"A nation can survive its fools, even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within....for the traitor appears not to be a traitor...he rots the soul of a nation...he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist."
Ambitious quotes
321 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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"I am overly ambitious, because I realize it can be done."
"It is the only point of getting up every morning: to paint, to make something good, to make something even better than before, not to give up, to compete, to be ambitious."
"People say it's not ambitious, but it is actually quite ambitious wanting to help people."
"Those who are believed to be most abject and humble are usually most ambitious and envious."
"Enthusiasm, being the infirmity of bold and ambitious tempers, is naturally accompanied with a spirit of liberty; as superstition,on the contrary, renders men tame and abject, and fits them for slavery."
"Well, the truth is, if you really listen to that bird on your shoulder, if you accept that you can die at any time–then you might not be as ambitious as you are."
"As someone who lived under communism for most of my life I feel obliged to say that the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity at the beginning of the 21st century is not communism or its various softer variants. Communism was replaced by the threat of ambitious environmentalism."
"I'm ambitious. But if I weren't as talented as I am ambitious, I would be a gross monstrosity."
"If conversion to Christianity makes no improvement in a man's outward actions – if he continues to be just a snobbish or spiteful or envious or ambitious as he was before – then I think we must suspect that his 'conversion' was largely imaginary."
"Thinking men cannot be ruled; ambitious men do not stagnate."
"The largest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity, is no longer socialism. It is, instead, the ambitious, arrogant, unscrupulous ideology of environmentalism."
"I incline to an aristocratic republic. This would satisfy the ambitious spirit among our people. We shall learn from the historic mistakes of others in the same way as we learn from our own; for we are a modern nation and wish to be the most modern in the world."
"Most of our pocket wisdom is conceived for the use of mediocre people, to discourage them from ambitious attempts, and generally console them in their mediocrity."
"I've never been particularly ambitious. I'm driven by the moment."
"Saving our planet requires you to be ambitious in what you aim, and, equally, in how hard you work to reach your goal."
"I was definitely different from the other kids... I was more ambitious. I knew what I liked and what I wanted, and I worked really hard. I was a very serious kid."
"It is ordained that to the ambitious, who derive no satisfaction from the gifts of life and the beauty of the world, life shall be a cause of suffering, and they shall possess neither the profit nor the beauty of the world."
"When ambition ends, happiness begins."
"We do not need to have an agreed set of goals before we do something ambitious!"
"I am very proud, revengeful, ambitious, with more offences at my beck than I have thoughts to put them in, imagination to give them shape, or time to act them in."