Ambition is word denoting strong desire for distinction, preferment, honor, political power, fame, or the object of such desires, or a general motivation, not necessarily tied to any particular goals.
Virtue’s true reward is happiness itself, for which the virtuous work, whereas if they worked for honor, it would no longer be virtue, but ambition.
It will not be amiss to distinguish the 3 kinds and, as it were, grades of ambition in mankind. The first is of those who desire to extend their power in their native country, a vulgar and degenerate kind. The second is of those who labor to extend the power and dominion of their country among men. This certainly has more dignity, though not less covetousness. But if a man endeavor to establish and extend the power and dominion of the human race itself over the universe, his ambition is without doubt both a more wholesome and a more noble thing than the other two.
Things move violently to their place, and calmly in their place, so virtue in ambition is violent, in authority settled and calm.
So ambitious men, if they find the way open for their rising, and still get forward, they are rather busy than dangerous; but if they be checked in their desires, they become secretly discontent, and look upon men and matters with an evil eye, and are best pleased, when things to backward.
At court, far from regarding ambition as a sin, people regard it as a virtue, or if it passes for a vice, then it is regarded as the vice of great souls, and the vices of great souls are preferred to the virtues of the simple and the small.
Ambition is a gilded misery, a secret poison, a hidden plague, the engineer of deceit, the mother of hypocrisy, the parent of envy, the original of vices, the moth of holiness, the blinder of hearts, turning medicine into maladies, and remedies into diseases.
Love, a pleasant folly; ambition, a serious stupidity.
Ambition has its disappointments to sour us, but never the good fortune to satisfy us.
Ambition is but Avarice on stilts and masked.
Whenever men are not obliged to fight from necessity, they fight from ambition; which is powerful in human breasts, that it never leaves them no matter to what rank they rise. The reason is that nature has so created men that they are able to desire everything but are not able to attain everything.
Reason can no longer restrain one who is lured by the fury of ambition.
All sins have their origin in a sense of inferiority, otherwise called ambition.
Glory ought to be the consequence, not the motive, of our actions; and although it happen not to attend the worthy deed, yet it is by no means the less fair for having missed the applause it deserved.
If any man stopped and asked himself whether he’s ever held a truly personal desire, he’d find the answer. He’d see that all his wishes, his efforts, his dreams, his ambitions are motivated by other men. He’s not even struggling for material wealth, but for the second-hander’s delusion — prestige. A stamp of approval, not his own. He can find no joy in the struggle and no joy when he has succeeded. He can’t say about a single thing: this is what I wanted because I wanted it, not because it made my neighbors gape at me. Then he wonders why he’s unhappy.
The highest form of vanity is fame.
Wisdom is corrupted by ambition, even when the quality of the ambition is intellectual. For ambition, even of this quality, is but a form of self-love.
Full of hopes beyond their power though not beyond their ambition.
Nothing but ambition, nothing but the desire to get on, that’s all there is in his soul. As for these lofty ideas, love of culture, religion, they are only so many tools for getting on.
Vain the ambition of kings
Who seek by trophies and dead things
To leave a living name behind
And weave but nets to catch the wind.
Men often make up in wrath what they want in reason.
Anger makes dull men witty, but it keeps them poor.
By doing this you are like a man who wants to hit another and picks up a burning ember or excrement in his hand and so first burns himself or makes himself stink.
We had relieved our own pain by inflicting it on others.
When anger rises, think of the consequences.
Don’t become angry over little things; there are enough big ones.
There are 3 things all wise men fear: the sea in storm, a night with no moon, and the anger of a gentle man.
The relationship of anger to attack is so obvious, but the relationship of anger to fear is not always so apparent. Anger always involves projection of separation, which must ultimately be accepted as one’s own responsibility, rather than being blamed on others. Anger cannot occur unless you believe that you have been attacked, that your attack is justified in return, and that you are in no way responsible for it.
A man raising his hand in anger does not see clearly.
Where there is anger, there is always pain underneath.
Usually, when people are sad, they don’t do anything. They just cry over their condition. But when they get angry, they bring about a change.
Sadness is an emotional pain associated with, or characterized by, feelings of disadvantage, loss, despair, grief, helplessness, disappointment and sorrow. An individual experiencing sadness may become quiet or lethargic, and withdraw themselves from others. An example of severe sadness is depression.
The greater part of human pain is unnecessary. It is self created as long as the unobserved mind runs your life. The pain that you create now is always some form of non acceptance, some form of unconscious resistance to what is. On the level of thought, the resistance is some form of judgment. On the emotional level, it is some form of negativity. The intensity of the pain depends on the degree of resistance to the present moment, and this in turn depends on how strongly you are identified with your mind. The mind always seeks to deny the Now and to escape from it. In other words, the more you are identified with your mind, the more you suffer. Or you may put it like this: the more you are able to honor and accept the Now, the more you are free of pain, of suffering — and free of the egoic mind.
Despair is like forward children, who, when you take away one of their playthings, throw the rest into the fire for madness. It grows angry with itself, turns its own executioner, and revenges its misfortunes on its own head.
Despair is the conclusion of fools.
Despair is the price one pays for setting oneself an impossible aim.
Not a single human being who does not despair at least a little, in whose innermost being there does not dwell an uneasiness, an unquiet, a discordance, an anxiety about a possibility in life or an anxiety about himself, so that as a physician speaks of one’s going about with an illness in the body, he goes about with a sickness, goes about weighted down with a sickness of the spirit, which only now and then reveals its presence within, in glimpses, and with what is for him an inexplicable anxiety.
I believe in evil. It is the property of all those who are certain of truth. Despair and fanaticism are only different manifestation of evil.
Night brings out stars as sorrow shows us truths.
Sorrow is better than laughter; when the face is sad, the heart grows wise.
It is said that adversity introduces us to ourselves. This is true of a nation as well. We see our national character in our ability to rally together in times of difficulties, celebrations and in eloquent acts of sacrifice.
Fire is the test of gold; adversity, of strong men.
Adversity’s sweet milk, philosophy.
Prosperity makes friends, adversity tries them.
Thinking to get at once all the gold the goose could give, he killed it and opened it only to find nothing.
Consider these people, then, their way of life, their habits, their manners, the very tones of their voice; look at them attentively; observe the literature they read, the things which give them pleasure, the words which come forth out of their mouths, the thoughts which made the furniture of their minds; would any amount of wealth be worth having with the condition that one was to become just like these people by having it?
Greed, like the love of comfort, is a kind of fear.
The Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need but not for every man’s greed.
I have never understood why it is “greed” to want to keep the money you have earned but not greed to want to take somebody else’s money.
The pronouns “my” and “mine” look innocent enough in print, but their constant and universal use is significant. They express the real nature of the old Adamic man better than a thousand volumes of theology could do.
If God has bestowed on us any excellent gift, we imagine it to be our own achievement; and we swell and even burst with pride.
Man is the proudest of God’s creatures, the eagle is the haughtiest among the birds, the ox amongst the cattle, and the lion amongst the beasts of the field. Hence it was the image of these 4 which Ezekiel saw in his vision on the throne of God.
In reality there is, perhaps no one of our natural passions so hard to subdue as pride.
Pride always entails intense awareness of an inferior other.
My pride fell with my fortunes.
Power is the very force of strength.
Politics is the art of making the people believe that they are in power, when in fact, they have none.
Power always sincerely, conscientiously, believes itself right. Power always thinks it hsa a great soul and vast views, beyond the comprehension of the weak.
That was the real price, I thought. Once you had power, you ended up having to depend on it. Eventually, like anything else, it owned you.
Being powerful is like being a lady. If you have to tell people you are, you aren’t.
Men are never very wise and select in the exercise of a new power.
It is only in folk tales, children’s stories, and the journals of intellectual opinion that power is used wisely and well to destroy evil. The real world teaches very different lessons, and it takes willful and dedicated ignorance to fail to perceive them.
That was the way of the world: power would always be used, nation would subjugate nation, the weak would always be slaughtered. Everything else was pious self-delusion.
Power doesn’t have to show off. Power is confident, self-assuring, self-starting and self-stopping, self-warming and self-justifying. When you have it, you know it.
Because of this innate lust for power, Hobbes thought that life before (or after) the state was a “war of every man against every man” — “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”
The impulse of power is to turn every variable into a constant, and give to commands the inexorableness and relentless of laws of nature. Hence absolute power corrupts even when exercised for human purposes. The benevolent despot who sees himself as a shepherd of the people still demands from others the submissiveness of sheep.
There are similarities between absolute power and absolute faith: a demand for absolute obedience, a readiness to attempt the impossible, a bias for simple solution — to cut the knot rather than unravel it, the viewing of compromise as surrender. Both absolute power and absolute faith are instruments of dehumanization.
Most people can bear adversity; but if you wish to know what a man really is give him power. This is the supreme test. It is the glory of Lincoln that, having almost absolute power, he never used it except on the side of mercy.
Where love rules, there is no will to power; and where power predominates, there love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.
The intoxication with power is worse than drunkenness with liquor and such, for he who is drunk with power does not come to his sense before he falls.
Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.
Next to enjoying ourselves, the next greatest pleasure consists in preventing others from enjoying themselves, or, more generally, in the acquisition of power.
The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics.
The pursuit of knowledge is, I think, mainly actuated by love of power. And so are all advances in scientific technique.
The conception of duty, speaking historically, has been a means used by the holders of power to induce others to live for the interests of their masters rather than for their own. Of course the holders of power conceal this fact from themselves by managing to believe that their interests are identical with the larger interests of humanity. Sometimes this is true; Athenian slave-owners, for instance, employed part of their leisure in making a permanent contribution to civilization which would have been impossible under a just economic system. Leisure is essential to civilization, and in former times leisure for the few was only rendered possible by the labors of the many. But their labors were valuable, not because work is good, but because leisure is good. And with modern technique it would be possible to distribute leisure justly without injury to civilization.
We are defined by how we use our power.
The function of the law is not to provide justice or to preserve freedom. The function of the law is to keep those who in power, in power.
Socialism means power, power, and more power. Thoughts and schemes are nothing without power.
In the struggle between those seeking power there is no middle course.
Real power is — I don’t even want to use the word — fear.
Power never takes a back step — only in the face of more power.
Violence is any act of aggression and/or abuse that causes or intends to cause injury to persons, animals, or property. It may include random violence, and coordinated violence.
Victory won by violence is tantamount to defeat, for it is momentary.
Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin are able to show the immediate effectiveness of violence. But it will be as transitory as that of Genghis’s slaughters. But the effects of Buddha’s nonviolence persist and are likely to grow with age.
If “violence never solved anything,” cops wouldn’t have guns and slaves may never have been freed. If it’s better that 10 guilty men go free to spare one innocent, why not free 100 or 1,000,000? Cliches begin arguments, they don’t settle them.
Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst.
It is not a question of the necessity of violence, but how to organize it to fit our unique situation, to tie it with flawless exactitude to our political activity, and to organize it immediately.
Civilization is based on a clearly defined and widely accepted yet often unarticulated hierarchy. Violence is done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower is nearly always invisible, that is, unnoticed. When it is noticed, it is fully rationalized. Violence done by those lower on the hierarchy to those higher is unthinkable, and when it does occur is regarded with shock, horror, and the fetishization of the victims.
People often say that violence accomplishes nothing, that it’s ineffective. Violence is dreadfully effective. That’s why those in power use it.
The most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together.
Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art.
Simplicity is the keynote of all true elegance.
Simplify, then add lightness.
Simplicity is the prerequisite for reliability.
What I’m really interested in is whether God could have made the world in a different way; that is, whether the necessity of logical simplicity leaves any freedom at all.
I am very conscious of the fact that our feelings and strivings are often contradictory and obscure and that they cannot be expressed in easy and simple formulas.
It seems that perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to remove.
Nature has a great simplicity and, therefore, a great beauty.
The greatest truths are the simplest; and so are the greatest men.
I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.
If you can’t reduce a difficult engineering problem to just one sheet of paper, you will probably never understand it.
Fools ignore complexity. Pragmatists suffer it. Some can avoid it. Geniuses remove it.
Simplicity — the art of maximizing the amount of work not done — is essential.
The subjective experience of beauty often involves the interpretation of some entity as being in harmony with nature, which may lead to feelings of attraction and emotional well-being.
Good design is a Renaissance attitude that combines technology, cognitive science, human need and beauty to produce something.
The urge for good design is the same as the urge to go on living. The assumption is that somewhere, hidden, is a better way of doing things.
As in poetry and music, even the unskilled ear may be offended by a mistake in measure, without discerning the cause, may not also a mistake in the harmony of dimensions unconsciously offend us in design?
One of the best ways to economize in buildings is to economize on ugliness. Nothing can be greater service in avoiding ugliness than a knowledge of the principles of design.
It looks so obvious, but that sense of inevitability in the solution is really hard to achieve.
In a very real way, designers create the human environment; they make the things we use, the places we live and work, our modes of communication and mobility. Simply put, design matters. And at a moment in our history in which the scientific community has issued serious warnings about the negative impacts of our flawed designs, designers hav a critical role to play in the creation of a more just, healthy and sustainable world.
If you want a golden rule that will fit everybody, this is it: Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.
Good design is also an act of communication between the designer and the user, except that all the communication has to come about by the appearance of the device itself. The device must explain itself.
A new leader has to be able to change an organization that is dreamless, soulless and visionless… someone’s got to make a wake up call.
“Safety first” has been the motto of the human race for half a million years; but it has never been the motto of leaders. A leader must face danger. He must take the risk and the blame, and the brunt of the storm.
A leader must have the courage to act against an expert’s advice.
The essence of leadership is to get others to do something because they think you want it done and because they know it is worthwhile doing.
When a leader correctly identifies real hurt and insecurity in our country, and instead of addressing it, goes to look for someone to blame, there is perhaps nothing more devastating to a pluralistic society. Leadership knows that most often a good place to start in assigning blame is to look somewhat closer to home. Leadership knows where the buck stops.
All of the great leaders have had one characteristic in common: it was the willingness to confront unequivocally the major anxiety of their people in their time. This, and not much else, is the essence of leadership.
The leader has to be practical and a realist, yet must talk the language of the visionary and the idealist.
The leader personifies the certitude of the creed and the defiance and the grandeur of power. He articulates and justifies the resentment damned up in the souls of the frustrated. He kindles the vision of a breathtaking future so as to justify the sacrifice of a transitory present. He stages a world of make-believe so indispensable for the realization of self-sacrifice and united action.
Churchill famously claimed that of all human qualities, courage was the most esteemed, because it guaranteed all others. Historically there would have been no social progress if not for the presence of specific human dissenting and breaking from herd-inspired suspicion and fear.
Leaders are not necessarily popular. For soldiers, the choice between popularity and effectiveness is ultimately no choice at all. Soldiers want to win; their survival depends on it. They will accept, and even take pride in, the quirks and shortcomings of a leader if they believe he can produce success.
Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do, and they will surprise you with their ingenuity.
The born leader is a fiction invented by “born followers.” Leadership is not a gift a birth; it is an award for growing to full moral stature. It is the only prize that a man must win everyday. The prize is the respect of others, earned by the disciplines that generate self-respect.
If you want to be respected by others the great thing is to respect yourself. Only by that, only by self-respect will you compel others to respect you.
Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth.
A nation has security when it does not have to sacrifice its legitimate interests to avoid war, and is able, if challenged, to maintain them by war.
The only things worth learning are the things you learn after you know it all.
When you have an efficient government, you have a dictatorship.
Leadership is the ability to get men to do what they don’t want to do and like it.
A man who is influenced by the polls or is afraid to make decisions which make him unpopular is not a man to represent the welfare of the country.
There is no more fundamental axiom of America freedom than the familiar statement: In a free country we punish men for the crimes they commit but never for the opinions they have.
In reading the lives of great men, I found that the first victory they won was over themselves… self discipline with all of them came first.
Without a strong educational system — free of government control — democracy is crippled. Knowledge is not only the key to power. It is the citadel of human freedom.
A President cannot always be popular.
Being a President is like riding a tiger. A man has to keep on riding or he is swallowed.
A President either is constantly on top of events or, if he hesitates, events will soon be on top of him. I never felt that I could let up for a moment.
Selfishness and greed, individual or national, cause most of our troubles.