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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.

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Most quoted on ambition:

I'm disappointed we lost but I was very encouraged by our ambition - and we played with the ball in hand.

Toby Booth

I mean, these boys don’t have ambitions after crossing the road like that.

Moeneeb Josephs

My principal motive is the belief that we can still make admirable sense of our lives even if we cease to have … "an ambition of transcendence."

Richard Rorty

‘a Communist China which has definite ambitions and aims and which does not, in any way, seem friendly disposed towards us’.

Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel

It was imperative to make common cause with the oppressed, in order to secure a new system opposed to the ambitions and governing habits of the oppressors.

José Martí Our America (1891)

One must avoid ambition in order to write. Otherwise something else is the goal: some kind of power beyond the power of language.

Cynthia Ozick Interview with The Paris Review (1987)

We are aware of the various inglorious moves by those who are only loyal to their personal interests and ambition than the survival of the party…

Bunmi Olusona

The vicar’s right; he says that we
Are ever wayward, weak and blind;
He tells us in his homily
Ambition ruins all mankind

Gustave Nadaud Carcassonne (1887)

Mr. Sam was our father. He knew about our dreams and ambitions.

Athol Fugard Master Harold"...and the Boys (1982)

I worked as a medical illustrator for about ten years. It was not my career ambition; it was a way to finance my addiction to art and support my family.

Alex Grey High Times interview (2002)

Yes, we have a pronatalist ambition. We want people to have more children, and we think the government should get behind that wish.

Danny Kruger The House interview (2026)

Ambition never comes to an end.

Yoshida Kenkō Attributed Tsurezuregusa (1330)

Ambition is a gilded misery, a secret poison, a hidden plague, the engineer of deceit, the mother of hypocrisy, the parent of envy, the original of vices, the moth of holiness, the blinder of hearts, turning medicines into maladies, and remedies into diseases.

Thomas Brooks Attributed Forty Thousand Quotations (1917)

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

Sallust Misattributed

A republic is not founded on virtue, but on the ambition of its citizens.

Voltaire Attributed A Thousand Flashes of French Wit, Wisdom, and Wickedness (1902)

Ambition is not a vice of little people.

Michel de Montaigne Attributed

Some through ambition, or through thirst of gold,
Have slain their brothers, and their country sold.

John Dryden Disputed Poetical Quotations from Chaucer to Tennyson (1880)

O diadem, thou centre of ambition,
Where all its different lines are reconciled;
As if thou wert the burning glass of glory.

John Dryden Disputed Poetical Quotations from Chaucer to Tennyson (1880)

Presidential ambition is a disease which can only be cured by embalming fluid.

Morris Udall Misattributed

Moderation has been called a virtue to limit the ambition of great men, and to console undistinguished people for their want of fortune and their lack of merit.

Benjamin Disraeli Misattributed

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