Misguided Ambition Quotes

Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.

It was not power that corrupted people, but fools who corrupted power.

Life seems sadly mishandled by humans, as if it's all too much for them - they spend so much time and energy hurting each other, making things worse, and fouling their own nest, all because they imagine things aren't good enough and should be made much better.

Do not gain basely; base gain is equal to ruin.

Obviously, I believe that to pursue the American Dream is not only futile but self-destructive because ultimately it destroys everything and everyone involved with it. By definition it must, because it nurtures everything except those things that are important: integrity, ethics, truth, our very heart and soul. Why? The reason is simple: because Life/life is giving, not getting.

When public figures think they can open a business even though they've got no business experience, it's a bad idea.

People mistake their limitations for high standards.

I love characters who are really dedicated to a really bad plan.

At 20, you're cocky and you think you can rule the world, and you get it all wrong.

How working for the wrong motives poisons our creativity and warps our ideas of success and failure.

Avarice misapprehends itself almost always. There is no passion which more often will miss its aim, nor upon which the present has so much influence to the prejudice of the future.

Fame for fame's sake is never a good road to go down.

I read Rand and thought, "I want to be one of the earth movers, the scientific people who power the world. I don't want to be one of these lisping liberal artsy leeches." So I was working against my actual abilities.

Passion, prejudice, and error, are characteristics of human nature ….. Literary talents may be prostituted, and the powers of genius debased to subserve the purposes of ambition or avarice.

If you were handed power on a plate you'd be left fighting over a plate.

Men wholly bent on wordly treasures were the dupes of their own passions, rather than deceived by the writings or pretenses of those who claimed to be Alchemists.

You aim for the palace and get drowned in the sewer.

Hope of ill gain is the beginning of loss.

Furthermore, what profit was it to me that I, rascally slave of selfish ambitions that I was, read and understood by myself as many books as I could get concerning the so-called liberal arts?...I had turned my back to the light and my face to the things it illuminated, and so no light played upon my own face, or on the eyes that perceived them.

Don't go into something you actually don't know much about, in the hopes that you're going to get really financially successful and rewarded... even though people think you're, like, terrific.

What's horrible is when someone believes they are a star, and they have no vocal ability whatsoever.