Top 85 Quotes About Ambition And Power
#1. Men drunk with ambition and power do not ground their weapons, nor stop to recognise the fellow-humanity of those they are about to slay. - Pg. 2
Ellis Peters
#2. Giving peace a chance only gives Saddam Hussein more time to prepare for war on his terms, at a time of his choosing, in pursuit of ambitions that will only grow as his power to achieve them grows.
John McCain
#3. And yet is not mankind itself, pushing on its blind way, driven by a dream of its greatness and its power upon the dark paths of excessive cruelty and of excessive devotion. And what is the pursuit of truth, after all?
Joseph Conrad
#4. It was Tigerstar's ambition that destroyed him. If he had been willing to wait for power to come to him, he would've been the greatest leader in the forest.
Erin Hunter
#5. Cage of freedom, that's our prison; we're the jailer and captive combined Cage of freedom, cast in power; all the trappings of our own design. Blind ambition, steals our reason; we're soon behind those invisible bars On the inside, looking outside; to make it safer we double the guard.
Jon Anderson
#6. Russia - having sat across the table from Vladimir Putin, it's pretty clear when you meet him that he has an almost limitless ambition for power. And he's been very good at acquiring it - political power, economic power, military power, territorial power.
Carly Fiorina
#7. I hate what you represent."
...
"Power without conviction." Isana replied, her tone lifeless, matter of fact.
"Ambition without conscience. Decent folk suffer at the hands of those like you.
Jim Butcher
#8. Ambition's monstrous stomach does increase
By eating, and it fears to starve, unless
It still may feed, and all it sees devour;
Ambition is not tir'd with toll nor cloy'd with power.
William Davenant
#9. I'm not God, but I'm working within my own means as an artist and a person, and I possibly have more power than God does, in whatever form he has, if he exists, because I can work without the overarching ambition of wanting to rule over everything. I can work just for the heck of it.
Raymond Pettibon
#11. If you try to keep your most sacred ambitions off of your weekly calendar and your most genuine traits off of your resume, then you're missing out on the power of real integrity.
Danielle LaPorte
#13. I own records that have the power to make me cry. Records to be by or with - truly precious possessions. It is the ambition of the Midnight Runners to make records of this value ...
Kevin Rowland
#14. I used to think that the causes of war were predominantly economic. I came to think that they were more psychological. I am now coming to think that they are decisively "personal," arising from the defects and ambitions of those who have the power to influence the currents of nations.
B.H. Liddell Hart
#16. The gold standard makes the money's purchasing power independent of the changing, ambitions and doctrines of political parties and pressure groups. This is not a defect of the gold standard; it is its main excellence.
Ludwig Von Mises
#17. Ambition, while there was nothing wrong with it, was still a far cry from power. Ambition got you out of bed to make money. Power meant you could make money without ever leaving bed.
AlTonya Washington
#19. Ambition makes the same mistake concerning power that avarice makes concerning wealth. She begins by accumulating power as a means to happiness, and she finishes by continuing to accumulate it as an end.
Charles Caleb Colton
#20. Every time I tried to express my most heartfelt desires to be morally good I met with contempt and ridicule; and as soon as I would give in to vile passions I was praised and encouraged. Ambition, love of power, self-interest, lechery, pride, anger, vengeance-all of it was highly esteemed.
Leo Tolstoy
#21. Those whose tastes run to personal power [can] never be trusted to act save in the pursuit of their own ambition.
Jack McDevitt
#22. He shed a lake of blood and murdered a king for a cold, lonely throne.
Jayne Castel
#23. We continue to recognize the greater ability of some to earn more than others. But we do assert that the ambition of the individual to obtain for him a proper security is an ambition to be preferred to the appetite for great wealth and great power.
Franklin D. Roosevelt
#24. Her father was lying back in his chair, lazy and powerful, his eyes as fierce as his daemon's. She didn't love him, she couldn't trust him, but she had to admire him, and the extravagant luxury he'd assembled in this desolate wasteland, and the power of his ambition.
Philip Pullman
#25. I almost trust her to burn the bridges while standing at the cliff herself. She hardly agrees to be on the same page as others, either ahead of all or all in a different book.
Parul Wadhwa
#26. By Gryffindor, the bravest were Prized far beyond the rest; For Ravenclaw, the cleverest Would always be the best; For Hufflepuff, hard workers were Most worthy of admission; And power-hungry Slytherin Loved those of great ambition.
J.K. Rowling
#27. Happiness has nothing to do with success, happiness has nothing to do with ambition, happiness has nothing to do with money, power, prestige. Happiness has something to do with your consiousness, not with your character.
Osho
#28. Full of hopes beyond their power though not beyond their ambition.
Thucydides
#29. Heirs Holdings has the ambition to generate at least a quarter of Nigeria's power consumption needs in the next five years
Tony Elumelu
#30. Everything that anyone respects is what men naturally excel at: fighting, accruing wealth, playing at power ...
Janet Morris
#31. It was under a solemn consciousness of the dangers from ecclesiastical ambition, the bigotry of spiritual pride, and the intolerance of sects ... that is was deemed advisable to exclude from the national government all power to act upon the subject.
Joseph Story
#32. People - running from unhappiness, hiding in power - are locked within their reputations, ambitions, beliefs.
Richard Avedon
#33. I have enormous personal ambition. I want to shift the entire planet. And I'm doing it. I am now a famous person. I represent real power.
Newt Gingrich
#34. Richard, marked for misery and defeat, acknowledged that power which sentiment possesses to exalt us - to convince us that our minds, endowed with a soaring, restless aspiration, can find no repose on earth except in love.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
#35. As he passed Alistair to depart the library, Bosque said, I'm pleased you didn't limit your vision. Ambition is the fertile soil in which true power can be cultivated.
Andrea Cremer
#36. In 1979, I moved to England and photographed Joy Division and Bowie and Beefheart. At that time I got images that I felt had that special, well - power is a big word to say - more like intimacy and ambition that outlasted the photo shoot. I felt that they would have a longer life.
Anton Corbijn
#37. Verily, I swear, 'tis better to be lowly born, and range with humble livers in content, than to be perk'd up in a glistering grief, and wear a golden sorrow.
William Shakespeare
#38. All facts prove that the Saenuri Party is a group of traitors who stoop to any infamy to realize its ambition to seize power.
Park Geun-hye
#39. Only those with no ambition and the inability to truly understand power are happy without it. They live in their little bubbles, never suspecting that there is more in the world. They are content to just exist. I want to do more than exist; I want to create, to destroy, to evolve." ~Lorsan
Quinn Loftis
#40. He is not Enzo, I remind myself. But I don't want him to be. With Enzo, my energy yearned for his power and ambition, all too happy to let him take me into the darkness. But with Magiano ... I am able to smile, even to laugh. I am able to sit here and lean back and point out the constellations.
Marie Lu
#41. Success come only through high ambition, good guidance, strong will, determining and effort.
Santonu Kumar Dhar
#42. What if God were not exactly truth, and if this could be proved? And if he were instead the vanity, the desire for power, the ambitions, the fear, and the enraptured and terrified folly of mankind?
Friedrich Nietzsche
#43. There is that within a man that drives him ever onwards, just as the power of the seasons drives the roots of flowers into the hard earth; and so he decided, against his better judgment, to open his eyes and find out what was going to happen to him next.
Tom Holt
#44. Fear is a great robber of power. It paralyzes the thinking faculties, ruins spontaneity, enthusiasm, and self confidence. It has a blighting effect upon all one's thoughts, moods, and efforts. It destroys ambition and efficiency.
Orison Swett Marden
#45. what is the truth about the inner motivations, character, and ambition of those who hold power?
Stephen R. Covey
#46. The power of hope! Even a lack of ambition can, for a time, pay off as a necessary facet, as long as hope outweighs it.
Criss Jami
#47. The pleasures and the cares of the luckiest ambition, even of limitless power, are nothing next to the intimate happiness that tenderness and love give. I am man before being a prince, and when I have the good fortune to be in love, my mistress addresses a man and not a prince.
Stendhal
#48. Among precautions against ambition, it may not be amiss to take precautions against our own. I must fairly say, I dread our own power and our own ambition: I dread our being too much dreaded.
Edmund Burke
#49. To admit error and cut losses is rare among individuals, unknown among states. States function only in terms of what those in control perceive as power or personal ambition, and both of these wear blinkers.
Barbara W. Tuchman
#50. 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.
Beau Willimon
#51. I'm not - I'm not a person looking for money. I have no political ambitions whatsoever. I don't seek power. I don't seek any kind of praise. I have no ego to fulfill.
Carl Paladino
#52. People Power is too often an inverted fairy story - the triumph of innocence coming at the start and the Ugly Sisters of intrigue and ambition coming on stage in triumph for the final curtain.
Mark Almond
#53. Ambition is one of the ungovernable passions of the human heart. The love of power is insatiable and uncontrollable.
John Adams
#54. The most important gift anyone can give a girl is a belief in her own power as an individual, her value without reference to gender, her respect as a person with potential.
Emilie Buchwald
#55. The cause of all these evils was the lust for power arising from greed and ambition; and from these passions proceeded the violence of parties once engaged in contention.
Thucydides
#56. Discontented inhabitants who willingly admit a foreign power either through excessive ambition or through fear, as was the case with the Etolians, who admitted the Romans into Greece. So it was with every province that the Romans entered: they were brought in by the inhabitants themselves.
Niccolo Machiavelli
#57. When I was 27, I didn't have a clue what was going on! At that age, to have that much power and to have that much ambition is something.
Stephen Graham
#58. Envy is of all others the most ungratifying and disconsolate passion. There is power for ambition, pleasure for luxury, and pelf even for covetousness; but envy gets no reward but vexation.
Jeremy Collier
#59. Ambition and thirst for power have a part but greed and greed alone is the reason for a man wanting to swell his ward.
Charles Ranlett Flint
#60. We should try to bring to any power what we have as women. We will destroy it all if we try to imitate that absolutely unfeeling, driving ambition that we have seen coming at us across the desk.
Colleen Dewhurst
#61. Nothing else so destroys the power to stand alone as the habit of leaning upon others. If you lean, you will never be strong or original. Stand alone or bury your ambition to be somebody in the world.
Orison Swett Marden
#62. What is ambition but desire of greatness? And what is greatness but extent of power?
Thomas Higgons
#63. Be not content with the common place in character anymore than with the commonplace in ambition or intellectual attainment. Do not expect that you will make any lasting or very strong impression on the world through intellectual power without the use of an equal amount of conscience and heart.
William Jewett Tucker
#64. As she sustained wound after wound ... the fairy should have fallen, but instead, she danced. This was Titania, the Fairy Queen.
Hiro Mashima
#65. People want to be special. I think ambition can take in a whole package of things, power or sexual excitement.
James Wolcott
#67. I find comfort in the fact that the longer I'm in politics the less nourishing popularity becomes, that striving for power and rank and fame seems to betray a poverty of ambition, and that I am answerable mainly to the steady gaze of my own conscience.
Barack Obama
#70. There is power in ambition, pleasure in luxury ... but envy can gain nothing but vexation.
Michel De Montaigne
#71. Being "too pushy" is paradoxically not a display of too much strength, but of weakness. What's more impressive than ambition is the power to control it.
Lou Kasischke
#72. Tales of power and ambition and intrigue and betrayal and desire - when you're telling those in a big way, you automatically want to go to Shakespeare.
Beau Willimon
#73. Ambition has but one reward for all: A little power, a little transient fame; A grave to rest in, and a fading name!
Walter Savage Landor
#74. Because there was a hunger in me to see everything and do everything. I wanted to be everyone I saw. I wasn't enough for me. Can you understand that?
Sidney Sheldon
#75. The men who succeed are the efficient few. They are the few who have the ambition and will power to develop themselves.
Robert Burton
#76. I make no pretensions to 'objectivity,' a fraudulent concept in an era of industrialized and politicized science in which intellectual mercenaries too often serve power and greed, the ambitions of competing nation-states, or the requirements of commerce.
Hazel Henderson
#77. Men seek to be great; they would have offices, wealth, power, and fame. They think that to be great is to possess one side of nature,
the sweet, without the other side,
the bitter.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#78. One of the most important reasons for North Korea continuing its nuclear ambitions is to consolidate the power to stay within the Kim Jong Il family.
Lee Myung-bak
#79. If you really think that ambition, power, lust, desire are not as applicable in the media as in politics or on Wall Street or anywhere else, you're deluding yourself.
Beau Willimon
#80. How to find joy? Let your ambition disappear; ambition is the barrier. Ambition means an ego trip: "I want to be this, I want to be that - more money, more power, more prestige."
Rajneesh
#82. Ambition, love of power, covetousness, lasciviousness, pride, anger, and revenge - were all respected.
Leo Tolstoy
#83. One has to be suspicious of anyone who seeks the limelight.
Marty Rubin
#84. There was reason for STILLMAN'S EXTREME SECRECY. HE WAS PREPARING TO EXTEND THE CITY BANK'S POWER OVER THE EARTH AND FULLY RECOGNIZED THAT THIS AMBITION WOULD DRAW HIM INTO THE WEB OF INTERNATIONAL COMMERCIAL INTRIGUE AND ESPIONAGE
George B. Cortelyou
#85. Nothing worse than a weak man with ambition, who gains power because those before him died rather than because his ideals were grand.
Melina Marchetta
