Famous Quotes & Sayings

Edmund Burke

The same sun which gilds all nature, and exhilarates the whole creation, does not shine upon disappointed ambition.

Edmund Burke

Greater mischief happens often from folly, meanness, and vanity than from the greater sins of avarice and ambition.

Elihu Root

Human nature must have come much nearer perfection than it is now, or will be in many generations, to exclude from such a control prejudice, selfishness, ambition, and injustice.

Edward Gibbon

The love of freedom, so often invigorated and disgraced by private ambition, was reduced, among the licentious Franks, to the contempt of order, and the desire of impunity.

Edward Gibbon

The imprudent Maximus disregarded these salutary considerations: he gratified his resentment and ambition; he saw the bleeding corpse of Valentinian at his feet; and he heard himself saluted Emperor by the unanimous voice of the senate and people. But the day of his inauguration was the last day of his happiness.

David Hume

Methinks I am like a man, who having struck on many shoals, and having narrowly escap'd shipwreck in passing a small frith, has yet the temerity to put out to sea in the same leaky weather-beaten vessel, and even carries his ambition so far as to think of compassing the globe under these disadvantageous circumstances.

David Hume

In all ages of the world, priests have been enemies to liberty; and it is certain, that this steady conduct of theirs must have been founded on fixed reasons of interest and ambition. Liberty of thinking, and of expressing our thoughts, is always fatal to priestly power, and to those pious frauds, on which it is commonly founded; and, by an infallible connexion, which prevails among all kinds of liberty, this privilege can never be enjoyed, at least has never yet been enjoyed, but in a free government.

David Hume

Where ambition can cover its enterprises, even to the person himself, under the appearance of principle, it is the most incurable and inflexible of passions

David Brooks

I want to make big films. That's always been my ambition.

Ben Whishaw

I don't have any ambition to make lots of money or win an Oscar or anything like that. It's not about that for me.

Benedict Cumberbatch

There are very specific demands, though, in television, and you notice the budget constrictions. It's the time constraint and a purse constraint more than anything else that you notice. But the ambition of the writing and, hopefully, the delivery of it gets better and better because we want to outdo ourselves to keep ahead of a very expectant and hungry public.

Beau Willimon

It's a rough and tumble game whenever power is involved - people's ambitions, their desires, their competitive spirit will often push them to play outside the rules. It's dramatic, it's interesting, and I think it's something we can all identify with to a degree.

Barney Frank

The left and the right live in parallel universes. The right listens to talk radio, the left's on the Internet and they just reinforce one another. They have no sense of reality. I have now one ambition: to retire before it becomes essential to tweet.

Aslan Maskhadov

Independence is not a whim or an ambition. It is the necessary condition of our survival as an ethnic group.

Edwin Louis Cole

The pleasures of sin exist. We cannot deny them. But we also dare not deny what follows in their wake: a voracious appetite, inflamed with eroticism, demanding more indulgence more often until a degenerative spiral captures the soul and drags us on a never ending descent into deeper patterns of immorality and illicit behaviour... Lust goes beyond the sexual. Lust can show itself in a variety of forms: covetousness, gluttony, drunkeness, power hunger, or unbridled ambition, to name a few

Edgar Quinet

Though ambition in itself is a vice, it often is also the parent of virtue.

Bobby Jones

Too much ambition is a bad thing to have in a bunker.

Barbra Streisand

I'm not that ambitious any more. I just like my privacy. I wish I really wasn't talked about at all.

Arthur Christiansen

The people who lived behind those clean lace curtains in row after row of identical boxes were newspaper readers, and every word in at any rate my newspaper must be clear and comprehensible to them, must be interesting to them, must encourage them to break away from littleness, stimulate their ambition, help them to want to build a better land.

Bela Lugosi

Every actor's greatest ambition is to create his own, definite and original role, a character with which he will always be identified. In my case, that role was Dracula.

Baltasar Gracian

The true way is the middle one, halfway between deserving a place and pushing oneself into it.

Baltasar Gracian

Nothing arouses ambition so much in the heart as the trumpet-clang of another's fame.

Arundhati Roy

Rahel’s toy wristwatch had the time painted on it. Ten to two. One of her ambitions was to own a watch on which she could change the time whenever she wanted to (which according to her was what Time was meant for in the first place).

Arianna Huffington

Learning to code is useful no matter what your career ambitions are.

Anthony Trollope

I have no ambition to surprise my reader. Castles with unknown passages are not compatible with my homely muse.

Anthony Trollope

It is a grand thing to rise in the world. The ambition to do so is the very salt of the earth. It is the parent of all enterprise, and the cause of all improvement.

Anthony Trollope

Your man with a thin skin, a vehement ambition, a scrupulous conscience, and a sanguine desire for rapid improvement is never a happy, and seldom a fortunate politician.

Craig Ferguson

I have no ambitions beyond being comfortable in what I do for a living - and earning a living.

There is a real danger that the competitive disadvantage caused by this measure will frustrate the government's ambition of making the U.K. the best place to trade electronically by 2002.

Charles Bukowski

My ambition is handicapped by laziness

Brian Tracy

A person with average talent, ambition and education, can outstrip a genius in society, if that person has focused goals.

Jan Timman

I am still full of ambition.

James Weldon Johnson

But I must own that I also felt stirred by an unselfish desire to voice all the joys and sorrows, the hopes and ambitions, of the American Negro, in classic musical form.