According to its doctors, my one intransigent desire is to have been a Confederate general, and because I could not or would not become anything else, I set up for poet and beg an to invent fictions about the personal ambitions that my society has no use for.
Ambition
One of the great ambitions is to discover the diversity of the world, to discover who inhabits the world.
Most people would succeed in small things if they were not troubled with great ambitions.
Ambition has but one reward for all: A little power, a little transient fame; A grave to rest in, and a fading name!
The aphorism in which I am the first master among Germans, are the forms of ‘eternity’; my ambition is to say in ten sentences what everyone else says in a book – what everyone else does not say in a book.
For reasons that are both fair and foul – but mostly for fair reasons – we have come under the domain of a scientific-management system whose ambitions are endless. They want to manage every second of our lives, every expenditure that we make. And the schools are the training ground to create a population that’s easy to manage.
Communism brought out the worst in human nature and crippled people’s ability or ambition to participate in a market economy.
Though ambition itself be a vice, yet it is often times the cause of virtues.
My main ambition as a teenager was to somehow resurrect the dark-minded writer Franz Kafka and become his girlfriend.
Do not calculate what I have done, for I shall accept no recompense. Calculate the public advantage, the welfare and liberty of my country, and believe that I shall refuse no burden, no danger, provided that, at the hour of tranquillity, I may return to private life, for there now remains but one step for my ambition – that of arriving at zero.