Quotes About Ambition

But at some point in my midtwenties I abandoned my boyhood fantasy of climbing Everest. By then it had become fashionable among alpine cognoscenti to denigrate Everest as a "slag heap"—a peak lacking sufficient technical challenges or aesthetic appeal to be a worthy objective for a "serious" climber, which I desperately aspired to be. I began to look down my nose at the world's highest mountain.

Chris answered that careers were demeaning twentieth-century inventions, more of a liability than an asset, and that he would do fine without one, thank you.

But there are men for whom the unattainable has a special attraction. Usually they are not experts: their ambitions and fantasies are strong enough to brush aside the doubts which more cautious men might have.

It is easy, when you are young, to believe that what you desire is no less than what you deserve, to assume that if you want something badly enough, it is your God-given right to have it. (…) I thought climbing the Devils Thumb would fix all that was wrong with my life. In the end, of course, it changed almost nothing. But I came to appreciate that mountains make poor receptacles for dreams. And I lived to tell my tale.

Some people have big dreams, some people have small dreams...Whatever you have, the important thing is that you never stop dreaming. -Doug Hansen

Honor, duty, country. Those verities, together with a driving ambition and an abiding competitive spirit, had shaped his life and his understanding of the nation.

he wanted to win. Republicans in the Texas of 1963–64 were Goldwater men, not Rockefeller men. So George Bush was a Goldwater man.

Well, what the hell is the presidency for?" he asked, if not to do the big things lesser men might not?

The better you did—the more contests you won—the greater the next goal, the greater the next mission.

To Randolph the answer was self-evident. Jefferson had proved too much of a compromiser. Moderation, Randolph said, was "the mask which ambition has worn" through the ages.27 By the last year of the president's term, Randolph would tell James Monroe, "The old republican party is already ruined, past redemption."28 Jefferson

The magnitude of the job dwarfs every man who aspires to it," Johnson recalled in his memoirs. "Every man who occupies the position has to strain to the utmost of his ability to fill it.

Nostalgia is a powerful force, and in the maelstrom of the moment many of us seek comfort in imagining that once there was a Camelot—without quite remembering that the Arthurian legend itself was about a court riven by ambition and infidelity. One point of this book is to remind us that imperfection is the rule, not the exception.

Robert Shelton of The New York Times had reviewed a Greenwich Village performance by a young folk singer, Bob Dylan. "His clothes may need a bit of tailoring," Shelton wrote of Dylan, "but when he works his guitar, harmonica or piano, and composes new songs faster than he can remember them, there is no doubt that he is bursting at the seams with talent.

Thomas Jefferson was his father's son. He was raised to wield power. By example and perhaps explicitly he was taught that to be great—to be heeded—one had to grow comfortable with authority and with responsibility.

You combine insecurity and ambition, and you get an inability to say no to things.

As I glanced at the phraseology of the research report, dull and unfathomable to outsiders like me, I thought that if you have the ambition to become a villain, the first thing you should do is learn to be impenetrable. Don't act like Blofeld--monocled and ostentatious. We journalists love writing about eccentrics. We hate writing about boring, impenetrable people. ...If you want to get away with wielding true, malevolent power, be boring.

Sociopaths love power. They love winning. If you take loving kindness out of the human brain, there's not much left except the will to win.

Learning how to walk through walls was an ambitious but inexpensive enterprise.

if you have the ambition to become a villain, the first thing you should do is learn to be impenetrable. Don't act like Blofeld—monocled and ostentatious. We journalists love writing about eccentrics. We hate writing about impenetrable, boring people. It makes us look bad: the duller the interviewee, the duller the prose. If you want to get away with wielding true, malevolent power, be boring.

Whenever you hear a politician start a sentence with, "If we can put a man on the moon . . . ," grab your wallet.

We've got to squash this dewy-eyed belief that people can be motivated by anything other than money.

Our joint plan was to be poor and obscure and pure and take the world by surprise at a later date.

I had a Viking sense of entitlement to whatever provisions I could plunder.

Power, power, power: how could the world be organized around the struggle for a thing so lonely and oppressive in the having of it?