Time & Perspective Quote by Michael Korda

Ambition, in Michael Korda's formulation, isn’t a personality trait so much as a propulsion system. "Momentum" is the operative word: it frames achievement not as a series of arrivals but as a physics problem. If you stop pushing, you stop moving. The line has the clean practicality of someone who’s watched careers up close (Korda spent decades in publishing as well as writing), where yesterday’s breakthrough becomes today’s baseline and attention has the shelf life of produce.

The intent is almost managerial: don’t let success seduce you into stasis. But the subtext is sharper. "Constantly greater goals" implies a controlled dissatisfaction, a refusal to treat any milestone as final. It flatters the reader with a kind of rugged discipline while quietly normalizing a treadmill logic: the only way to preserve forward motion is to escalate. That can sound like motivation; it can also sound like a warning about modern striving, where the reward for climbing is a higher wall.

Context matters because Korda’s generation moved through institutions that prized upward trajectories - publishing houses, cultural gatekeepers, prestige ladders. In that ecosystem, momentum isn’t just internal drive; it’s social proof. Greater goals keep you legible to the world as someone still "rising". The sentence works because it’s deceptively calm while advocating a restless stance toward one’s own life: if you want continuity, you have to keep renegotiating what counts as "enough."