In essence, I set myself the objective of doing what I feel is right without having any ambition.

- Andrea Bocelli

Mr. President, prime ministers, let us have ambitions: ambitions to move beyond the violence and occupation, to the day when two states, Palestine and Israel, can live together side by side in peace and security.

- Abdullah II of Jordan

A writer's ambition should be to trade a hundred contemporary readers for ten readers in ten years' time and for one reader in a hundred years' time.

- Arthur Koestler

Ambition often puts Men upon doing the meanest offices; so climbing is performed in the same position with creeping.

- A. C. Benson

We have these ambitions that are very hard to accomplish because life puts us in our place. We have this battle with mediocrity.

- Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu

Humility was an important part of the way I grew up. And I found that to be less common when I moved to California. That's not to say humble people don't exist there, but ambition seems really important.

- Anna Kendrick

Ambition. An overmastering desire to be vilified by enemies while living and made ridiculous by friends when dead.

- Ambrose Bierce

I am there to entertain. I call my work high escape fiction; it's high, it's good - but it's escape, and I have no delusions about that. I have no ambition to be a serious writer, whatever that means.

- Alan Furst

Every man is said to have his peculiar ambition. Whether it be true or not, I can say, for one, that I have no other so great as that of being truly esteemed of my fellow-men, by rendering myself worthy of their esteem. How far I shall succeed in gratifying this ambition is yet to be developed.

- Abraham Lincoln

I probably owe my political dismay to New Labour, but also my growing sense that the satirical shape of human affairs is international and historical, not glued to the tawdry ambitions of a team of politicians who represent nothing but themselves.

- Andrew O'Hagan

You do not have to ladle on the impasto to make a point about human frailty or ambitions.

- Alexander McCall Smith

The same ambition can destroy or save, and make a patriot as it makes a knave.

- Alexander Pope

Achievement results from work realizing ambition.

- Adam Ant

A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.

- Aldous Huxley

I think when people talk about ambition and talking to him, it might have seemed that he wasn't ambitious.

- Alan Hansen

It's incredible considering the public perception that he was tight fisted and he was more than prudent, and lacked ambition to take Tottenham to where the fans wanted them to be.

- Alan Hansen

Great ambition, the desire of real superiority, of leading and directing, seems to be altogether peculiar to man, and speech is the great instrument of ambition.

- Adam Smith

An actor should always let humility outweigh ambition.

- Anna Kendrick

I originally wanted to be a pop star. I wanted to be Kylie Minogue. My dad thought that was a very silly ambition and introduced me to drama classes. Once I became fixated on that, there was no stopping me.

- Ashley Madekwe

Sometimes with people I know, they're playing the hunky action guy and there's resistance to them coming out because it's so connected to straight masculinity. There's a plastic kind of movie star who has a very short shelf with very small kind of ambition. I see that but I still don't agree with it.

- Alan Cumming