Weekend Words: Competition

There was much talk of competition in the news this week, as tech companies poach each other’s talent and workplace culture turns brutal inside Amazon and across the business landscape.

That competition and the struggle for existence is the mechanism behind this state of perpetual change.

—Elizabeth Gilbert, The Signature of All Things

Moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but the world’s champions.

—Kurt Vonnegut, Bluebeard

My dear fellow, it isn’t easy to be anything nowadays. There’s such a lot of beastly competition about.

—Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

The praise of ancient authors proceeds not from the reverence of the dead, but from the competition, and the mutual envy of the living.

—Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

All, all is theft, all is unceasing and rigorous competition in nature; the desire to make off with the substance of others is the foremost — the most legitimate — passion nature has bred into us and, without doubt, the most agreeable one.

—Marquis De Sade

Government and co-operation are in all things the laws of life; anarchy and competition the laws of death.

—John Ruskin, Unto this Last

Competitions are for horses, not artist.

—Bela Bartok

Thou shalt not covet; but tradition
Approves all forms of competition.

—Arthur Hugh Clough, “The Latest Decalogue”

Battle is the most magnificent competition in which a human being can indulge. It brings out all that is best and it removes all that is base. Americans pride themselves on being He Men and they are He Men. Remember that the enemy is just as frightened as you are, and probably more so. They are not supermen.

—George S. Patton, speech to troops, June 1944

Life is nothing but a competition to be the criminal rather than the victim.

—Bertrand Russell

Competition has been shown to be useful up to a certain point and no further, but cooperation, which is the thing we must strive for today, begins where competition leaves off.

—Franklin Roosevelt

There are two kinds of people, those who do the work and those who take the credit. Try to be in the first group; there is less competition there.

—Indira Gandhi