Ambition and hope - Quotes from Science Fiction

A lot of quotations carefully collected from a very big amount of books and divided by categories.

Have fun reading it, this is really interesting and breathtaking!

Mark his perfect self-contentment, and hence learn this lesson, that to be selfcontented is to be vile and ignorant, and that to aspire is better than to be blindly and impotently happy.

- Edwin A. Abbott, Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884)

Have you never wanted to do anything that was dangerous? Where should we be if nobody tried to find out what lies beyond? Have you never wanted to look beyond the clouds and the stars, or to know what causes the trees to bud? And what changes the darkness into light? But if you talk like that, people call you crazy.Well, if I could discover just one of these things, what eternity is, for example, I wouldn't care if they did think I was crazy.

- Garrett Fort and Francis Edward Faragoh, Frankenstein (film, 1931)

The humans have a curious force they call ambition. It drives them, and, through them, it drives us. This force which keeps them active, we lack. Perhaps, in time, we machines will acquire it.

- JohnWyndham, ''The Lost Machine'' (1932)

It was better to live with disappointment and frustration than to live without hope.

- Robert A. Heinlein, ''Waldo'' (1942)

There is a special sadness in achievement, in the knowledge that a longdesired goal has been attained at last, and that life must now be shaped toward new ends.

- Arthur C. Clarke, The City and the Stars (1956)

He never gave up his search for the Door into Summer.

- Robert A. Heinlein, The Door into Summer (1956)

Hope clouds observation.

- Frank Herbert, Dune (1965)

After a time, you may find that having is not so pleasing a thing, after all, as wanting. It is not logical, but it is often true.

- Theodore Sturgeon, ''Amok Time,'' episode of Star Trek (1967)

Why can I never set my heart on a possible thing?

- Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)

How strange human nature is: confronted with a ladder, man feels compelled to climb to the very top. It's cold and drafty up there - bad for the health - and a fall can be fatal. The rungs are slippery. It's a funny thing: you're aware of the dangers, and you're practically ready to drop from exhaustion, yet you keep fighting your way up. Regardless of the situation, you keep climbing; contrary to advice, you keep climbing; despite the resistance of your enemies, you keep climbing; against your better instincts, your common sense, your premonitions, you climb, climb, climb. If you don't keep climbing, you fall to the bottom. That's for sure. But if you do keep climbing, you fall anyway.

- Arkady Strugatsky and Boris Strugatsky, Prisoners of Power (1969), translated by Helen Saltz Jacobson (1977)

All her life she had made her own mistakes and her own successes, both usually by trying what others said she could not do.

- Vonda N. McIntyre, ''Aztecs'' (1977)

Hope is a punishable offense. The verdict is always death; one more death of the heart.

- Tanith Lee, ''Medra'' (1984)

Your dream is a good one. [. . .] The desire that is the very root of life itself: To grow until all the space you can see is part of you, under your control. It's the desire for greatness.

- Orson Scott Card, Speaker for the Dead (1986)

There is that within a man that drives him ever onwards, just as the power of the seasons drives the roots of flowers into the hard earth; and so he decided, against his better judgment, to open his eyes and find out what was going to happen to him next.

- Tom Holt, Ye Gods! (1992)

''He has been positively growing tusks trying to create a breed of human insect which will continue to live on this accursed planet.'' ''Everyone needs a goal.''

- Steve Aylett, Atom (2000)