competition Quotes

“Instead of playing to win, I was playing not to lose. It reminds me of the story I once heard about two friends being chased by a bear, when one turned to the other and said, ‘I just realized that I don’t need to outrun the bear; I only need to outrun you.‘”

“Your brain against mine. Your woodcraft against mine. Your strength and stamina against mine. Outdoor chess!”

“The ball flew at him and he was conscious of its bird-form and white flapping wings he heard a noise like the bang of a firecracker at his feet and Sam had the ball in his mitt. Unable to believe his ears he heard Mercy intone a reluctant strike.”

“They hacked down trees in widening rings around their central halls and blistered the land with peasant huts and pigpen fences till the forest looked like an old dog, dying of mange. They thinned out the game, killed birds for sport, set accidental fires that would burn for days. Their sheep killed hedges, snipped valleys bare, and their pigs nosed up the very roots of what might have grown... There was nothing to stop the advance of man.”

“The moment you start thinking someone else’s gain is your loss, you limit yourself by thinking in terms of competition and shortages.”

“Look at them; as much money as they make, every last one of them is broke! They spend every dime they have, trying to keep up with my lifestyle. But they can’t, because they don’t make enough. So they end up living paycheck to paycheck on a million bucks a year. It’s hard to imagine, considering how you grew up, but, nevertheless, it is what it is.”

“Ladies, our judging has to stop. So does our compulsion to compete with everyone around us.”

“But her obsessions tended to be fueled by competition: She needed to dazzle men and jealous-ify women: Of course Amy can cook French cuisine and speak fluent Spanish and garden and knit and run marathons and day-trade stocks and fly a plane and look like a runway model doing it. She needed to be Amazing Amy, all the time. Here in Missouri, the women shop at Target, they make diligent, comforting meals, they laugh about how little high school Spanish they remember. Competition doesn’t interest them.”

“This is what I tell young women who ask me for career advice. People are going to try to trick you. To make you feel that you are in competition with one another. ‘You’re up for a promotion. If they go for a woman, it’ll be between you and Barbara.’ Don’t be fooled. You’re not in competition with other women. You’re in competition with everyone.”

“Obviously, as an adult I realize this girl-on-girl sabotage is the third worst kind of female behavior, right behind saying ‘like’ all the time and leaving your baby in a dumpster.”

“People reflexively assume that competition is always a good thing, that it always brings out the best in people, but that’s only true of people who can forget the competition. The art of competing, I’d learned from track, was the art of forgetting, and I now reminded myself of that fact. You must forget your limits. You must forget your doubts, your pain, your past.”

“For one thing, the bidding hadn’t been a contest between Dr. Crab and Nobu at all. It had ended up a contest between Dr. Crab and the Baron.”

“I’d earned more in the past six months than both Hatsumomo and Pumpkin combined.”

“Everyone knows how you hate Mameha,” Auntie told [Hatsumomo]. “You hate anyone more successful than you.”

“How quickly they can turn. And how painful it can be when you don’t expect it. (He turns) I wonder how it feels to be Almost-President three times—with a skull full of undelivered inauguration speeches.”

“I’m not afraid to compete. It’s just the opposite. Don’t you see that? I’m afraid I will compete - that’s what scares me. That’s why I quit the Theatre Department. Just because I’m so horribly conditioned to accept everybody else’s values, and just because I like applause and people to rave about me, doesn’t make it right. I’m ashamed of it. I’m sick of it. I’m sick of not having the courage to be an absolute nobody. I’m sick of myself and everybody else that wants to make some kind of a splash.”

“I can’t imagine the world without Matthew Harrison Brady.”

“MELINDA. (Calling to HOWARD across the courtroom) Which side won? HOWARD. (Calling back) I ain’t sure. But the whole thing’s over!”

“If the enemy sends its Goliath into battle, it magnifies our cause. Henry Drummond has stalked the courtrooms of this land for forty years. When he fights, headlines follow. (With growing fervor) The whole world will be watching our victory over Drummond. (Dramatically) If St. George had slain a dragonfly, who would remember him.”

“Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton. Do not think I am very much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn. He cared nothing for boxing, in fact he disliked it, but he learned it painfully and thoroughly to counteract the feeling of inferiority and shyness he had felt on being treated as a Jew at Princeton.”

“Life is a fight from the minute you take your first breath to the moment you exhale your last.”

“I am not looking to escape the pressure. I am embracing it. Pressure is what builds up in the chamber behind a bullet before it explodes out of the gun.”

“Success is the result of hard work, busting your ass every day for years on end without cutting corners or taking shortcuts.”

“You have to fight because you can’t count on anyone else fighting for you. And you have to fight for people who can’t fight for themselves. To get anything of real value, you have to fight for it.”

“Most people focus on the wrong thing; They focus on the result, not the process. The process is the sacrifice; it’s all the hard parts - the sweat, the pain, the tears, the losses. You make the sacrifices anyway. You learn to enjoy them, or at least embrace them. In the end, it is the sacrifices that must fulfill you.”

“I want her to look at me. I want her to stare me in the eye. I want her to see that I have no fear. I want her to know she stands no chance. I want her to be scared. I want her to know she is going to lose.”

“No one is ever going to give you anything of value. You have to work for it, sweat for it, fight for it. But there is far greater value in accomplishments you earn than in accolades that are merely given to you. When you earn something, you never have to worry about justifying that you truly deserve it.”

″‘Competition brings out the best in me.‘”

“A sleeper just waits and when the time is right, they come out and wow everyone. That’s you, kiddo. Don’t you worry.”

“I am vulnerable; that’s why I fight.”

“It is one thing to fight other people, but fighting yourself is different. If you’re fighting yourself, who wins? Who loses?”

“If you can’t dream big, ridiculous dreams, what’s the point in dreaming at all?”

“Once you give them the power to tell you you’re great, you’ve also given them the power to tell you you’re unworthy. Once you start caring about people’s opinions of you, you give up control.”

“Everyone my age remembers where they were and what they were doing when they first heard about the contest.”

“We compare ourselves to those in the same situation as ourselves, which means that students in an elite school - except, perhaps, those at the very top of the class - are going to face the burden that they would not face in a less competitive atmosphere.”

“A gifted human player could always triumph over the game’s AI, because software couldn’t improvise.”

“I no longer cared that we were supposed to be rivals.”

″[Halliday] was the videogame designer responsible for creating the OASIS, a massively multiplayer online game that had gradually evolved into the globally networked virtual reality most of humanity now used on a daily basis.”

“Our conversations were now stilted and reserved, as if [Aech and I] were both afraid of revealing some key piece of information the other might be able to use.”

“It was true, though. Janelle was the only girl to have two dates with Maxon besides me. Not that I was counting.”

“Suddenly those stares made sense. My intentions didn’t matter. They didn’t know I didn’t want this. In their eyes, I was a threat. And I could see they wanted me gone.”

“I’m the first to admit that I am very competitive and that I’ll do nearly anything within legal bounds to win. Sometimes, part of making a deal is denigrating your competition.”

“There’s more people! That’s what’s ruining this country! The competition is maddening! Smell the stink from that apartment house! And the one on the other side…”

“…The Bible teaches us there is no such thing as real peace until we are delivered from the need to compete with others.”

“Such was the formidable rival with whom Ichabod Crane had to contend, and, considering all things, a stouter man than he would have shrunk from the competition, and a wiser man would have despaired. He had, however, a happy mixture of pliability and perseverance in his nature; he was in form and spirit like a supple-jack—yielding, but tough; though he bent, he never broke; and though he bowed beneath the slightest pressure, yet, the moment it was away—jerk!—he was as erect, and carried his head as high as ever.”

“People are only mean when they’re threatened . . . and that’s what our culture does. That’s what our economy does. Even people who have jobs in our economy are threatened, because they worry about losing them. And when you get threatened, you start looking out only for yourself.”

″‘Why not start your own company?’ He snorted. ‘If only it were that easy. It’s impossible to compete with Sanchez. Literally impossible.‘”

“Out-numbered, out-weighed, but not out-hearted. That’s when Maniac felt it—pride, for this East End warrior whom Maniac could feel trembling in his arms, scared as any normal kid would be, but not showing it to them. Yeah, you’re bad all right, Mars Bar. You’re more than bad. You’re good. ”

“Next Saturday we play Wangaroo for the Peninsula Junior Colts Premiership. The whole town is talking about it, it’s the biggest thing to happen here since the second prize in the S.A. Tidy Towns Competition (Section B). Just shows what sort of town I live in. Hopeless.”

We have two ducks. One blue. One black. And when our blue duck goes “Quack-quack” our black duck quickly quack-quack back. The quacks Blue quacks make her quite a quacker but Black is a quicker quacker-backer.

“Gracey, these are nomination forms for the State Championships in Brisbane. I think you should enter the one hundred metres, just to have a go. There’s no competition for you round here. It’s time we found out how good you really are compared to other girls.”

“This road has been awarded the very safe road prize in the all-Ireland competition for very safe roads. Any boy can cycle on it with his eyes shut. Try it today.”

“Yes it is Rugby which is responsible for many of the troubles which beset Rowan in the next few months. He makes a dangerous enemy of Colin Clitford, a fellow team member. ”

“Moreover, while overcoming the common hang-ups of competition, the player of the inner game uncovers a will to win which unlocks all his energy and which is never discouraged by losing.”