Ambition Quote by Thomas Jefferson

When virtue is banished, ambition invades the minds of those who are disposed to receive it and avarice possesses the whole community.

— Baron de Montesquieu

Ambition is frequently the only refuge which life has left to the denied or mortified affections. We chide at the grasping eye, the daring…

— William Gilmore Simms

Virtue is despotic; life, reputation, every earthly good, must be surrendered at her voice. The law may seem hard, but it is the guardian…

— Jane Porter

Ambition makes the same mistake concerning power that avarice makes concerning wealth. She begins by accumulating power as a means to happiness, and she…

— Charles Caleb Colton

Ambition is but avarice on stilts, and masked. God sometimes sends a famine, sometimes a pestilence, and sometimes a hero, for the chastisement of…

— Walter Savage Landor

Avarice is a uniform and tractable vice; other intellectual distempers are different in different constitutions of mind. That which soothes the pride of one…

— Samuel Johnson

Ambition is like hunger; it obeys no law but its appetite

— Josh Billings

The lust of avarice as so totally seized upon mankind that their wealth seems rather to possess them than they possess their wealth.

— Pliny the Elder

...ambition without pious restraint must end in failure, often involving in its ruin that beautiful reverence which solaces common men for the obscurity and…

— Russell Kirk

If unjustified, ambition kills value, eats its own life, kills someone else's desire to fly, cuts their wings, sucks their air.

— Dejan Stojanovic

Virtue is persecuted by the wicked more than it is loved by the good.

— Anonymous

The passions do very often give birth to others of a nature most contrary to their own. Thus avarice sometimes brings forth prodigality, and…

— Anonymous