Ambition fortifies the will of man to become ruler over other men: it operates with deception, cajolery, and violence, it is the action of impurity upon impurity.
Greed, desire, ambition, jealousy, possessiveness, domination - you have to watch everything. And they are all interconnected, remember. If greed disappears, then anger will disappear. If anger disappears, jealousy will disappear. If jealousy disappears, violence will disappear. If violence disappears, possessiveness will disappear. They are all intertwined. In fact, they are spokes of the same wheel, and the hub that supports them all is the ego. So watch the ways of the ego.
America is a Nation with a mission - and that mission comes from our most basic beliefs. We have no desire to dominate, no ambitions of empire. Our aim is a democratic peace - a peace founded upon the dignity and rights of every man and woman.
Dreams, indeed, are ambition; for the very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream. And I hold ambition of so airy and light a quality that it is but a shadow's shadow.
When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept: Ambition should be made of sterner stuff: Yet Brutus says he was ambitious; And Brutus is an honourable man.
I actually think, when you're young, ambitions are somewhat common - you want to prove yourself. It may grow out of different life experiences. You may want to prove that you are worthy of the admiration of the demanding father. You may want to prove that you are worthy of the love of an absent father.
I suppose I was about 20, and a crowd of us had been to a village hop and came back to make midnight cups of coffee. I was in the kitchen helping to dish up and having a fierce argument with one of the boys in the crowd when someone else interrupted to say: 'Of course Margaret, you will go into politics won't you?' I stopped dead. Suddenly it was crystalised for me. I knew.
You despise books; you whose lives are absorbed in the vanities of ambition, the pursuit of pleasure or indolence; but remember that all the known world, excepting only savage nations, is governed by books.
The aphorism, the apothegm, in which I am the first among the Germans to be a master, are the forms of “eternity”; it is my ambition to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book — what everyone else does not say in a book.