Ambition Quotes - page 38
I feel that you are justified in looking into the future with true assurance, because you have a mode of living in which we find the joy of lifeand the joy of work harmoniously combined. Added to this is the spirit of ambition which pervades your very being, and seems to make theday's work like a happy child at play.
Albert Einstein
Single women often fear that the men they are going out with wouldn't be comfortable with less career and more child. Perhaps. If a woman selects a man with a lot of career ambition, she'll get what she selected. The solution? Choose among men who would love to be married to a career woman who valued his being home full-time with the children for a few years. Can't find these men? State your interest on your Match.com profile--the Internet's the best net to catch the right fish. You'll be surprised.
Warren Farrell
Now he's back to declaring himself a maverick, but it's not clear what that means. If he gains the presidency, is he going to rebel against the base he's now depending on to get him elected? (Hence his selection of running mate Sarah Palin.) Campaigns matter. If he means "shaking up the system" (which is not the same thing), opposing earmarks doesn't cut it. McCain's recent conduct of his campaign – his willingness to lie repeatedly (including in his acceptance speech) and to play Russian roulette with the vice-presidency, in order to fulfill his long-held ambition – has reinforced my earlier, and growing, sense that John McCain is not a principled man. In fact, it's not clear who he is.
John McCain
We pass no judgment here upon the political systems of other countries, but neither Fascism nor Communism is in harmony with our temperament and creed. We will have nothing to do with either of them here. And yet, whatever differences there may be between us and other nations on that subject, do not forget that we are all members of the human race and subject to the like passions and affections and fears and desires. There must be something in common between us if only we can find it, and perhaps by our very aloofness from the rest of Europe we may have some special part to play as conciliator and mediator. An ancient historian once wrote of the Greeks that they had made gentle the life of the world. I do not know whether in these modern days it is possible for any nation to emulate the example of the Greeks, but I can imagine no nobler ambition for an English statesman than to win the same tribute for his own country.
Neville Chamberlain
The Roman Catholic Church has withstood in Europe and in Ireland the fiercest storms. In France it has survived Voltaire and Lepaux, the French Revolution and the Goddess of Reason; in England, Queen Elizabeth, William the Third, and the Penal Laws. In Ireland it still confronts us with four times as many adherents as all the Protestant churches. If we look to the fate of sovereigns, we find that James the Second forfeited the crown of England, and that Charles the Tenth sacrificed the crown of France, rather from devotion to the Church of Rome than from the failure of their political ambition.
John Russell, 1st Earl Russell
Anything is one of a million paths. Therefore, a warrior must always keep in mind that a path is only a path; if he feels that he should not follow it, he must not stay with it under any conditions. His decision to keep on that path or to leave it must be free of fear or ambition. He must look at every path closely and deliberately.
Carlos Castaneda
I had an incredible 10-year run with Marvel which pushed me creatively. I now have tons more ambition to do things I haven't done before. Evolving is key - the worst thing you can do is get in your own way. Just in the matter of me wanting to be a fit father, husband and citizen, it'd be irresponsible of me to not keep my eye ahead so I can prepare my mind for what's to come and the transition. As an actor, every time I get a script now, I think about the commitment and time I'd be away from my missus and kiddos.
Robert Downey Jr.
The rich in all societies may be thrown into two classes. The first is of those who are powerful as well as rich, and conduct the operations of the vast political machine. The other is of those who employ their riches wholly in the acquisition of pleasure. As to the first sort, their continual care and anxiety, their toilsome days and sleepless nights, are next to proverbial. These circumstances are sufficient almost to level their condition to that of the unhappy majority; but there are other circumstances which place them in a far lower condition. Not only their understandings labour continually, which is the severest labour, but their hearts are torn by the worst, most troublesome, and insatiable of all passions, by avarice, by ambition, by fear and jealousy. No part of the mind has rest. Power gradually extirpates from the mind every humane and gentle virtue. Pity, benevolence, friendship, are things almost unknown in high stations.
Edmund Burke
Pedro Almodóvar: "When she came with her Blond Ambition tour I prepared a dinner for her, and that little thief didn't tell us that everything she was recording was going to be part of her film. Madonna was asking for Antonio Banderas' phone number all the time, because she wanted to screw him and I never gave it to her. When she went out jogging she always had her six bodyguards and I told her: 'Madonna, babe, this kind of things are not very attractive here in Spain.' In this country, that thing about bodyguards is like an offense, nobody is going to shoot Madonna or whoever in Spain. But in United States bodyguards seem to be, like a part of the body of the star. She asked me if I didn't have bodyguards and I said 'I would only have them to fuck them'."
Madonna (entertainer)
In Hindu scriptures, the Chakravartin is described as a suzerain who receives tribute from subject rulers, but who respects the autonomy (swarajya) and local customs (swadharma) of his subject nations. Is that what Hitler did? The Buddhist ideal of the Chakravartin was emperor Ashoka, who had his regrets about his initial military conquest (needed to round off his predecessors' conquests upto India's natural borders, easy to defend) chiselled in stone pillars. He explicitly dropped the ambition of further military conquest and opted for "religious conquest” (Dharma-Vijaya) instead. And lest anyone start misquoting this, the meaning of "religious conquest” is not something like Jihad, Islamic war against the Infidels, but simply promoting morality and sending out Buddhist missionaries. Far from illustrating that Buddhism had its imperialists too, as the Trimondis present it, the story of Ashoka is one of pacifism.
Koenraad Elst
When death comes, it does not ask your permission; it comes and takes you; it destroys you on the spot. In the same way, can you totally drop hate, envy, pride of possession, attachment to beliefs, to opinions, to ideas, to a particular way of thinking? Can you drop all that in an instant? There is no "how to drop it”, because that is only another form of continuity. To drop opinion, belief, attachment, greed, or envy is to die - to die every day, every moment. If there is the coming to an end of all ambition from moment to moment, then you will know the extraordinary state of being nothing, of coming to the abyss of an eternal movement, as it were, and dropping over the edge - which is death. I want to know all about death, because death may be reality; it may be what we call God - that most extraordinary something that lives and moves and yet has no beginning and no end.
Jiddu Krishnamurti
Dances With Wolves has the kind of vision and ambition that is rare in movies today. It is not a formula movie, but a thoughtful, carefully observed story. It is a Western at a time when the Western is said to be dead. It asks for our imagination and sympathy. It takes its time, three hours, to unfold. It is a personal triumph for Kevin Costner, the intelligent young actor of Field of Dreams, who directed the film and shows a command of story and of visual structure that is startling; this movie moves so confidently and looks so good it seems incredible that it's a directorial debut.
Roger Ebert
The tension between socially acceptable housewifery and creative ambition is certainly easy to find in Jackson's life, but it's rather harder to locate in her fiction. There's no question that, in her books, the house is a deeply ambiguous symbol-a place of warmth and security and also one of imprisonment and catastrophe. But the evil that lurks in Jackson's fair-seeming homes is not housework; it's other people-husbands, neighbors, mothers, hellbent on squashing and consuming those they profess to care for. And what keeps women inside these ghastly places is not societal pressure, or a patriarchal jailer, but the demon in their own minds. In this sense, Jackson's work is less an anticipation of second-wave feminism than a conversation with her female forebears in the gothic tradition. Her stories take the figure of the imprisoned "madwoman," as found in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" or Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, and make her the warder of her own jail.
Shirley Jackson
When, in the autumn of 1947, I was fired from the first and only job I have ever held, I wanted one thing out of life: to become a writer. I left my position as manuscript reader at the McGraw-Hill Book Company with no regrets; the job had been onerous and boring. It did not occur to me that there would be many difficulties to impede my ambition; in fact, the job itself had been an impediment. All I knew was that I burned to write a novel and I could not have cared less that my bank account was close to zero, with no replenishment in sight. At the age of twenty-two I had such pure hopes in my ability to write not just a respectable first novel, but a novel that would be completely out of the ordinary, that when I left the McGraw-Hill Building for the last time I felt the exultancy of a man just released from slavery and ready to set the universe on fire.
William Styron
Woody Allen later wrote in a letter: "My observation was that once a person actually completed a play or a novel, he was well on his way to getting it produced or published, as opposed to a vast majority of people who tell me their ambition is to write, but who strike out on the very first level and indeed never write the play or book. In the midst of the conversation, as I'm now trying to recall, I did say that 80 percent of success is showing up." - 1989 August 13, New York Times, On Language: The Elysian Fields by William Safire.
Woody Allen
