Placing the burden on the individual to break down doors in finding better education for a child is attractive to conservatives because it reaffirms their faith in individual ambition and autonomy. But to ask an individual to break down doors that we have chained and bolted in advance of his arrival is unfair.
People would do well to ask themselves how many of their ambitions and aspirations derive from the type of economic system they inhabit and the insecurity and exhaustion it creates, and question the sense and purpose of a society where control of a large portion of life is abdicated under contract in the labour market, and where immense creativity and potential is stifled by the need to do difficult and repetitive tasks in order to earn a wage.
They build too low who build beneath the skies.
I confess I am at a loss to discover what temptation the persons entrusted with the administration of the general government could ever feel to divest the States of the authorities of that description. The regulation of the mere domestic police of a State appears to me to hold out slender allurements to ambition.
Workers of the world awaken. Break your chains, demand your rights. All the wealth you make is taken, by exploiting parasites. Shall you kneel in deep submission from your cradle to your grave? Is the height of your ambition to be a good and willing slave?
No man's ambitions (have) a right to stand in the way of performing a simple act of justice.
I don't want to be poor. I don't want to be rich to the extent that all I care about is keeping my job. I don't care enough about keeping my job right now. That's good. That makes effective at what I do. I don't want to be frightened of getting fired. So to that end I suppose my ambitions are that I spend less than I earn.
The best hopes of any community rest upon that class of its gifted young men who are not encumbered with large possessions. . . . I now speak of extensive scholarship and ripe culture in science and art. . . . It is not large possessions, it is large expectations, or rather large hopes, that stimulate the ambition of the young.
When I applied to Stanford, I applied for graduate work in the PhD program, not to the creative writing program, mostly because though I had some vague ambition of becoming a writer and I was trying to write poems and essays and stories, I didn't feel like I was far enough along to submit work to some place and have it judged.
My musical ambitions are not that great. I make music I like, and thankfully - for my ability to make an (fairly. . . ) honest living - at least some others like the music too.
In the words of the late Francis Crick. . . You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. (13)
It is the art of mankind to polish the world, and every one who works is scrubbing in some part.
Action often precedes the feeling.
It's not greed and ambition that makes wars--it's goodness. Wars are always fought for the best of reasons, for liberation or manifest destiny, always against tyranny and always in the best interests of humanity. So far this war, we've managed to butcher some 10,000,000 people in the interest of humanity. The next war, it seems we'll have to destroy all of man in order to preserve his damn dignity.
Once we take our eyes away from ourselves, from our interests, from our own rights, privileges, ambitions - then they will become clear to see Jesus around us.
Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition. Whether it be true or not, I can say for one that I have no other so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem.
I don't believe you are simply born with the ambition of becoming chancellor. But if you want to make a difference, if you enjoy putting ideas into practice, then the post of chancellor has to be the one presenting the biggest opportunity of all.
The day of my departure at length arrived. Clerval spent the last evening with us. He had endeavoured to persuade his father to permit him to accompany me and to become my fellow student, but in vain. His father was a narrow-minded trader, and saw idleness and ruin in the aspirations and ambition of his son. Henry deeply felt the misfortune of being debarred from a liberal education. He said little, but when he spoke I read in his kindling eye and in his animated glance a restrained but firm resolve not to be chained to the miserable details of commerce.
Vanity makes people ridiculous, pride odious, and ambition terrible.
Love makes money-grabbing seem contemptible; love makes class prejudice impossible; love makes selfish ambition a thing to be despised; love converts enemies into friends.