This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Astronomy was born of superstition; eloquence of ambition, hatred, falsehood, and flattery; geometry of avarice; physics of an idle curiosity; and even moral philosophy of human pride. Thus the arts and sciences owe their birth to our vices." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau
"Insatiable ambition, the thirst of raising their respective fortunes, not so much from real want as from the desire to surpass others, inspired all men with a vile propensity to injure one another, and with a secret jealousy, which is the more dangerous, as it puts on the mask of benevolence, to carry its point with greater security. In a word, there arose rivalry and competition on the one hand, and conflicting interests on the other, together with a secret desire on both of profiting at the expense of others. All these evils were the first effects of property, and the inseparable attendants of growing inequality." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau
"There is no greater unreasonableness in the world than in the designs of ambition; for it makes the present certainly miserable, unsatisfactory, troublesome, and discontented, for the uncertain acquisition of an honor which nothing can secure; and, besides a thousand possibilities of miscarrying, it relies upon no greater certainty than our life; and when we are dead all the world sees who was the fool." - Jeremy Taylor
"Inherited wealth... is as certain death to ambition as cocaine is to mortality." - William K. Vanderbilt, fully William Kissam Vanderbilt
"The trouble with military rule is that every colonel or general is soon full of ambition. The navy takes over today and the army tomorrow." - Yakuba Gowon, fully General Yakubu "Jack" Dan-Yumma Gowon
"Ambition is not a reprehdnsible quality, nor are ambitious men to be censured, if they seek glory through honorable and honest means. In fact, it is they who produce great and excellent works. Those who lack this passion are cold spirits, inclined towards laziness than activity. But ambition is pernicious and detestable when it has as its sole end power." - Francesco Guicciardini
"We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise anyone who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. If he does not join the general scramble and pant with the money-making street, we deem him spiritless and lacking in ambition. We have lost the power even of imagining what the ancient idealization of poverty could have meant: the liberation from material attachments, the unbribed soul." - William James
"The mischief of flattery is not that it persuades any man that he is what he is not, but that it suppresses the influence of honest ambition, by raising an opinion that honor may be gained without the toil of merit." - Samuel Johnson, aka Doctor Johnson
"There is no guilt greater than to sanction ambition." - Lao Tzu, ne Li Urh, also Laotse, Lao Tse, Lao Tse, Lao Zi, Laozi, Lao Zi, La-tsze
"I believe in the virtue of traditions, and I recall having often spoken this phrase: “Memory is revolutionary.” If one has the ambition of preparing the century to come, breaking with the past or being ignorant of its amounts to cutting one’s own roots and drying up on the spot." - François Mitterand, fully François Maurice Adrien Marie Mitterand
"The animosity which Nations reciprocally entertain is nothing more than what the policy of their Governments excites to keep up the spirit of the system. Each Government accuses the other of perfidy, intrigue, and ambition, as a means of heating the imagination of their respective Nations, and incensing them to hostilities. Man is not the enemy of Man, but through the medium of a false system of Government." - Thomas Paine
"The love of beauty which exalts the poet; that devotion to the One and that ascent of science which makes the ambition of the philosopher, and that love and those prayers by which some devout and ardent soul tends in its moral purity towards perfection: these are the great highways conducting to that height above the actual and the particular, where we stand in the immediate presence of the Infinite, who shines out as from the deeps of the soul." -
"The greatest evil which fortune can inflict on men is to endow them with small talents and great ambition." - Vauvenargues, Luc de Clapiers, Marquis de Vauvenargues NULL
"Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired, and success achieved." - Helen Keller. aka Helen Adams Keller
"Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition ... I have no other so great as that of being truly esteemed by my fellow-men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem." - Abraham Lincoln
"The results at which I have to aim are only to be attained by systematic corruption of the possessing and governing classes. Business advantages, erotic satisfactions, and ambition, that is to say, the will to power, are the three stops in our propaganda organ." - Adolph Hitler
"Men’s ambition and their desire to make money are among the most frequent causes of deliberate acts of injustice." - Aristotle NULL
"Everyone can put to good use their own little bits of time, talent, influence, ambition, energy, and weave them into lives of beauty and goodness and rare value." - Author Unknown NULL
"If you would keep young and happy, be good; live a high moral life; practice the principles of the brotherhood of man; send out good thoughts to all, and think evil of no man. This is in obedience to the great natural law; to live otherwise is to break this great Divine law. Other things being equal, it is the cleanest, purest minds that live long and are happy. The man who is growing and developing intellectually does not grow old like the man who has stopped advancing, but when ambition, aspirations and ideals halt, old age begins." - Author Unknown NULL
"Nothing arouses ambition in the heart like the clarion-call of another's fame." - Baltasar Gracián
"As men advance in life, all passions resolve themselves in money. Love, ambition, even poetry, end in this." - Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield
"Ambition is to the mind what the cap is to the falcon; it blinds us first and then compels us to tower, by reason of our blindness. But alas! when we are at the summit of a vain ambition, we are also at the depth of misery." - Charles Caleb Colton
"Ambition makes the same mistake concerning power that avarice makes concerning wealth. She begins by accumulating power as a mean to happiness, and she finishes by continuing to accumulate it as an end." - Charles Caleb Colton
"For what are the triumphs of war, planned by ambition, executed by violence, and consummated by devastation? The means are the sacrifice of many, the end, the bloated aggrandizement of the few." - Charles Caleb Colton
"Time, the cradle of hope, but the grave of ambition, is the stern corrector of fools, but the salutary counselor of the wise, bringing all they dread to the one, and all they desire to the other; it warns us with a voice tht even the sagest discredit too long, and the silliest believe too late. Wisdom walks before it, opportunity with it, and repentance behind it; he that has made it his friend will have little to fear from his enemies, but he that has made it his enemy will have little to hope from his friends." - Charles Caleb Colton
"There is a profound causal relation between the height of a man’s ambition and the depth of his possible fall." - Dag Hammarskjöld
"Mix judgment with ambition and season it with energy. It makes a splendid recipe for success." - Dale Carnegie, originally spelled Dale Carnegey
"Moderation has been created a virtue to limit the ambition of great men, and to console undistinguished people for their want of fortune and their lack of merit." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
"Moderation must not claim the merit of combating and conquering ambition; for they can never exist in the same subject. Moderation is the languor and sloth of the soul; ambition its activity and ardor." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
"We frequently pass from love to ambition, but one seldom returns from ambition to love." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
"Love often leads on to ambition, but seldom does one return from ambition to love." - François de La Rochefoucauld, François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld, Prince de Marcillac, Francois A. F. Rochefoucauld-Liancourt
"Greater mischief happens often from folly, meanness, and vanity than from the greater sins of avarice and ambition." - Edmund Burke
"Great mischiefs happen more often from folly, meanness, and vanity, than from the greater sins of avarice and ambition." - Edmund Burke
"There is a loftier ambition than merely to stand high in the world. It is to stoop down and lift mankind a little higher." - Henry Van Dyke
"It is a very indiscreet and troublesome ambition which cares so much about fame; about what the world says of us; to be always looking in the faces of others for approval; to be always anxious about the effect of what we do or say; to be always shouting, to hear the echoes of our own voices." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"Ambition’s cradle oftenest is its grave." - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
"A noble man compares and estimates himself by an idea which is higher than himself, and a mean man by one which is lower than himself. The one produces aspiration; the other, ambition. Ambition is the way in which a vulgar man aspires." - Henry Ward Beecher
"Every great success has always been achieved by fight. Every winner has scars... The men who succeed are the efficient few. They are the few who have the ambition and willpower to develop themselves." - Herbert Newton Casson
"To lose money is nothing, but to lose hope, to lose nerve, to lose ambition - that makes men cripples." - Herbert Newton Casson
"Enslave a man and you destroy his ambition, his enterprise, his capacity. In the constitution of human nature, the desire of bettering one’s condition is the mainspring of effort. The first touch of slavery snaps this spring." - Horace Mann
"The blindness of bigotry, the madness of ambition, and the miscalculations of diplomacy seek their victims principally amongst the innocent and the unoffending. The cottage is sure to suffer for every error of the court, the cabinet, or the camp. When error sits in the seat of power and of authority, and is generated in high places, it may; be compared to that torrent which originates indeed in the mountain, but commits its devastation in the vale." - James Bryant Conant
"The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of a man is healthy; but there is a space of life between, in which the soul is in a ferment, the character undecided, the way of life uncertain, the ambition thicksighted." - John Keats
"To make the people fittest to choose, and the chosen fittest to govern, will be to mend our corrupt and faulty education , to teach the people faith, not without virtue, temperance, modesty, sobriety, parsimony, justice; not to admire wealth or honor; to hate turbulence and ambition; to place every one his private welfare and happiness in the public peace, liberty and safety." - John Milton
"[On children] Train them to virtue; habituate them to industry, activity, and spirit. Make them consider every vice as shameful and unmanly. Fire them with ambition to be useful. Make them disdain to be destitute of any useful knowledge. Fix their ambition upon great and solid objects, and their contempt upon little, frivolous, and useless ones." - John Quincy Adams
"Ambition raises a secret tumult in the soul; it inflames the mind, and puts it into a violent hurry of thought." - Joseph Addison
"To look upon the soul as going on from strength to strength, to consider that she is to shine forever with new accessions of glory, and brighten to all eternity; that she will be still adding virtue to virtue, and knowledge to knowledge, carries in it something wonderfully agreeable to that ambition which is natural to the mind of man." - Joseph Addison
"Ambition beyond existence is the essential purpose of our being." - Kahlil Gibran