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

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.