Human Ambition Quotes

On a grassroots level we say that man can touch more than he can grasp.

The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.

If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans.

We don't want to conquer the cosmos, we simply want to extend the boundaries of Earth to the frontiers of the cosmos.

Of all the passions that inspire a man in a battle, none, we have to admit, is so powerful and so constant as the longing for honor and reknown.

Finds progress, man's distinctive mark alone, Not God's, and not the beast's; God is, they are, Man partly is, and wholly hopes to be.

A man's hope measures his civilization. The attainability of the hope measures, or may measure, the civilization of his nation and time.

The sea has never been friendly to man. At most it has been the accomplice of human restlessness.

To what base ends, and by what abject ways, Are mortals urg'd through sacred lust of praise!

I don't think immortality is necessarily the key to understanding the world. You have to be careful with what you think you're achieving. I'm all for science discovering amazing and fantastic things about our world, but I think the motivations behind it are slightly askew.

Man's restlessness makes him strive.

Decisive inventions and discoveries always are initiated by an intellectual or moral stimulus as their actual motivating force, but, usually, the final impetus to human action is given by material impulses ... merchants stood as a driving force behind the heroes of the age of discovery; this first heroic impulse to conquer the world emanated from very mortal forces

As long as humanity has been human, it has looked toward the heavens and dreamed that some day, some way, there would be giant federal contracts involved.

People desire power. I don't know why they want it so. It seems to me it implies a hugely superior intellect which separates them from most of the populace.

Science has grown frightfully audacious in these days -- swift-footed, ponderous, careering over her iron ways with unslacking pace. This rampant dragon, on which I am mounted, see how he bends his once stiff neck to his rider, champing his checked bit and pawing the dust, impatient to leap around the globe. Genius is prescient, foresees its own might. Man is striving through these iron-ribbed, steam-sped hippogriffs, to recover his lost ubiquity and omnipotence, and threatens soon to grasp in his ample palm, and fix with flaming eye-ball, the elemental forces!

Trusting in Christ, we may boldly join in the combat, and enlist ourselves among that disinterested band, who fight not for human ambition, or human praise, but for the honour of our Saviour, and the salvation of men.

I put for the general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.

Never doubt what small men will do for great power.

There is a race between mankind and the universe. Mankind is trying to build bigger, better, faster, and more foolproof machines. The universe is trying to build bigger, better, and faster fools. So far the universe is winning.

Man may live and man may die searching for the question why. But if he tries to rule the sky, he must fall.

There is no better story in the Old Testament, or perhaps the whole Bible, for depicting the difference between the ladder-defined life and the cross-defined life than that of the Tower of Babel.

I hope I'm still alive to see an expedition set off for Mars.

Enslave a man and you destroy his ambition, his enterprise, his capacity. In the constitution of human nature, the desire of bettering one's condition is the mainspring of effort. The first touch of slavery snaps this spring.

Zeus does not bring all men's plans to fulfillment.