Ambitious Quotes - Page 27

• If you are ambitious, you are running in a tunnel that never ends. You will always find something new to go after. [...] I got high for the first time with Get Rich or Die Tryin' and I have been trying to achieve that feeling again since then, all the time.

  Curtis Jackson

  Running, Tunnels, Feelings

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• Every ambitious would-be empire, clarions it abroad that she is conquering the world to bring it peace, security and freedom, and it is sacrificing her sons only for the most noble and humanitarian purposes. That is a lie; and it is an ancient lie, yet generations still rise and believe it.

  Henry David Thoreau

  Lying, Believe, Son

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• No government can be long secure without a formidable opposition. It reduces their supporters to that tractable number which can be managed by the joint influences of fruition and hope. It offers vengeance to the discontented, and distinction to the ambitious; and employs the energies of aspiring spirits, who otherwise may prove traitors in a division or assassins in a debate.

  Benjamin Disraeli

  Numbers, Government, Long

  Benjamin Disraeli (1870). “Collected Edition of the Novels and Tales”, p.65

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• I'm often asked how I define "success." It's an overused term, but I fundamentally view this elusive beast as a combination of two things - achievement and appreciation. One isn't enough:
  
  Achievement without appreciation makes you ambitious but miserable.
  Appreciation without achievement makes you unambitious but happy.

  Tim Ferriss

  Appreciation, Views, Two

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• 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.

  Vaclav Klaus

  Democracy, Arrogant, Politics

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• Its subtlest, most appealing accomplishment may be in how other characters respond to Gregorius' precipitous swerve onto the spiritual path. (...) That said, Night Train to Lisbon is a very long, ambitious book that's feverishly overwritten. (...) Think of W.G. Sebald recast for the mass market: stripped of nuance, cooked at high temperature and pounded home, clause after clause. Some of the clumsiness derives from Barbara Harshav's inelegant translation -- we're often aware of her struggle -- but she can't be blamed for the pervasive bloat.

  Michelle Huneven

  Spiritual, Struggle, Book

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• Tacit knowledge is one of the most important concepts of current scholarship in the humanities. Ambitious and important, Tacit and Explicit Knowledge is a well-written and original book.

  Robert P. Crease

  Book, Humanity, Important

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• The Connecticut Center for Science and Exploration will be a building that will connect the excitement of science to the surrounding streets, river and highway. These forms are ambitious and dynamic. They appear to reach out beyond their physical limits.

  Cesar Pelli

  Rivers, Limits, Excitement

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• There are so many steps you have to go through to reach a high level, so youre kind of building your own, I would say, mountain. You have to go piece by piece by piece. When youre young and really ambitious, you want to jump right up. It kind of teaches you a lesson, I would say.

  Victoria Azarenka

  Mountain, Pieces, Levels

  "Coffee break with Victoria Azarenka". Interview with Jon Wertheim, www.si.com. August 28, 2012.

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• Yet it ought to be clear that a minimum wage law is, at best, a limited weapon for combatting the evil of low wages, and that the possible good to be achieved by such a law can exceed the possible harm only in proportion as its aims are mode.

  Henry Hazlitt

  Law, Numbers, Evil

  "Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics".

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• A first novel should be brash and ambitious, and announce the arrival of a new talent.

  Stuart Woods

  Firsts, Talent, Should

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• Saving our planet requires you to be ambitious in what you aim, and, equally, in how hard you work to reach your goal.

  Ban Ki-moon

  Goal, Saving, Planets

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• During the Q&A periods after my speeches, it is the men who say to me, "Help me understand how I am going to balance my work and my family." Now, let me tell you why I believe they see it that way. Because when they look around the room, they see the women who are going to be in their lives, the choices they will have for a spouse. And they realize that these women are educated, ambitious, and have every intention of having careers of their own.

  Vicki Donlan

  Business, Work, Believe

  Interview with Erik Hansen, tompeters.com.

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• Not being ambitious of martyrdom, even in the cause of gastronomical enterprise, especially if the instrument is to be a contemptible, rank-smelling fungus, I never eat or cook mushrooms.

  Mary Virginia Terhune

  Mushrooms, Causes, Fungi

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• Do not turn the superior eye of critical passivity upon these efforts .... We must not be ambitious. We cannot aspire to masterpieces. We may content ourselves with a joy ride in a paint-box.

  Winston Churchill

  Eye, Effort, Joy

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• To be ambitious for wealth, and yet always expecting to be poor, to be always doubting your ability to get what you long for, is like trying to reach east by traveling west. . . . No matter how hard you work for success, if your thought is saturated with the fear of failure, it will kill your efforts, neutralize your endeavors, and make success impossible.

  Charles Baudouin

  Fear, Long, Effort

  Charles Baudouin (1945). “Suggestion and Autosuggestion: A Psychological and Pedagogical Study Based Upon the Investigations Made by the New Nancy School”

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• Humans are ambitious and rational and proud. And we don't fall in line with people who don't respect us and who we don't believe have our best interests at heart. We are willing to follow leaders, but only to the extent that we believe they call on our best, not our worst.

  Rachel Maddow

  Inspirational, Leadership, Respect

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• The general problem with ambitious systems is complexity. [...] it is important to emphasize the value of simplicity and elegance, for complexity has a way of compounding difficulties.

  Fernando J. Corbato

  Simplicity, Design, Important

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• Reason, on the contrary, assures us, that as in so great a number, a fit representative would be most likely to be found, so the choice would be less likely to be diverted from him, by the intrigues of the ambitious, or the bribes of the rich.

  James Madison

  Numbers, Choices, Would Be

  Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay (2015). “The Federalist Papers: A Collection of Essays Written in Favour of the New Constitution”, p.282, Coventry House Publishing

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• But ambitious encroachments of the federal government, on the authority of the State governments, would not excite the opposition of a single State, or of a few States only. They would be signals of general alarm . . . But what degree of madness could ever drive the federal government to such an extremity.

  James Madison

  Government, Federalism, Alarms

  Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay (1842). “The Federalist, on the New Constitution, Written in the Year 1788”, p.220

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• We come to our own and would make friends with matter, which the ambitious chatter of the schools would persuade us to despise. We can never part with it; the mind loves its old home: as water to our thirst, so is rock, the ground, to our eyes, and hands, and feet. It is firm water: it is cold flame: what health, what affinity!

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Home, School, Eye

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2000). “Selected Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson: (A Modern Library E-Book)”, p.451, Modern Library

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• 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.

  Vaclav Klaus

  Democracy, Global Warming, Prosperity

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• I have no interest or desire to be head of Fine Gael.... I am ambitious for my country and I always said I would love to sit at Cabinet.

  Lucinda Creighton

  Country, Gay, Desire

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• Patriotism in its simplest, clearest, and most indubitable meaning is nothing but an instrument for the attainment of the government's ambitious and mercenary aims, and a renunciation of human dignity, common sense, and conscience by the governed, and a slavish submission to those who hold power. That is what is really preached wherever patriotism is championed. Patriotism is slavery.

  Leo Tolstoy

  War, Government, Common Sense

  Leo Tolstoy (graf) (1951). “The kingdom of God: and peace essays”

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• Because one has to be an optimist to begin an ambitious project, it is not surprising that underestimation of completion time is the norm.

  Fernando J. Corbato

  Projects, Optimist, Norm

  "On Building Systems That Will Fail". Communications of the ACM, Volume 34 Issue 9, dl.acm.org. September 1991.

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