What's the difference between ambition and cunning?

Ambition


Definition:

  • (n.) The act of going about to solicit or obtain an office, or any other object of desire; canvassing.
  • (n.) An eager, and sometimes an inordinate, desire for preferment, honor, superiority, power, or the attainment of something.
  • (v. t.) To seek after ambitiously or eagerly; to covet.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Jubilant Democrats are eyeing so-called “red states” such as Georgia and Utah and expanding their ambitions to take both the Senate and House .
  • (2) The award for nonfiction went to New Yorker staff writer Evan Osnos for his book on modern China, Age of Ambition .
  • (3) "My great ambition is to be president of a golf club where I am playing," he teased .
  • (4) So far, there is little sign of similar hubris at the Human Brain Project, a far more complex undertaking, but perhaps for the moment Markram's ambition is precisely what is needed.
  • (5) Photograph: KHIZR KHAN This sombre, serene oasis overlooking the Potomac river might also prove the graveyard of Donald Trump’s ambitions for the US presidency.
  • (6) Britain’s troubled relationship with the EU has provided Boris Johnson with nothing but fun since he first made his name lampooning the federalist ambitions of Jacques Delors as the Daily Telegraph’s Brussels correspondent in the early 1990s .
  • (7) President Obama's ambitions for new nuclear reductions?
  • (8) As Iain Duncan Smith, the work and pensions secretary, said when he published the initial white paper back in 2010: “At its heart, universal credit has a simple ambition – to make work pay, even for the poorest.
  • (9) "The player [Suárez] is amazing and I love his quality, commitment and ambition to play," said Mourinho.
  • (10) Some … actually dropped to the low end of their ambition ranges, which have led small island states to ask, 'Why is this?'
  • (11) Archbishop Eliud Wabukala of Kenya said the “truth [of the Gospel] continues to be called into question in the Anglican communion” and warned against “the global ambitions of a secular culture”.
  • (12) As important, if not more so, as his ambition to make exams tougher is his hostility towards other measures of ability, such as course work and controlled assessments.
  • (13) And Bristol, I guess, is following on because it has an ambition to become something similar.” According to Key, Bristol’s congestion problems are only as bad as those of other UK cities, and it’s “streets ahead” on walking and cycling .
  • (14) The company recently announced its ambition to reach a valuation of $50bn, but it is unclear how much Uber is worth if it has to start picking up expenses it has up to now pushed on to the shoulders of its drivers.
  • (15) If the ambition set out by the world’s heads of state in New York is ever to be achieved, the global tax system needs more than just a sticking plaster.
  • (16) But concerns about a slowing economy, jobs, civil rights and a lack of progress in the Kurdish peace process appear to have combined with worries that Erdoğan could assume quasi-dictatorial powers to thwart the president’s ambitions.
  • (17) Ian Macfarlane signals frontbench ambition after defecting to Nationals Read more But the deputy leader of the Nationals, Barnaby Joyce, pushed back at the criticism, saying it was not unprecedented for people to move between the Coalition parties and noted it was not as significant as ousting a prime minister.
  • (18) Susan Rice, US ambassador to the UN and a former frontrunner to replace Clinton as state secretary, saw her political ambitions cut short after she suggested that the attack could have originated from a spontaneous protest over an anti-Muslim US-made film.
  • (19) In this context, it is hard not to wonder whether a scheme on the scale and ambition of Packington, located as it is in a sea of valuable central London real estate, could ever be replicated.
  • (20) For Davutoglu, this ambition entails a "comprehensive" approach embracing enhanced economic, cultural and social ties as well as political and security relations.

Cunning


Definition:

  • (a.) Knowing; skillful; dexterous.
  • (a.) Wrought with, or exhibiting, skill or ingenuity; ingenious; curious; as, cunning work.
  • (a.) Crafty; sly; artful; designing; deceitful.
  • (a.) Pretty or pleasing; as, a cunning little boy.
  • (a.) Knowledge; art; skill; dexterity.
  • (a.) The faculty or act of using stratagem to accomplish a purpose; fraudulent skill or dexterity; deceit; craft.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) But the Franco-British spat sparked by Dave's rejection of Angela and Nicolas's cunning plan to save the euro has been given wings by news the US credit agencies may soon strip France of its triple-A rating and is coming along very nicely, thank you. "
  • (2) According to his blog, he's been acting on the advice of a friend and pursuing a course of "silence, exile and cunning", but I'm not sure a couple of years of not giving interviews to Heat qualifies.
  • (3) "They are alert, cunning and devious individuals who have current knowledge of investigative methods and techniques which may be used against them," said an internal report.
  • (4) 3.16pm BST Myners explains that his solution is a PLC-plus board -- a highly qualified board, holding the executive to account, complemented by a national council who is charged with checking that the board is doing what it should ( acting like shareholders, effectively ) He denies that it's a cunning plan to get his friends onto the Co-op board.
  • (5) The SNP minority government at Holyrood after 2007 survived from day to day by cunning deals that played the other parties off against one another.
  • (6) In fact, not only have the teams that failed to qualify not been invited to play, for if they were that would contradict the elitist terms of the qualification that are disavowed so cunningly here by Pitbull, but also in reality, only Fifa functionaries, Brazilian bureaucrats and half the BBC will get into Brazil's stadiums gratis this summer.
  • (7) The capacity of urea-N synthesis (CUNS), the galactose elimination capacity (GEC) and the antipyrine clearance (APC) were measured in rats immediately after 30, 70 and 90% partial hepatectomy and after sham operation.
  • (8) 1980 was his best year for opera: the Cologne company (whose music director, John Pritchard, became a staunch supporter) brought Mozart's Cosi Fan Tutte and Cimarosa's Il Matrimonio Segreto, Glasgow provided Berg's Wozzeck and Janacek's The Cunning Little Vixen, and the festival itself produced a distinguished world premiere in Maxwell Davies' The Lighthouse.
  • (9) In it she explains how she scratched the graffito "My French teacher is a cun-" on a door, and was stopped just as she finished that crucial "t".)
  • (10) Putin is a cunning negotiator with the skills of a KGB colonel, varying between brute force, charm and obfuscation.
  • (11) He added that the core message from Pyongyang was that South Korea’s National Intelligence Service was using the reptiles “as part of a ‘cunning scheme’ to challenge our unity”.
  • (12) It needed stamina, ice-in-the-veins bravery, cunning, cool judgment and brute determination.
  • (13) So much so that he ends the press conference with the point, and has a little smile at his own cunning.
  • (14) Running at the visiting defence, N’Doye produced a cunning disguise pass that the Croat Jelavic took in his stride and dispatched past Brad Guzan via a looping deflection.
  • (15) Only Eurovision could offer up such a song: a plea for ethnic tolerance, cunningly disguised as an Abba track with the offcuts from a pantomime.
  • (16) Anyway, back to these fraudsters, who are the least costly element of a leaky system, but nevertheless transfix the political imagination as though they were masterminds of cunning and audacity, whose long game were to destroy the fabric of society altogether.
  • (17) Steve Hilton's cunning plan to abolish all consumer, employment and maternity rights got a dusty answer, while his green passions are at least tolerated.
  • (18) Former schemes were tiny but this one is mammoth, the debt kept cunningly off the public borrowing books (which the Office for National Statistics allowed; it's said the Treasury was amazed).
  • (19) It turned out that the Square Mile is cunningly designed so as to have almost nowhere for such groups to gather, so the protesters ended up by the skirts of St Paul's.
  • (20) Undercover underwear What do you do when you develop a cunning remote-monitoring system to track soldiers’ performance in the field, but they don’t want to wear a clumsy chest strap, or forget to wear the wristband?