All JOHN ADAMS Quotes about “Ambition”

“It should be your care, therefore, and mine, to elevate the minds of our children and exalt their courage; to accelerate and animate their industry and activity; to excite in them an habitual contempt of meanness, abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity, and an ambition to excel in every capacity, faculty, and virtue. If we suffer their minds to grovel and creep in infancy, they will grovel all their lives.”
“We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge or gallantry would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution is designed only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for any other.”
“Ambition is the subtlest beast of the intellectual and moral field. It is wonderfully adroit in concealing itself from its owner.”
“I have long been settled in my own opinion that neither Philosophy, nor Religion, nor Morality, nor Wisdom, nor Interest, will ever govern nations or Parties, against their vanity, their Pride, their Resentment, or Revenge, or their Avarice, or Ambition. Nothing but Force and Power and Strength can restrain them.”
“Elections to office, which are the great objects of ambition, I look at with terror!”
“Ambition is one of the ungovernable passions of the human heart. The love of power is insatiable and uncontrollable.”
“A pen is certainly an excellent instrument to fix a man's attention and to inflame his ambition.”
“A constitution founded on these principles introduces knowledge among the people, and inspires them with a conscious dignity becoming freemen; a general emulation takes place, which causes good humor, sociability, good manners, and good morals to be general. That elevation of sentiment inspired by such a government, makes the common people brave and enterprising. That ambition which is inspired by it makes them sober, industrious, and frugal.”
“There never was yet a people who must not have somebody or something to represent the dignity of the state, the majesty of the people, call it what you will - a doge, an avoyer, an archon, a president, a consul, a syndic; this becomes at once an object of ambition and dispute, and, in time, of division, faction, sedition, and rebellion.”

More John Adams quote about:

You may also like:

Abigail Adams
Former First Lady of the United States
Abraham Lincoln
16th U.S. President
Alexander Hamilton
Founding Father of the United States
Andrew Jackson
7th U.S. President
Benjamin Franklin
Founding Father of the United States
George Washington
1st U.S. President
James Madison
4th U.S. President
James Monroe
5th U.S. President
John Hancock
Former President of the Continental Congress
John Quincy Adams
6th U.S. President
Samuel Adams
Founding Father of the United States
Thomas Jefferson
3rd U.S. President