John Adams Quotes About Ambition

Quotes about: Ambition

• It should be your care, therefore, and mine, to elevate the minds of our children and exalt their courage; to accelerate and animate their industry and activity; to excite in them an habitual contempt of meanness, abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity, and an ambition to excel in every capacity, faculty, and virtue. If we suffer their minds to grovel and creep in infancy, they will grovel all their lives.

  John Adams

  Children, Ambition, Compassion

  John Adams (2003). “The Letters of John and Abigail Adams”, p.74, Penguin

• We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution is designed only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for any other.

  John Adams

  Religious, Revenge, Passion

  John Adams (1854). “The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States: With a Life of the Author, Notes and Illustrations”, p.229

• Ambition is the subtlest beast of the intellectual and moral field. It is wonderfully adroit in concealing itself from its owner.

  John Adams

  Ambition, Intellectual, Fields

• I have long been settled in my own opinion that neither Philosophy, nor Religion, nor Morality, nor Wisdom, nor Interest, will ever govern nations or Parties, against their vanity, their Pride, their Resentment, or Revenge, or their Avarice, or Ambition. Nothing but Force and Power and Strength can restrain them.

  John Adams

  Revenge, Philosophy, Party

  John Adams (2016). “John Adams: Writings from the New Nation, 1784-1826”, p.102, Library of America

• Elections to office, which are the great objects of ambition, I look at with terror!

  John Adams

  Ambition, Office, Revolution

• Ambition is one of the ungovernable passions of the human heart. The love of power is insatiable and uncontrollable.

  John Adams

  Passion, Heart, Ambition

• A pen is certainly an excellent instrument to fix a man's attention and to inflame his ambition.

  John Adams

  Ambition, Men, Presidential

  Diary and Autobiography, 14 Nov. 1760

• I never engaged in public affairs for my own interest, pleasure, envy, jealousy, avarice or ambition, or even the desire of fame

  John Adams

  Jealousy, Ambition, Envy

  John Adams (1854). “The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States: With a Life of the Author, Notes and Illustrations”, p.593

• There never was yet a people who must not have somebody or something to represent the dignity of the state, the majesty of the people, call it what you will - a doge, an avoyer, an archon, a president, a consul, a syndic; this becomes at once an object of ambition and dispute, and, in time, of division, faction, sedition, and rebellion.

  John Adams

  Ambition, People, President

  John Adams (1851). “The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States: With a Life of the Author, Notes and Illustrations”, p.583

• A constitution founded on these principles introduces knowledge among the people, and inspires them with a conscious dignity becoming freemen; a general emulation takes place, which causes good humor, sociability, good manners, and good morals to be general. That elevation of sentiment inspired by such a government, makes the common people brave and enterprising. That ambition which is inspired by it makes them sober, industrious, and frugal.

  John Adams

  Ambition, Government, People

  John Adams (2015). “The Works of John Adams Vol. 4: Novanglus, Thoughts on Government, Defence of the Constitution I”, p.158, Jazzybee Verlag

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