His characters were often motivated by powerful ambition or desperation to escape society's constraints.
Mr. Caro concludes from long and deep study that when Johnson's vivid sense of compassion came into conflict with his powerful ambition -- he wanted not just to be president but to surpass his hero, Franklin D. Roosevelt -- ambition won out.
But he has also shown traits that have eased his path, like the ability to plunge into a subject with a surgeon's focus, a hunger to win and a powerful ambition.
She had a powerful ambition to sell a painting to the government art collection – without letting on who she was – and for it to be displayed in a minister's office.
A designer of eclectic talents, he produced work that gradually evolved from neo-classic orthodoxy to an expressionistic modernism, driven by a powerful ambition that kept him beyond the pale, as far as the stylistic arbiters of the profession were concerned, for much of his professional life.
Mr. Gutierrez's beginnings as a dancer were typical enough, except that he was a boy ("a queeny little boy," he said) and the powerful ambition his Columbian-émigré parents harbored for him -- their only, American son -- didn't happen to include dancing.
In the 19th century the Meiji Restoration in Japan (1868 1912), motivated by powerful modernizing ambitions, centralized the state, weakened the aristocracy, and created a powerful bureaucracy.
The US and the EU joined some African and Latin American countries in a powerful "high ambition coalition", bringing countries within sight of an agreement.
