Quotes About Ambition

Every child is born sane, and then, slowly slowly, we civilize him - we call it the process of civilization. We prepare him to become part of the great culture, the great church, the great state to which we belong. Our whole politics is stupid, and then HE becomes stupid. Our whole education is ugly. Our politics means nothing but ambition, naked ambition - ambition for power. And only the lowest kind of people become interested in power.

I think ambition is a desire for recognition. People want to be special. I think ambition can take in a whole package of things, power or sexual excitement.

If you have ambition, you might not achieve anything, but without ambition, you are almost certain not to achieve anything.

I wasn't really interested in doing television. I don't have that much ambition. My agent, Eileen Feldman, has all the ambition for me.

Many people wants to be the president...they have ambition. Just ambition is not enough.

Ambition, if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others.

We continue to recognize the greater ability of some to earn more than others. But we do assert that the ambition of the individual to obtain for him a proper security is an ambition to be preferred to the appetite for great wealth and great power.

Moderation cannot have the credit of combatiug and subduing ambition, they are never found together. Moderation is the languor and indolence of the soul, as ambition is its activity and ardor.

Love and friendship, two of life's abiding rewards, are endangered species in Hollywood. People crave both, mistaking alliance for friendship, lust for love, and ambition for both.

Liberalism is the party of upstarts who have insinuated themselves between the people and its big men. Liberals feel themselves as isolated individuals, responsible to nobody. They do not share the nation’s traditions, they are indifferent to its past and have no ambition for its future. They seek only their own personal advantage in the present. Their dream is the great International, in which the differences of peoples and languages, races and cultures will be obliterated.

If love and ambition should be in equal balance, and come to jostle with equal force, I make no doubt but that the last would win the prize.

What likelihood is there of corrupting a man who has no ambition.

The worst thing is to feel that as a photographer I am 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.

When I applied to Stanford, I applied for graduate work in the PhD program, not to the creative writing program, mostly because though I had some vague ambition of becoming a writer and I was trying to write poems and essays and stories, I didn't feel like I was far enough along to submit work to some place and have it judged.

Motherhood has never been an ambition. I don't think like that. I never have expectations like, 'When I'm 19 I'm going to do this, and by the time I've hit 25 I'm going to do that'. I just take things as they come, each day at a time, and if things happen then all well and good.

Squint your eyes and look closer I'm not between you and your ambition I am a poster girl with no poster I am thirty-two flavors and then some And I'm beyond your peripheral vision So you might want to turn your head Cause someday you might find you're starving and eating all of the words you said.

Rodgers & Hammerstein shows have a purity of unironic emotion that imprints itself upon people's hearts. They seem to touch our feelings so effortlessly. They have a scope and ambition that's missing from many musicals now.

Vanity makes people ridiculous, pride odious, and ambition terrible.

I wish I had a little more ambition. But then what would I do? Turn down more roles with more vehemence? Me no likey worky.

How like a mounting devil in the heart rules the unreined ambition.

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

I'm fascinated by the journey that an intelligent and an ambitious woman makes in the professional world in contrast to the journey that a man of similar ambition, of similar intelligence makes. What sort of concessions does a woman have to make? Does she have to work 20 percent harder than a man?

Who among us has not, in moments of ambition, dreamt of the miracle of a form of poetic prose, musical but without rhythm and rhyme, both supple and staccato enough to adapt itself to the lyrical movements of our souls, the undulating movements of our reveries, and the convulsive movements of our consciences? This obsessive ideal springs above all from frequent contact with enormous cities, from the junction of their innumerable connections.

My ambition for station was always easily controlled. If the place came to me it was welcome. But it never seemed to me worth seeking at the cost of self-respect, or independence. My family were not historic; they were well-to-do, did not hold or seek office. It was easy for me to be contented in private life. An honor was no honor to me, if obtained by my own seeking.

I had a burning ambition. Otherwise, I wouldn't have accomplished it

Cent percent swadeshi gives sufficient scope for the most insatiable ambition for service and a satisfaction of every kind of talent.

I started to notice that simpleness is divine. I think we all start trying to use very complex harmonies and rhythms and all that because of a certain kind of ambition. But I was always trying to create something simple.

But ambition is a funny thing: it creeps in when you least expect it and keeps you moving, even when you think you want to stay put.

If we deny our anger, our pain, our ambition, or our goodness, we will suffer.

There are, indeed, two forms of discontent: one laborious, the other indolent and complaining. We respect the man of laborious desire, but let us not suppose that his restlessness is peace, or his ambition meekness. It is because of the special connection of meekness with contentment that it is promised that the meek shall 'inherit the earth.' Neither covetous men, nor the grave, can inherit anything; they can but consume. Only contentment can possess.

I have only one ambition left: I should like to have a good epitaph.

Combine a certain amount of indifference with your ambition. Be carefully careless. If you don't succeed today, there is always tomorrow.

I think that if I have one hope, 1 ambition, 1 aspiration for the next 4 or 5 years it would be that I can improve as a writer and just be able to say more of what I want to say throught the music.

Great ambition is the passion of a great character. Those endowed with it may perform very good or very bad acts. All depends on the principles which direct them.

Challenge negative forces with hope, self-confidence and conviction. I believe that ambition and initiative will ultimately triumph.

The failure of women to produce genius of the first rank in most of the supreme forms of human effort has been used to block the way of all women of talent and ambition for intellectual achievement.

The incentive to ambition is the love of power.

While the agreement signed in Paris between 195 nations to combat climate change was historic and significant, it's still vague and lacks the ambition to truly meet the challenge. The next step is to move aggressively toward a transition to 100% clean renewable energy as quickly as possible (that means no fossil fuels, nuclear, or big hydro).

To all our means of culture is added the powerful incentive to personal ambition, no post of honor is so high but the poorest may hope to reach it.

There is little doubt that, until 1846 when he helped to engineer the resignation of Robert Peel, Disraeli was driven by an ambition to make his mark rather than by any consistent political purpose, and that his attacks on Peel would have not have been so mounted had he been given in 1841 the office for which he had asked.

I'd like them [people] to leave thinking about the challenges women face in the workforce, but more importantly to really feel the emotional highs and lows of those challenges - to have really experienced that unsettling place where ambition crosses over into something else entirely.

What is my loftiest ambition? I've always wanted to throw an egg at an electric fan.

In his writings, Patton was shameless about his ambition to woo Lena to be his bride. He detailed the gradual progress he made, playing music for her on his violin, writing her poems, beguiling her with stories, engaging her in conversation. It was clear that he obsessed over her. He knew what he wanted and never relented until she was his.

Picasso had nicknamed Georges Braque "Wilbur," thereby becoming "Orville" in their Wright Brothers-like ambition to get painting off the ground of conventional representation.

Ambition is an idol, on whose wings great minds are carried only to extreme; to be sublimely great or to be nothing.

It is not good for man to cherish a solitary ambition. Unless there be those around him, by whose example he may regulate himself, his thoughts, desires, and hopes will become extravagant, and he the semblance, perhaps the reality, of a madman

Ambition is a passion, at once strong and insidious, and is very apt to cheat a man out of his happiness and his true respectability of character

Laurence Olivier said if you have ambition to be a serious classical actor, you must be as fit as an athlete. For me, the breakthrough was going to live in California. I exercised. I drank less. It was one of the things about California that had a positive impact on me.