Quotes About Ambition

To admit error and cut losses is rare among individuals, unknown among states. States function only in terms of what those in control perceive as power or personal ambition, and both of these wear blinkers.

Mankind's tragedy is that he can draw up blueprints for a better life but he cannot live up to them.

His decision suggests that an absence of overriding personal ambition together with shrewd common sense are among the essential components of wisdom.

Money was evil, beauty vain, and both were transitory. Ambition was pride, desire for gain was avarice, desire of the flesh was lust, desire for honor, even for knowledge and beauty, was vainglory. Insofar as these diverted man from seeking the life of the spirit, they were sinful.

He had the ruthlessness of uninterrupted success.

Fate represents the fulfillment of man's expectations of himself.

The appetite for power is old and irrepressible in humankind, and in its action almost always destructive.

Sternly saving his greatest strength for the right wing, he did not yield to that vaulting ambition in his plan. But the lure of the left wing remained to tempt his successors.

Whenever a man has cast a longing eye on [office]," he wrote to a friend, "a rottenness begins in his conduct.

Your past is not your potential

The poor prayed to become rich, and the rich prayed to become richer.

Success to me is having ten honeydew melons and eating only the top half of each slice.

I just don't want to be hampered by my own limitations.

I would rather be a failure on my own terms than a success on someone else's," Waits said on the album's release.

We live in a world that teaches the importance of ambition, efficiency, expediency, getting things done to produce the quickest results. It does not teach or encourage us to relax and just be where we are. In fact, if we are not crazy active and doing a million different things, we get labeled as lazy or unambitious.

Ambition -- it is the last infirmity of noble minds.

Most literary people die of starvation.

When I was young, I used to think that wealth and power would bring me happiness. . . . I was right. —GAHAN WILSON

It's a great country, where anybody can grow up to be president... except me.

Less than I want. More than I deserve.

bullshit might help you get to the top, but it won't keep you there.

If you can see it, you can be it.

We get what we say we want, only to discover that what we want doesn't satisfy us to the degree that we expect.

I was born for better things.