destructive ambition Quotes

It is very sad to me that some people are so intent on leaving their mark on the world that they don’t care if that mark is a scar.

A house built on greed cannot long endure.

I have high hopes of smashing my name into history so violently that it will take a legendary form even if all books are destroyed.

I hate the man who builds his name On ruins of another's fame. Thus prudes, by characters o'erthrown, Imagine that they raise their own. Thus Scribblers, covetous of praise, Think slander can transplant the bays.

Greed has poisoned men's souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed.

The cause of all these evils was the lust for power arising from greed and ambition; and from these passions proceeded the violence of parties once engaged in contention.

The acorn of ambition often grows into an oak from which men hang.

If you love money and you want to be creative, you cannot become creative. The very ambition for money is going to destroy your creativity. If you want fame, then forget about creativity. Fame comes easier if you are destructive.

We just don't need any more 'Macbeth's in the world, however brilliant mine might turn out to be.

There is competition, but it is used in a good way. It is positive to want to go first, provided the intention is to pave the way for others, make their path more easy, help them, or show the way. Competition is negative when we wish to defeat others, to bring them down in order to lift ourselves up.

As Herman Melville wrote of that seagoing monster of a man Captain Ahab, “All mortal greatness is but disease.

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 medicines into maladies, and remedies into diseases.

Each child is poisoned by the society through teaching him ambition. Ambition is a poison far more dangerous than any alcohol can ever be, far more dangerous than marijuana or LSD, because ambition destroys your whole life. It keeps you moving in a false direction. It keeps you imagining, desiring, dreaming, it keeps you wasting your life. Ambition means a subtle creation of the ego, and once the ego is created you are in the grip of darkness. And the whole social structure depends on ambition.