Quotes about ambition
page 4

Hermann Hesse photo
Paul Keating photo

“A familiar question for Australians is how much we are a product of our circumstances, and how much we are what we have made ourselves to be. In truth, by the act of migration the country was made: by that voluntary act and by the emigrants' ambitions it was built.”

Paul Keating (1944) Australian politician, 24th Prime Minister of Australia

Address to the Dáil Éireann, the lower house of parliament of the Republic of Ireland, 20 September, 1993.

Anne Morrow Lindbergh photo
Alex Salmond photo

“We celebrate the values which define modern Scotland: the values of humanity, compassion, enterprise, ambition, and a determined internationalism.”

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

St Andrew's Day (November 30, 2007)

Morris Udall photo

“Presidential ambition is a disease which can only be cured by embalming fluid.”

Morris Udall (1922–1998) American politician

Quoting from Estes Kefauver
Misattributed

Frederick II of Prussia photo
Jonas Salk photo
Jerry Coyne photo
Thom Yorke photo

“Ambition makes you look pretty ugly
Kicking and squealing gucci little piggy”

Thom Yorke (1968) English musician, philanthropist and singer-songwriter

Lyrics, OK Computer (1997)

Jay Samit photo

“Whether driven by ambition or circumstance, every career gets disrupted.”

Jay Samit (1961) American businessman

Source: Disrupt You! (2015), p. 75

Pierre Corneille photo

“Ambition displeases when it has been sated… Having reached the peak, it aspires to descend.”

L'ambition déplaît quand elle est assouvie... Monté sur le faîte, il aspire à descendre.
Auguste, act II, scene i.
Cinna (1641)

Alexander Pope photo

“Ambition first sprung from your blest abodes;
The glorious fault of Angels and of Gods.”

Alexander Pope (1688–1744) eighteenth century English poet

Source: The Works of Mr. Alexander Pope (1717), Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady, Line 13.

Alan Keyes photo
Björn Ulvaeus photo

“We will never appear on stage again. There is simply no motivation to re-group. Money is not a factor and we would like people to remember us as we were. Young, exuburent, full of energy and ambition.”

Björn Ulvaeus (1945) Swedish musician

Daily Telegraph, 5 Jul 2008 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/3555750/ABBAs-Bjorn-Ulvaeus-and-Benny-Anderson-We-will-never-reform.html

Ambrose Bierce photo
George Bernard Shaw photo
Michael Swanwick photo
E. B. White photo
Eric Hoffer photo
Benoît Mandelbrot photo
John Flavel photo

“God kills thy comforts from no other design but to kill thy corruptions; wants are ordained to kill wantonness, poverty is appointed to kill pride, reproaches are permitted to destroy ambition.”

John Flavel (1627–1691) English Presbyterian clergyman

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 7.

Francis Parkman photo
Lars Løkke Rasmussen photo
David Lee Roth photo

“It's not about money right now. My ambition is to further create a signature sound, a signature spirit, that makes some kind of contribution to music in general.”

David Lee Roth (1954) Rock vocalist; lead singer with Van Halen

David Barton (July 3, 1994) "Jumping at the Chance - With His Newest Album, David Lee Roth Rocks, Rolls and Moves On", Sacramento Bee, p. EN3.

Warren Buffett photo

“Putting people into homes, though a desirable goal, shouldn’t be our country’s primary objective. Keeping them in their homes should be the ambition.”

Warren Buffett (1930) American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

2008 Chairman's Letter
Letters to Shareholders (1957 - 2012)

William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham photo

“Resistance to your acts was necessary as it was just; and your vain declarations of the omnipotence of Parliament, and your imperious doctrines of the necessity of submission, will be found equally impotent to convince or to enslave your fellow-subjects in America, who feel tyranny, whether ambitioned by an individual part of the legislature, or the bodies who compose it, is equally intolerable to British subjects…What, though you march form town to town, and from province to province; though you should be able to enforce a temporary and local submission, which I only suppose, not admit—how shall you be able to secure the obedience of the country you leave behind you in your progress, to grasp the dominion of eighteen hundred miles of continent, populous in numbers, possessing valour, liberty, and resistance? This resistance to your arbitrary system of taxation might have been foreseen: it was obvious, from the nature of things and of mankind; and, above all, from the Whiggish spirit flourishing in that country. The spirit which now resists your taxation in America, is the same which formerly opposed loans, benevolences, and ship-money, in England: the same spirit which called all England on its legs, and by the Bill of Rights vindicated the English constitution: the same spirit which established the great, fundamental, essential maxim of your liberties, that no subject of England shall be taxed but by his own consent.”

William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chatham (1708–1778) British politician

This glorious spirit of Whiggism animates three millions in America; who prefer poverty with liberty to gilded chains and sordid affluence; and who will die in defence of their rights as men, as freemen.
Speech in the House of Lords (20 January 1775), quoted in William Pitt, The Speeches of the Right Honourable the Earl of Chatham in the Houses of Lords and Commons: With a Biographical Memoir and Introductions and Explanatory Notes to the Speeches (London: Aylott & Jones, 1848), pp. 134-6.

John Cowper Powys photo

“Ambition is the grand enemy of all peace.”

John Cowper Powys (1872–1963) British writer, lecturer and philosopher

Source: The Meaning of Culture (1929), p. 140

Samuel Romilly photo
Alex Salmond photo
Richard Rodríguez photo
Walter Raleigh photo
Chinmayananda Saraswati photo
Thomas Carlyle photo
Washington Irving photo
Robert G. Ingersoll photo
Alexander H. Stephens photo
Ignatius Sancho photo
Paul Cézanne photo
François de La Rochefoucauld photo

“Moderation has been called a virtue to limit the ambition of great men, and to console undistinguished people for their want of fortune and their lack of merit.”

On a fait une vertu de la modération pour borner l’ambition des grands hommes, et pour consoler les gens médiocres de leur peu de fortune, et de leur peu de mérite.
Maxim 308.
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665–1678)

Krishna Raja Wadiyar IV photo
Frank Chodorov photo
Glen Cook photo
Hugo Diemer photo
Francis Parkman photo
Adam Smith photo
David Hume photo
Emil M. Cioran photo
André Maurois photo
Dinesh D'Souza photo
Shaun Ellis photo

“My ultimate ambition is to introduce a captive pack of wolves into the wild and live with them.”

Shaun Ellis (1977) American football player, defensive end

Interview with A Man Among Wolves: Shaun Ellis http://incubator.nationalgeographic.com/inside_ngc/2007/04/interview-with-a-man-among-wolves-shaun-ellis.html, Inside NGS, (2007)

Joyce Brothers photo

“If your energy is as boundless as your ambition, total commitment may be a way of life you should seriously consider.”

Joyce Brothers (1927–2013) Joyce Brothers

As quoted in It's All About You: Live the Life You Crave (2007) by Mary Goulet and Heather Reider

George Bernard Shaw photo
Alex Salmond photo
Wu Den-yih photo

“Both sides (Taiwan and Mainland China) are so lovely and so many of their people are behaving like heroes and heroines, and yet Taiwan's former ambition to 'recover the mainland' has become a thing of the past.”

Wu Den-yih (1948) Taiwanese politician

Wu Den-yih (2016) cited in: " Ex-VP calls on China 'not to widen distance' with Taiwanese http://focustaiwan.tw/news/acs/201610030023.aspx" in Focus Taiwan, 3 October 2016.

Norbert Wiener photo
Ben Jonson photo
Anthony Burgess photo

“I am not unambitious. I am just too ambitious for what you call ambitions.”

James Richardson (1950) American poet

#412
Vectors: Aphorisms and Ten Second Essays (2001)

Norodom Sihanouk photo

“I don't want to become a kind of Hirohito who produces cameras, or an Elizabeth of England who cares only for horses. Even less do I want to turn out like Juan Carlos, who's just a ghost of Franco. I have no personal ambitions.”

Norodom Sihanouk (1922–2012) Cambodian King

Said during his exile in Peking, as quoted by Oriana Fallaci (June 1973), Intervista con la Storia (sixth edition, 2011). page 103.
Interviews

Margaret Mead photo
Gino Severini photo

“.. ambition to surpass Impressionism, destroying the subject's unity of time and place.... [to render its relations to] things that apparently had nothing to do with it, but that in reality were linked to it in my imagination, in my memories or by feeling. In the same canvas I brought together the Arc of Triumph, the Tour Eiffel, the Alps, the head of my father, an autobus, the municipal hall of Pienza, the boulevard…”

Gino Severini (1883–1966) Italian painter

Quote from his article 'Processo e difesa di un pittore d'oggi', L'Arte 5, Rome, September – November, 1931; as cited in Inventing Futurism: The Art and Politics of Artificial Optimism, by Christine Poggi, Princeton University Press, 2009, p. 25
quote, referring to his painting 'Memories of a Voyage', Severini painted in 1910-1911.

Josiah Gilbert Holland photo
Edgar Rice Burroughs photo
Sallust photo

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

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

The earliest attributions of this yet found are to it being a saying of William Scott, 1st Baron Stowell, in History of the Anti-Corn Law League (1853), by Archibald Prentice, p. 54; around 1876 it 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. It seems to only recently to have begun to be attributed to Sallust, on the internet.
Misattributed

Boris Johnson photo

“It is vital now to see this [Brexit] moment for what it is. This is not a time to quail, it is not a crisis, nor should we see it as an excuse for wobbling or self-doubt, but it is a moment for hope and ambition for Britain. A time not to fight against the tide of history, but to take that tide at the flood, and sail on to fortune.”

Boris Johnson (1964) British politician, historian and journalist

During the announcement that he would not run to become Britain's prime minister. A reference to Brutus's "There is a tide in the affairs of men. Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune" in Julius Caesar. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/01/world/europe/britain-conservative-party.html (June 30, 2016)
2010s, 2016

Lyndon B. Johnson photo

“We have carried our quest for peace to many nations and peoples because we share this planet with others whose future, in large measure, is tied to our own action, and whose counsel is necessary to our own hopes. We have found understanding and support. And we know they wait with us tonight for some response that could lead to peace. I wish tonight that I could give you a blueprint for the course of this conflict over the coming months, but we just cannot know what the future may require. We may have to face long, hard combat or a long, hard conference, or even both at once. Until peace comes, or if it does not come, our course is clear. We will act as we must to help protect the independence of the valiant people of South Vietnam. We will strive to limit the conflict, for we wish neither increased destruction nor do we want to invite increased danger. But we will give our fighting men what they must have: every gun, and every dollar, and every decision—whatever the cost or whatever the challenge. And we will continue to help the people of South Vietnam care for those that are ravaged by battle, create progress in the villages, and carry forward the healing hopes of peace as best they can amidst the uncertain terrors of war. And let me be absolutely clear: The days may become months, and the months may become years, but we will stay as long as aggression commands us to battle. There may be some who do not want peace, whose ambitions stretch so far that war in Vietnam is but a welcome and convenient episode in an immense design to subdue history to their will. But for others it must now be clear—the choice is not between peace and victory, it lies between peace and the ravages of a conflict from which they can only lose.”

Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–1973) American politician, 36th president of the United States (in office from 1963 to 1969)

1960s, State of the Union Address (1966)

Alexis De Tocqueville photo
Orson Scott Card photo
David Lloyd George photo
Will Eisner photo

“This patchwork of largely fictional works makes the Protocols an incoherent text that easily reveals its fabricated origins. It is hardly credible, if not in a roman feuilleton or in a grand opera, that the “bad guys” should express their evil plans in such a frank and unashamed manner, that they should declare, as the Elders of Zion do, that they have “boundless ambition, a ravenous greed, a merciless desire for revenge and an intended hatred.” If at first the Protocols was taken seriously, it is because it was presented as a shocking revelation, and by sources all in all trustworthy. But what seems incredible is how this fake arose from its own ashes each time someone proved that it was, beyond all doubt, a fake. This is when the “novel of the Protocols” truly starts to sound like fiction. Following the article that appeared in 1921 in the Times of London revealing that the Protocols was plagiarized, as well as every other time some authoritative source confirmed the spurious nature of the Protocols, there was someone else who published it again claiming its authenticity. And the story continues unabated on the Internet today. It is as if, after Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler, one were to continue publishing textbooks claiming that the sun travels around the earth.
How can one explain resilience against all evidence, and the perverse appeal that this book continues to exercise? The answer can be found in the works of Nesta Webster, an antisemetic author who spent her life supporting this account of the Jewish plot. In her Secret Societies and Subversive Movements, she seems well informed and knows the whole story as Eisner narrates it here, but this is her conclusion:
The only opinion I have committed myself is that, whether genuine or not, the Protocols represent the programme of a world revolution, and that in view of their prophetic nature and of their extraordinary resemblance to the protocols of certain secret societies of the past, they were either the work of some such society or of someone profoundly versed in the lore of secret society who was able to reproduce their ideas and phraseology.
Her reasoning is flawless: “since the Protocols say what I said in my story, they confirm it,” or: “the Protocols confirm the story that I derived from them, and are therefore authentic.” Better still: “the Protocols could be fake, but they say exactly what the Jews think, and must therefore be considered authentic.””

Will Eisner (1917–2005) American cartoonist

In other words, it is not the Protocols that produce antisemetism, it is people’s profound need to single out an Enemy that leads them to believe in the Protocols.
I believe that-in spite of this courageous, not comic but tragic book by Will Eisner- the story is hardly over. Yet is is a story very much worth telling, for one must fight the Big Lie and the hatred it spawns.
Umberto Eco, Milan Italy December 2004 translated by Allesandra Bastagli, p. vi-vii
The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (10/2/2005)

Alexander Hamilton photo
Babe Ruth photo
Auguste Rodin photo
Enoch Powell photo

“It is conventional to refer to the United Nations in hushed tones of respect and awe, as if it were the repository of justice and equity, speaking almost with the voice of God if not yet acting with the power of God. It is no such thing. Despite the fair-seeming terminology of its charter and its declarations, the reality both of the Assembly and of the Security Council is a concourse of self-seeking nations, obeying their own prejudices and pursuing their own interests. They have not changed their individual natures by being aggregated with others in a system of bogus democracy…Does anybody seriously suppose that the members of the United Nations, or of the Security Council, have been actuated in their decisions on the Argentine invasion of the Falklands by a pure desire to see right done and wrong reversed? That was the last thing on their minds. Everyone of them, from the United States to Peru, calculated its own interests and consulted its own ambitions. What moral authority can attach a summation of self-interest and prejudice? I am not saying that nations ought not to pursue their own interests; they ought and, in any case, they will. What I am saying is that those interests are not sanctified by being tumbled into a mixer and shaken up altogether. An assembly of national spokesmen is not magically transmuted into a glorious company of saints and martyrs. Its only redeeming feature is its impotence…The United Nations is a colossal coating of humbug poured, like icing over a birthday cake, over the naked ambitions and hostilities of the nations.”

Enoch Powell (1912–1998) British politician

'We have the will, we don't need the humbug', The Times (12 June 1982), p. 12
1980s

Immortal Technique photo

“Hell is not a place you go, if you ain't a christian, it's the failure, of your life's greatest ambition.”

Immortal Technique (1978) American rapper and activist

Leaving the Past
Albums, Revolutionary Vol. 2 (2003)

İsmail Enver photo
Wendell Berry photo
Kenneth N. Waltz photo
Michael Moorcock photo
Mary Midgley photo
Alfred P. Sloan photo

“It is astonishing what you can do when you have a lot of energy, ambition and plenty of ignorance.”

Alfred P. Sloan (1875–1966) American businessman

Source: Adventures of a White-Collar Man. 1941, p. 18

African Spir photo
Phillip Guston photo
John Buchan photo
Aldous Huxley photo
Charles James Fox photo
Warren Farrell photo
Winston S. Churchill photo
Henry James photo

“If the artist is necessarily sensitive, does that sensitiveness form in its essence a state constantly liable to shade off into the morbid? Does this liability, moreover, increase in proportion as the effort is great and the ambition intense?”

Henry James (1843–1916) American novelist, short story author, and literary critic

"The Journal of the Brothers de Goncourt," Fortnightly Review (October 1888).

James Bryce, 1st Viscount Bryce photo

“[Bryce] thought she [Russia] was becoming a menace to Europe with her vast and rapidly increasing population and her also rapidly increasing prosperity. The Duma was no check on the ambitions of the official class. Germany, he thought, was right to arm and she would need every man.”

James Bryce, 1st Viscount Bryce (1838–1922) British academic, jurist, historian and Liberal politician

Quoted by C. P. Scott in his diary (30 June 1914), in Trevor Wilson (ed.), The Political Diaries of C. P. Scott, 1911-1928 (London: Collins, 1970), p. 88.
1910s