Ambition Quotes
Shakespeare leads, followed by Milton, Pope, Cowper and the American educator William H. Crogman. The sourced lines are mostly unflattering. Wilde, in 1894, calls ambition the last refuge of the failure, and Bierce, in 1911, defines it as an overmastering desire to be vilified by enemies while living and made ridiculous by friends when dead. Burke, in Letters on a Regicide Peace (1796), puts it more neatly: ambition can creep as well as soar.
Flagged: a passage on moderation being a virtue to limit the ambition of great men, credited to Disraeli, is marked misattributed, and two passages of Dryden, one on ambition and gold, the other on the diadem as the centre of ambition, are disputed.
“What do you mean by a tyrant?”
“One whose blood was poisoned by the ambition to rule over others.”
Ambition can never be naked in a political campaign, it must be clothed in deceit.
But this was the eighteenth century, when life was cheap and ambition unlimited.
Ambition is ever tempered by experience. Otherwise, fortune makes fools of us all.
It was men’s ambitions, they said, that had perverted all the arts to ends of gain.