Aim
- In great attempts it is glorious even to fail.
-- Cassius
- Not failure, but low aim, is crime.
-- James Russell Lowell
- Perhaps the reward of the spirit who tries is not the goal but the exercise.
-- E. V. Cooke
- High aims form high characters, and great objects bring out great minds.
-- Tryon Edwards
- Aim at the sun, and you may not reach it; but your arrow will fly far higher than if aimed at an object on a level with yourself.
-- Joel Hawes
Ambiguity
- I fear explanations explanatory of things explained.
-- Abraham Lincoln
- Those who write clearly have readers, those who write obscurely have commentators.
-- Albert Camus
- That must be wonderful; I have no idea of what it means.
-- Moliere
- Clearly spoken, Mr. Fogg; you explain English by Greek.
-- Benjamin Franklin
Ambition
- No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings.
-- William Blake
- We grow small trying to be great.
-- E. Stanley Jones
- Hitch your wagon to a star.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
- You can't hold a man down without staying down with him.
-- Booker T. Washington
- Where ambition can cover its enterprises, even to the person himself, under the appearance of principle, it is the most incurable and inflexible of passions.
-- David Hume
- The very substance of the ambitious is merely the shadow of a dream.
-- William Shakespeare
- To be ambitious of true honor and of the real glory and perfection of our nature is the very principle and incentive of virtue; but to be ambitious of titles, place, ceremonial respects, and civil pageantry, is as vain and little as the things are whi
-- Philip Sidney
- Ambition is not a vice of little people.
-- Michel de Montaigne
- Ambition is the last refuge of failure.
-- Oscar Wilde
- The men who succeed are the efficient few. They are the few who have the ambition and will power to develop themselves.
-- Herbert N. Casson
- Some folks can look so busy doing nothin' that they seem indispensable.
-- Kin Hubbard
- Too low they build who build below the skies.
-- Edward Young
- The tallest trees are most in the power of the winds, and ambitious men of the blasts of fortune.
-- William Penn
- Ambition should be made of sterner stuff.
-- William Shakespeare
- A life spent in constant labor is a life wasted, save a man be such a fool as to regard a fulsome obituary notice as ample reward.
-- George Jean Nathan
- It is the constant fault and inseparable evil quality of ambition, that it never looks behind it.
-- Seneca
- Ambition often puts men upon doing the meanest offices: so climbing is performed in the same posture with creeping.
-- Jonathan Swift
- Ambition has one heel nailed in well, though she stretch her fingers to touch the heavens.
-- William Lilly
- Ambition is so powerful a passion in the human breast, that however high we reach we are never satisfied.
-- Niccolò Machiavelli
- He who surpasses or subdues mankind, must look down on the hate of those below.
-- Lord Byron
- If you wish to reach the highest, begin at the lowest.
-- Publilius Syrus
- Ambition is a lust that is never quenched, but grows more inflamed and madder by enjoyment.
-- Thomas Otway
- It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them.
-- George Eliot
- The noblest spirit is most strongly attracted by the love of glory.
-- Cicero
- Ambition is the germ from which all growth of nobleness proceeds.
-- Thomas Dunn English
- There are glimpses of heaven to us in every act, or thought, or word, that raises us above ourselves.
-- Arthur P. Stanley
- All ambitions are lawful except those which climb upward on the miseries or credulities of mankind.
-- Joseph Conrad
- When you are aspiring to the highest place, it is honorable to reach the second or even the third rank.
-- Cicero
- Nothing is too high for the daring of mortals: we storm heaven itself in our folly.
-- Horace
- A noble man compares and estimates himself by an idea which is higher than himself; and a mean man, by one lower than himself. The one produces aspiration; the other ambition, which is the way in which a vulgar man aspires.
-- Henry Ward Beecher
- Most people would succeed in small things if they were not troubled with great ambitions.
-- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
America
- Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris.
-- Thomas Gold Appleton
- Whoever wants to know the hearts and minds of America had better learn baseball.
-- Jacques Barzun
- There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America.
-- Bill Clinton, US President
- When asked by an anthropologist what the Indians called America before the white man came, an Indian said simply, 'Ours'.
-- Vine Deloria, Jr.
- America is a willingness of the heart.
-- F. Scott Fitzgerald
- Americans are like a rich father who wishes he knew how to give his son the hardships that made him rich.
-- Robert Frost
- The true America is the Middle West, and Columbus discovered nothing at all except another Europe.
-- W.L. George
- The greatest American superstition is a belief in facts.
-- Hermann Keyserling
- You will find the Americans much like the Greeks found the Romans: great, big, vulgar, bustling people more vigorous than we are and also more idle, with more unspoiled virtues but also more corrupt.
-- Harold Macmillan
- America and its demons; Europe and its ghosts.
-- Le Monde
- American youth attributes much more importance to arriving at driver's license age than at voting age.
-- Marshall McLuhan
- Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.
-- H.L. Mencken
- Our national flower is the concrete cloverleaf.
-- Lewis Mumford.
- In America there is more space where nobody is than where anybody is. This is what makes America what it is.
-- Gertrude Stein
- America has meant to the world a land in which the common man who means well and is willing to do his part has access to all the necessary means of a good life.
-- Alvin Saunders Johnson
- America, thou half-brother of the world;
With something good and bad of every land.
-- Philip James Bailey
- America has believed that in differentiation, not in uniformity, lies the path of progress. It acted on this belief; it has advanced human happiness, and it has prospered.
-- Louis D. Brandeis
- Americans never quit.
-- Douglas MacArthur
- If there is one word that describes our form of society in America, it may be the word--voluntary.
-- Lyndon Baines Johnson
- For this is what America is all about. It is the uncrossed desert and the unclimbed ridge. It is the star that is not reached and the harvest that's sleeping in the unplowed ground.
-- Lyndon Baines Johnson
- Let our object be our country, our whole country, and nothing but our country.
-- Daniel Webster
- America is the country where you buy a lifetime supply of aspirin for one dollar and use it up in two weeks.
-- John Barrymore
- I was born an American; I live an American; I shall die an American.
-- Daniel Webster
- The metaphor of the melting pot is unfortunate and misleading. A more accurate analogy would be a salad bowl, for, though the salad is an entity, the lettuce can still be distinguished from the chicory, the tomatoes from the cabbage.
-- Carl N. Degler
- A citizen of America will cross the ocean to fight for democracy but won't cross the street to vote in a national election.
-- Bill Vaughan
- America lives in the heart of every man everywhere who wishes to find a region where he will be free to work out his destiny as he chooses.
-- Woodrow Wilson
- In the field of world policy, I would dedicate this nation to the policy of the good neighbor.
-- Franklin Delano Roosevelt
- If she [America] forgets where she came from, if the people lose sight of what brought them along, if she listens to the deniers and mockers, then will begin the rot and dissolution.
-- Carl Sandburg
- If there is a country in the world where concord, according to common calculation, would be least expected, it is America.
-- Thomas Paine
- I would rather see the United States respected than loved by other nations.
-- Henry Cabot Lodge
- America is a large, friendly dog in a very small room. Every time it wags its tail, it knocks over a chair.
-- Arnold Joseph Toynbee
- The surface of American society is covered with a layer of democratic paint, but from time to time one can see the old aristocratic colors breaking through.
-- Alexis de Tocqueville
- But America is a great, unwieldy Body. Its Progress must be slow.... Like a Coach and six--the swiftest Horses must be slackened and the slowest quickened, that all may keep an even Pace.
-- John Quincy Adams
- America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.
-- Georges Clemenceau
- The country's honor must be upheld at home and abroad.
-- Theodore Roosevelt
- Ideals are the 'incentive payment' of practical men. The opportunity to strive for them is the currency that has enriched America through the centuries.
-- Robert E. Hannegan
- Why is it, whenever a group of internationalists get together, they always decide that Uncle Sam must be the goat?
-- Bertrand H. Snell
- Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans.
-- John Fitzgerald Kennedy
- America.... It is a fabulous country, the only fabulous country; it is the only place where miracles not only happen, but where they happen all the time.
-- Thomas Wolfe
- It may be that without a vision men shall die. It is no less true that, without hard practical sense, they shall also die. Without Jefferson the new nation might have lost its soul. Without Hamilton it would assuredly have been killed in body.
-- James Truslow Adams
- If the American dream is for Americans only, it will remain our dream and never be our destiny.
-- René de Visme Williamson
- America is a country of young men.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
- Every time Europe looks across the Atlantic to see the American Eagle, it observes only the rear end of an ostrich.
-- H. G. Wells
- The interesting and inspiring thing about America is that she asks nothing for herself except what she has a right to ask for humanity itself.
-- Woodrow Wilson
- Our country, right or wrong. When right, to be kept right; when wrong, to be put right.
-- Carl Schurz
- There is a New America every morning when we wake up. It is upon us whether we will it or not.
-- Adlai E. Stevenson
- The less America looks abroad, the grander its promise.
-- Ralph Waldo Emerson
- Wake up, America.
-- Augustus P. Gardner
- Intellectually I know that America is no better than any other country; emotionally I know she is better than every country.
-- Sinclair Lewis
- America is not merely a nation but a nation of nations.
-- Lyndon Baines Johnson
- I am certain that, however great the hardships and the trials which loom ahead, our America will endure and the cause of human freedom will triumph.
-- Cordell Hull
- America ... a great social and economic experiment, noble in motive and far-reaching in purpose.
-- Herbert Hoover
- For the American people are a very generous people and will forgive almost any weakness, with the possible exception of stupidity.
-- Will Rogers
- We defend and we build a way of life, not for America alone, but for all mankind.
-- Franklin Delano Roosevelt
- Before you guys came along, we hunted and fished when we wanted to, the women did all the work, and we paid no taxes. And you thought you could improve on this system? Indians have to deal with four "B.C."s: Before Christ, Before Columbus, Before Custer, and before Costner."
-- Adam Fortunate Eagle (Native American Artist, World Affairs Conference, U. of Colorado 1993)
Amiability
- When the righteous man turneth away from his righteousness that he hath committed and doeth that which is neither quite lawful nor quite right, he will generally be found to have gained in amiability what he has lost in holiness.
-- Samuel Butler
- How easy to be amiable in the midst of happiness and success.
-- Anne Sophie Swetchine
- Natural amiableness is too often seen in company with sloth, with uselessness, with the vanity of fashionable life.
-- William Ellery Channing
- An inexhaustible good nature is one of the most precious gifts of heaven, spreading itself like oil over the troubled sea of thought, and keeping the mind smooth and equable in the roughest weather.
-- Washington Irving
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