“The ambition of the greatest men of our generation has been to wipe every tear from every eye. That may be beyond us, but so long as there are tears and suffering, so long our work will not be over.”

Life is like a game of cards. The hand you are dealt is determinism; the way you play it is free will.

The only alternative to coexistence is codestruction.

Restraint does not mean weakness. It does not mean giving in.

No country or people who are slaves to dogma and dogmatic mentality can progress.

That great lover of peace, a man of giant stature who moulded, as few other men have done, the destinies of his age.

Unity must be of the mind and heart, a sense of belonging together and of facing together those who attack it.

Where freedom is menaced or justice threatened or where aggression takes place, we cannot be and shall not be neutral.

The art of a people is a true mirror of their minds.

People avoid action. Often because they are afraid of the consequences, for action means risk and danger. Danger seems terrible from a distance; it is not so bad if you have a close look at it

Those who boast are seldom the great.

Evil unchecked grows, evil tolerated poisons the whole system.

What we need is a generation of peace.

A man who is afraid will do anything.

Without peace, all other dreams vanish and are reduced to ashes.

For the first time i began to think, consciously and deliberately of religion and other worlds. The Hindu religion especially went up in my estimation; not the ritual or ceremonial part, but it’s great books, the “Upnishads,” and the “Bhagavad Gita.”

History is the record of human progress, a record of the struggle of the advancement of the human mind, of the human spirit, towards some known or unknown objective.

What great changes have not been ambitious?

Without my mother’s ambition, her drive, I doubt that on my own I would have pushed myself out of Pozzuoli and into the frightening world that was faraway Rome.

Ambition is when you close the gap between your circumstances and expectations.

What we have, what we wish we had – ambitions fulfilled, ambitions disappointed, investments won, investments lost, elections won, elections lost – these things may occupy our attention, but they do not define us.

I remember the whole thing with the word ambition. I was messed up for a while because I associated it with certain people who just want to be famous. I think, for a while, it was kind of a dirty word for women.

There is, however, another purpose to which academies contribute. When they consist of a limited number of persons, eminent for their knowledge, it becomes an object of ambition to be admitted on their list.

To endure is greater than to dare; to tire out hostile fortune; to be daunted my no difficulty; to keep heart when all have lost it; to go through intrigue spotless; to forgo even ambition when the end is gained – who can say this is not greatness?

I am not ambitious to appear a man of letters: I could be content the world should think I had scarce looked upon any other book than that of nature.