burney book Evelina

Letter VI
Evelina (1778)

Youth

“Man abhors the absence of integration. He demands integration, and will create religions, achieve heroic self-sacrifice, pursue mad ambitions, or follow the ecstasy of danger, rather than live without. If society refuses him this satisfaction in a constructive form he will seize a destructive principle to which he can devote himself and will take revenge on the society that thought his only demand was pleasure.”

Lancelot Law Whyte (1896–1972) Scottish industrial engineer

Source: The Next Development in Man (1948), p. 188

Pleasure, Religion, Revenge, Madness

“Ambition, I’ve found, can lead only to failure. I do not read the reviews. No, I am not singing for you.”

Conor Oberst (1980) American musician

Lifted or The Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground (2002)

Failure, Singing, Reading

“It was men’s ambitions, they said, that had perverted all the arts to ends of gain.”

Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) American writer

“The Finder” (p. 56)
Earthsea Books, Tales from Earthsea (2001)

Men, Art

“Honesty is negative and sterile; it is ignorant of the correct evaluation of appetite and ambition – the only powers through which you can found anything durable.”

Octave Mirbeau (1848–1917) French journalist, art critic, travel writer, pamphleteer, novelist, and playwright

“How do you whip up resentment against absentee landlords and pocketers of bribes when the highest ambition of the people is either to become the former or be in a position to receive the latter?”

John Brunner book Stand on Zanzibar

context (8) “Isolation”
Stand on Zanzibar (1968)

People

“What you propose to do today is to bring civilization to a lawless corner of the world. I know that you claim more modest ambitions. But when the protection of law is extended to the innocent and weak, that is civilization. Now I hold that in the natural state, there are only two kinds of people in the world—the men with guns, and the victims. And the one kind feeds off the other.”

Michael Swanwick (1950) American science fiction author

Source: In the Drift (1985), Chapter 4, “Mutagen Fair” (p. 130)

Men, People, World, Law

“Fawning ambition so plainly expressed in the classroom was quite another matter. It wasn’t that I got A’s; other boys got A’s. It was that I wanted my A’s so badly and sought them so blatantly—that’s what everyone saw. Nixon: “I won my share of scholarships, and of speaking and debating prizes in school, not because I was smarter but because I worked longer and harder than some of my more gifted colleagues.””

Richard Rodríguez (1944) American journalist and essayist

Brown : The Last Discovery of America (2003)

School, Boy

“During my early years as an actor, Bond was never a desire, but when Cassie was playing in For Your Eyes Only, then, of course, it became a joke. I would do my own impersonations of James Bond. Just for fun. Just driving her home from work, or going out, or talking about her experience on it. But even so, it was not an ambition to play James Bond. I had my sights set on other aspects of the work.”

Pierce Brosnan (1953) Irish-American actor, film producer, and environmentalist

Brosnan. Pierce Brosnan. http://www.cigaraficionado.com/webfeatures/show/id/Brosnan-Pierce-Brosnan_6003/p/2 (November 1997)

Home

“God's hand is strange to us. He cares nothing for the moment, nothing for the feeble ambitions of men and women. He sees the road that flows onward forever.”

Orson Scott Card book Stone Tables

Stone Tables (1997)

Women, Men, God

“The men who succeed are the efficient few. They are the few who have the ambition and will power to develop themselves.”

Herbert N. Casson (1869–1951) Canadian journalist and writer

Herbert N. Casson cited in: Supervisory Management. Vol. 1 (1955). p. 60
1950s and later

Men

“Politics in America is still different from politics anywhere else because the politics has arisen out of the immediate needs, ambitions, and cupidities of the people, that our politics still smell of the bedroom and the kitchen, rather than having descended to us from the chill punctilio of aristocratic negotiation.”

Norman Mailer (1923–2007) American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film maker, actor and political candidate

Superman Comes to the Supermarket (1960)

People

“[I] decided to force myself to cut this golden knot of ambition [to portray the nobility any longer] in order to recover my liberty. Realizing that a retirement of this sort must be made while one is rising and not falling; that one must leave Fortune while she is still favorable... I seized the occasion of a short, secret journey to throw myself at Her Highness's feet and beg, as the sole reward for so many efforts, exemption from such [diplomatic] assignments and permission to serve her in my own home. This favor I obtained with more difficulty than any other she ever granted me... Now by God's grace.... I am leading a quiet life with my wife and children and have no pretensions in the world than to live in peace.”

Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) Flemish painter

Quote in a letter to his friend Peiresc, 18 Dec. 1634; as cited by Simon Schrama, in Rembrandt's eyes, Alfred A. Knopf - Borzoi Books, New York 1999, p. 402
1625 - 1640

Life, God, Children, Secret

“Ambition can never be naked in a political campaign, it must be clothed in deceit.”

Michael Kinsley (1951) American political journalist, commentator television host

As quoted in Time, Jan. 4, 2008

Clothes

“You don’t quench ambition by feeding it any more than you quench a fire the same way,” said Cletus. “To an ambitious man, what he already has is nothing. It’s what he doesn’t have that counts.”

Gordon R. Dickson book Tactics of Mistake

Source: Tactics of Mistake (1971), Chapter 16 (p. 280)

Way

“.. every day I can benefit from Mr. B [his teacher, Van de Sande Bakhuyzen ] is another profit…. day by day my ambition is growing.”

Willem Roelofs (1822–1897) Dutch painter and entomologist (1822-1897)

(translation from original Dutch: Fons Heijnsbroek, original Dutch: citaat van Willem Roelofs, in het Nederlands:) ..elken dag die ik bij den heer B [zijn leermeester ] kan profiteren is alweder gewonnen.. ..van dag tot dag wordt mijn ambitie grooter.

In a letter to his parents, August 1840; as cited by Marjan van Heteren in Willem Roelofs 1822-1897 De Adem der natuur, ed. Marjan van Heteren & Robert-Jan te Rijdt; Thoth, Bussum, 2006; ISBN13 * 978 90 6868 4322 - p. 23
1840' + 1850's

Teachers

“This is going to sound really weird, but I never had a desire to be famous. I never had huge ambitions — never.”

Kate Winslet (1975) English actress and singer

Isn’t She Deneuvely?: Vanity Fair, Dec 2008 http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2008/12/winslet200812

“God has blessed our family with some means. Can we not offer at least one of our members for the service of the nation? Having provided me with education, moral instruction and all sorts of qualifications, can you not turn me over to the Samaj (society), to which we owe so much? This will hardly be any kind of sacrifice, it will rather be an investment. It is like providing the farm of the Samaj with manure. We are nowadays interested only in reaping the harvest and have forgotten to provide the field with manure. There is thus the danger of our land becoming barren and unproductive. Can we not forgo a few worthless ambitions for the protection and benefit of a Samaj and a faith, for which Rama suffered exile, Krishna bore innumerable hardships, Rana Pratap wandered about from forest to forest, Shivaji staked his all, and Guru Govind Singh allowed his little sons to be buried alive?”

Deendayal Upadhyaya (1916–1968) RSS thinker and co-founder of the political party Bharatiya Jana Sangh

Letter to his uncle in 1942, quoted in L.K. Advani, My Country My Life (2008)

God, Education, Family, Faith

Quotes about ambition page 3

Quotes about ambition
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