Political Ambition Quotes

There's a national ambition, a collective, in a sense, political ambition, which I think is the thing we see from far away. That's the fact that China's building roads and airports and extending its reaches out into the East China Sea and the South China Sea, and in a way that's putting it into some tension with its neighbors. ~ Evan Osnos

My political ambition
is not worth the blood of any Nigerian ~ Goodluck Jonathan

What Dad taught me above all else, and did so utterly unconsciously, was why people like him became Tories. He had been poor. He was working class. He aspired to be middle class. He worked hard, made it on his merits, and wanted his children to do even better than him. He thought – as did many others of his generation – that the logical outcome of this striving, born of this attitude, was to be a Tory. Indeed, it was part of the package. You made it; you were a Tory: two sides of the same coin. It became my political ambition to break that connection, and replace it with a different currency. You are compassionate; you care about those less fortunate than yourself; you believe in society as well as the individual. You can be Labour. You can be successful and care; ambitious and compassionate; a meritocrat and a progressive. These are entirely compatible ways of making sure progress happens; and they answer the realistic, not utopian, claims of human nature. ~ Tony Blair

I have no political ambitions whatsoever. My ambitions are all about what XL can become. ~ Mike McGavick

I really don't have tremendous political ambition. I have policy ambition. ~ Paul Ryan

The only beneficiaries of income taxation are the politicians, for it not only gives them the means by which they can increase their emoluments, but it also enables them to improve their importance. The have-nots who support the politicians in the demand for income taxation do so only because they hate the haves; ... the sum of all the arguments for income taxation comes to political ambition and the sin of covetousness. ~ Frank Chodorov

When I decided to run for Congress, I saw it as an opportunity to serve the South Jersey community that had become my home after signing to play for the Philadelphia Eagles. I didn't choose public service out of political ambition or a desire for power, and never once thought of making a career of it. ~ Jon Runyan

Among the droves of men with political ambitions in the United States, I found very few with that virile candor, that manly independence of thought, that often distinguished Americans in earlier times and that is invariably the preeminent trait of great characters wherever it exists. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

America became a great civilization thanks to a culture based on the value of having to earn almost everything an American got in life. As it abandons this value, it will become a mediocre civilization. And eventually it will not be America. It will be a large Sweden, and just as influential as the smaller one. ~ Dennis Prager

The more you think of what is right, the more you tend to make every action in your mind right. The more you think of the goal you have in view, the more life and power you will call into action in working for that goal. The more you think of your ambition, the more power you will give to those faculties that can make your ambitions come true. The more you think of harmony, of health, of success, of happiness, of things that are desirable, of things that are beautiful, of things that have true worth, the more the mind will tend to build all those things in yourself, provided, of course, that all such thinking is subjective. ~ Christian D. Larson

Nobody ever won an election by spitting at his political opponents. ~ David Frum

My first career ambitions involved turning into a boy; I intended to be either a railway guard or a knight errant. ~ Hilary Mantel

The availability of cheap effective lighting alone, following Thomas Edison's invention of the incandescent bulb in 1879, greatly extended the range of waking human consciousness, effectively adding more hours onto the day - for work, for entertainment, for study, for discovery, for consumption. Subsequently, one development led to another, and to yet another, fueled by a corporate economy in developed nations, and then later by the arms race, and then the space race, as human ambition literally outgrew the planet. It seemed that there was no limit on what humanity could achieve. But there was a flaw at the heart of that expansive optimism - namely, that humanity cannot exist as a thing apart from nature; it has no destiny but annihilation apart from the land that gave it birth. ~ Clark Strand

A nation can be mighty, when the citizens put away their political differences, work together for a common vision, a common goal and a common good. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

I strongly believe that every American should always be rooting for our president to do well, no matter which political party that he or she might belong to. ~ Joe Manchin

A distaste for the new is not always fear of the unknown, but sometimes ambition. Some people don't like the new way simply because they never got a chance to master the old way. ~ Criss Jami

Your heart is smothering under your small ambitions. ~ Timothy Keller

None speak of the bravery, the might, or the intellect of Jesus; but the devil is always imagined as a being of acute intellect, political cunning, and the fiercest courage. These universal and instinctive tendencies of the human mind reveal much. ~ Lydia M. Child

Among precautions against ambition, it may not be amiss to take precautions against our own. I must fairly say, I dread our own power and our own ambition: I dread our being too much dreaded. ~ Edmund Burke

The world shown us in books, whether the books be confessed epics or professed gospels, or in codes, or in political orations, or in philosophic systems, is not the main world at all: it is only the self-consciousness of certain abnormal people who have the specific artistic talent and temperament. A serious matter this for you and me, because the man whose consciousness does not correspond to that of the majority is a madman; and the old habit of worshipping madmen is giving way to the new habit of locking them up. And since what we call education and culture is for the most part nothing but the substitution of reading for experience, of literature for life, of the absolete fictitious for the contemporary real, education, as you no doubt observed at Oxford, destroys, by supplantation, every mind that is not strong enough to see through the imposture and to use the great Masters of Arts as what they really are and no more: that is, patentees of highly questionable methods of thinking, and manufacturers of highly questionable, and for the majority but half valid representations of life. The school boy who uses his Homer to throw at his fellow's head makes perhaps the safest and most rational use of him; and I observe with reassurance that you occasionally do the same, in your prime, with your Aristotle. ~ George Bernard Shaw

Islam has some of the best defenses against other god viruses and has the potential to be more parasitically aggressive when consolidating political power with a society. ~ Darrel Ray

The Middle East has the highest unemployment percentage of any region in the world we have the largest youth cohort of history coming into the market place that frustration does translate into the political sphere when people are hungry and without jobs. ~ Abdallah II Of Jordan

I hope we shall ... crush in it's birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength, and to bid defiance to the laws of their country. ~ Thomas Jefferson

The desire not to use disparaging terms for other groups can have its comic side, and is often dismissed as a product of 'political correctness'. But the concern behind it is part of the growth of one of our central moral resources. ~ Jonathan Glover

Freedom has many difficulties and democracy is not perfect, but we have never had to put up a wall to keep our people in. ~ John F. Kennedy

Anti-government rhetoric appears to offer a vision of greater efficiency, self-reliance, and personal freedom. (For obvious reasons, it also usually enjoys greater financial backing and better organized support.) Unfortunately, this rhetoric ignores what has historically been most valuable about our skepticism toward government - the emphasis it places on personal responsibility from all citizens. Instead, it argues against the excesses of government but not against those of the marketplace, where there is great power to disrupt the lives of workers, families, and communities. It even argues against the basic protections government extends to the well-being of individuals, families, and communities, without offering an alternative way of safeguarding them. In fact, its extreme case against government, often including intense personal attacks on government officials and political leaders, is designed not just to restrain government but to advance narrow religious, political, and economic agendas. ~ Hillary Rodham Clinton

The media, I think, have to be accountable for some of the misdirection that is put forward in politics in some of the misapprehension, maybe even some of the lack of confidence in the political process. Because the most benign, frank thought can be twisted and portrayed as something that it really wasn't intended to. ~ Cory Bernardi

Most people would succeed in small things if they were not troubled with great ambitions. ~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Obama was the most powerful man in the world, but that didn't mean he could control the forces at play in the Middle East. There was no Nelson Mandela who could lead a country to absolution for its sins and ours. Extremist forces were exploiting the Arab Spring. Reactionary forces - with deep reservoirs of political support in the United States - were intent on clinging to power. Bashar al-Assad was going to fight to the death, backed by his Russian and Iranian sponsors. Factions were going to fight it out in the streets of Libya. The Saudis and Emiratis were going to stamp out political dissent in Egypt before it could come to their kingdoms. A Likud prime minister was going to mouth words about peace while building settlements that made peace impossible. Meanwhile, innocent people were going to suffer, some of them were going to be killed, and there didn't seem to be anything I could do about it. Obama had reached that conclusion before I had. History had opened up a doorway in 2011 that, by the middle of 2013, had been slammed shut. There would be more war, more conflict, and more suffering, until - someday - old men would make peace. ~ Ben Rhodes

I wouldn't even say "Imagine" is political. I think it's more just sort of declaration of humanity. I don't find his political songs to be the ones that I go home and listen to. And I would say that of any artist. They're not the ones that interest. ~ Sean Lennon

The wisdom and spirit of Churchill not only saved Britain from the Third Reich but saved Western civilization from a Nazi Dark Ages when no other nation was willing to take up that defense. Churchill was the greatest military, political and spiritual leader of the 20th century. ~ Victor Davis Hanson

It is significant that modern believers in power are in complete accord with the philosophy of the only great thinker who ever attempted to derive public good from private interest and who, for the sake of private good, conceived and outlined a Commonwealth whose basis and ultimate end is the accumulation of power. Hobbes, indeed, is the only great philosopher to whom the bourgeoisie can rightly and exclusively lay claim....
.... The consistency of this conclusion is in no way altered by the remarkable fact that for some three hundred years there was neither a sovereign who would "convert this Truth of Speculation into the Utility of Practice," nor a bourgeoisie politically conscious and economically mature enough openly to adopt Hobbes's philosophy of power. ~ Hannah Arendt

Career politicians do not have the courage to prioritize spending and say no to demanding special interest groups who do not reflect the best interests of the country. ~ Tom Coburn

Travel is as much a passion as ambition or love. ~ Letitia Elizabeth Landon

I began a conversation with the heads of our esteemed department of political science, and instantly I concluded, 'Hopelessly incompetent! ~ Ira Carmen

Even more dramatic, Alex Todorov at Princeton has shown us that judgments of political candidates' faces in just one second predict 70 percent of U.S. Senate and gubernatorial race outcomes, and even, let's go digital, emoticons used well in online negotiations can lead to you claim more value from that negotiation. If you use them poorly, bad idea. Right? So when we think of nonverbals, we think of how we judge others, how they judge us and what the outcomes are. We tend to forget, though, the other audience that's influenced by our nonverbals, and that's ourselves. ~ Amy Cuddy

In place of the Old Bottom Line of money and power, a New Bottom Line of Love and Generosity is possible. People of all faiths need to shape a political and social movement that reaffirms the most generous, peace-oriented, social justice-committed, and loving truths of the spiritual heritage of the human race. ~ Michael Lerner

Well, I've been in the political arena all of my life, and 10 years of that as a candidate and elected official, and that's about enough. ~ Jim Hightower

Until politics are a branch of science we shall do well to regard political and social reforms as experiments rather than short-cuts to the millennium. ~ John B. S. Haldane

I know how to move between political camps. When everyone in the world hated (Libyan leader Moammar) Gadhafi, I paid him an official visit. It caused an uproar - Lula's visiting the devil! ~ Luiz Inacio Lula Da Silva

Political controls in the sense that we think of bureaus or departments of government can never ope to produce collaboration between groups in the inner wheels of our industrial organization. It must come from inner compulsions and desires. ~ William O. Douglas

Enlist the interests of stern Morality and religious Enthusiasm in the cause of Political Liberty, as in the time of the old Puritans, and it will be irresistible. ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Why, over her political career has Wall Street been a major - the major campaign contributor to Hillary Clinton? You know, maybe they're dumb and they don't know what they're going to get, but I don't think so. ~ Bernie Sanders

If you know only one language, you're a prisoner, stuck in the tyranny of that one language. ~ Andrew Cohen

Whether it's threats to Medicare, cuts in education spending, or Internet privacy, the ramifications got young people out to vote and should be enough to keep them involved in our political system. ~ Patrick Murphy

Ethnic divisions can definitely be exacerbated by a lack of natural resources, but those tensions become violent when people manipulate them for their own political gain. ~ Dinaw Mengestu

All literature is political. ~ LeVar Burton

There are no morals in politics; there is only expedience. A scoundrel may be of use to us just because he is a scoundrel. ~ Vladimir Lenin

The enemy is not individuals, churches, 'ex-gay' organisations or political parties; the enemy is ignorance. Change is created by focusing our energies on overcoming the latter instead of attacking the former. ~ Anthony Venn-Brown

To delight in war is a merit in the soldier, a dangerous quality in the captain, and a positive crime in the statesman. ~ George Santayana