What Is Macbeth's Ambition

Ambition is the strong desire to achieve a specific goal and is often driven by determination. It can guide people to achieve goals and aspirations, and some are willing to do anything in order to satisfy their ambitious personalities. The French military and political Napoleon Bonaparte successfully defined what ambition truly is by stating, “Great ambition is the passion of a great character. Those endowed with it may perform very good or very bad acts. All depends on the principles which direct them.” In other words, ambition is not only aspirations that will help people strive to their successes, but it can also fuel a dangerous desire that people will manipulate and use toward ruthless acts. The desire to achieve has proven to emphasize
After the three witches, or weïrd sisters, tell Macbeth about his future of becoming king, he became fixated on the sense of his head being adorned with the crown. While it was not his intended idea to kill the king, he does so in order to satisfy his desire to have the crown on his head. While Macbeth may have felt guilty of his deed, his ambition led him to slay the lives of more innocent people in order to keep his objective from failing. In fact, Macbeth’s aspiration to rule without the pressure or the questioning of others gave him the motivation to murder his best friend, Banquo. Macbeth states, “Whose loves I may not drop, but wail his fall Who I myself struck down. And thence it is, That I to your assistance do make love, Masking the business from the common eye For sundry weighty reasons” (Act 3, scene 1 Pg. 89 Shakespeare). Macbeth was so determined to remove any threats to his reign that he became daring enough to hire someone to murder his friend and his family. Macbeth’s ambition took control of the situation, and because Macbeth needed to satisfy his ruthless desire, he preformed the immoral act of murder. As Napoleon Bonaparte once stated, ambition can be used for good or bad acts, depending on the values that are influencing these motivations. Macbeth, seeing the only way to become king was commit murder, was motivated and so determined to take the
Oprah Winfrey, for one, grew up in an abusive household where male relatives of hers would repeatedly molest her, which took an emotional toll on Oprah. She was an unsettled teenager who appeared to have no future ahead of her, considering the cruelty and harm she had undergone. After Oprah moved to Nashville to live with her father, where she could have easily been absorbed in the same life style she perused in New York, constantly surrounding herself with promiscuous behavior. Instead, she cleaned up her act and won the Miss Black Tennessee beauty pageant, got an on-air job at WVOL, and also won a full scholarship to Tennessee State University. From there she continued her career as a radio newscaster, and eventually had her own radio show. With continued persistence, Oprah gained her own television talk show and is now the highest-paid performer on television. Oprah’s ambition was what drove her to continue her fight through her hard childhood, and make a positive, healthy life for herself. If Oprah lacked the ambitious qualities that she had and gave up, she would likely be trapped as a damaged and troubled woman who let her past experience define who she