Selected competition quotes

1. Layeth the smacketh down.

2. The Rock is going to lay the smack down all over your candy ass!

3. Sporting chivalrous contest helps knit the bonds of peace between nations. Therefore may the Olympic flame never expire.

4. Certainly the most diverse, if minor, pastime of literary life is the game of Find the Author.

5. Why is the competition always so intense to set new records for maximum stupidity?

6. Sometimes the only way you can win is to stay out of the game.

7. To be sure of winning, invent your own game, and never tell any other player the rules.

8. When women are encouraged to be competitive, too many of them become disagreeable.

9. In this rat-race everybody's guilty till proved innocent!

10. I wanted to be the first to win three Oscars, but Miss Hepburn has done it. Actually it hasn't been done. Miss Hepburn only won half an Oscar. If they'd given me half an Oscar I would have thrown it back in their faces. You see, I'm an Aries. I never lose.

11. I usually never stay at the board after a game. Especially against Spassky. I made a dumb suggestion and he refuted it instantly! I know I'm going to have to play him some day and it was really stupid to look like such a jerk in front of him.

12. Americans like a winner. If you lose, you're nothing. I'm going to win, though. It's good for the match that Spassky has a plus score against me. We've met five times. He's won three times and we've drawn twice. But I'm a stronger player and a long match favors me.

13. The turning point in my career came with the realization that Black should play to win instead of just steering for equality.

14. People have been playing against me below their strength for fifteen years.

15. I play honestly and I play to win. If I lose, I take my medicine.

16. Let's play. I'm willing to play anywhere.

17. If you don't win, it's not a great tragedy - the worst that happens is that you lose a game.

18. The Russians have held my title for ten years and they're going to be in for it when I win the Championship. They're going to have to wait and play under my conditions.

19. There was open collusion between the Russian players. They agreed ahead of time to draw the games they played against each other. Every time they drew they gave each other half a point.

20. It's not quite as important who you beat as that you end up on top.

21. My goal is the same as every year - to not hurt myself.

22. Charlie Chaplin and I would have a friendly contest: Who could do the feature film with the least subtitles?

23. Before you try to keep up with the Joneses, be sure they're not trying to keep up with you.

24. Games give you a chance to excel, and if you're playing in good company you don't even mind if you lose because you had the enjoyment of the company during the course of the game.

25. It's never just a game when you're winning.

26. I aim to be a competitive nation.

27. Big oil, big steel, big agriculture avoid the open marketplace. Big corporations fix prices among themselves and thus drive out of business the small entrepreneur. Also, in their conglomerate form, the huge corporations have begun to challenge the very legitimacy of the state.

28. It is not enough to succeed. Others must fail.

29. When I see an Alfa Romeo go by, I tip my hat.

30. Business is never so healthy as when, like a chicken, it must do a certain amount of scratching around for what it gets.

31. Competition is the keen cutting edge of business, always shaving away at costs.

32. The competitor to be feared is one who never bothers about you at all, but goes on making his own business better all the time.

33. Competition is not only the basis of protection to the consumer, but is the incentive to progress.

34. There was not after all a single kind of strife, but on earth there are two kinds: one of them a man might praise when he recognized her, but the other is blameworthy.

35. Gentlemen, when the enemy is committed to a mistake we must not interrupt him too soon.

36. Sports is human life in microcosm.

37. The ultimate victory in competition is derived from the inner satisfaction of knowing that you have done your best and that you have gotten the most out of what you had to give.

38. My grandfather once told me that there were two kinds of people: those who do the work and those who take the credit. He told me to try to be in the first group; there was much less competition.

39. An organization's ability to learn, and translate that learning into action rapidly, is the ultimate competitive advantage.

40. When your opponent is drowning, throw the son of a bitch an anvil.

41. It's just you and your opponent at the board and you're trying to prove something.

42. Don't even mention losing to me. I can't stand to think of it.

43. I don't have a sense of entitlement or that I deserve this. You'd be surprised at the lack of competition between nominees- I think a lot of it's imposed from the outside. Can I have my champagne now?

44. We must scrunch or be scrunched.

45. Look at The Rock's competition! Look at him! It looks like a big monkey came down here, took a crap, and out came Mankind!

46. Now, Bad Ass, you run your mouth about SummerSlam. Well, here's the situation. The Rock says this: if the Rock hits you, he'll kill you. If he misses, the wind behind the punch will give you pneumonia and you'll die anyway, so the choice is yours, jabroni!

47. The Rock is going to lay the smack down all over your candy ass!

48. It would clearly not be an improvement to build all houses exactly alike in order to create a perfect market for houses, and the same is true of most other fields where differences between the individual products prevent competition from ever being perfect.

49. There is, in a competitive society, nobody who can exercise even a fraction of the power which a socialist planning board would possess.

50. KISS is the number-one American band in gold-record sales. In the world, only the Beatles and the Stones are ahead of us. Every other band should be wiping my ass. The line forms over there to the left.

51. He who is enamored of himself will at least have the advantage of being inconvenienced by few rivals.

52. Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting.

53. Whoever claims that economic competition represents 'survival of the fittest' in the sense of the law of the jungle, provides the clearest possible evidence of his lack of knowledge of economics.

54. Politics is like boxing - you try to knock out your opponents.

55. Unless you think you can do better than Tolstoy, we don't need you.

56. It all goes so fast, and character makes the difference when it's close.

57. Ambition is like love, impatient Both of delays and rivals.

58. I started out very quiet and I beat Mr. Turgenev. Then I trained hard and I beat Mr. de Maupassant. I've fought two draws with Mr. Stendhal, and I think I had an edge in the last one. But nobody's going to get me in any ring with Mr. Tolstoy unless I'm crazy or I keep getting better.

59. Sister is probably the most competitive relationship within the family, but once the sisters are grown, it becomes the strongest relationship.

60. Ain't no reason for me to kill nobody in the ring, unless they deserve it.

61. In a competition of love we'll all share in the victory, no matter who comes first.

62. To be a great champion you must believe you are the best. If you're not, pretend you are.

63. You never win the silver. You only lose the gold.

64. 'People who live in the past generally are afraid to compete in the present. I've got my faults, but living in the past is not one of them. There's no future in it.'

65. 'You give us the pitching some of these clubs have and no one could touch us, but God has a way of not arranging that, because it's not as much fun.'

66. 'The sense of urgency is real for me, because the window of opportunity is closing. Gotta get back to the Super Bowl, gotta get back there and win it.'

67. Winning isn't everything, but it beats anything in second place.

68. People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be executed, or would be consistent with liberty and justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies; much less to render them necessary.

69. The economic anarchy of capitalist society as it exists today is, in my opinion, the real source of the evil. We see before us a huge community of producers the members of which are unceasingly striving to deprive each other of the fruits of their collective labor - not by force, but on the whole in faithful compliance with legally established rules.

70. By being a racing driver you are under risk all the time. By being a racing driver means you are racing with other people. And if you no longer go for a gap that exists, you are no longer a racing driver because we are competing, competing to win. And the main motivation is to compete for victory, it's not to come 3rd, 4th, 5th or 6th. I race to win as long as I feel it's possible. Sometimes you get it wrong? Sure, it's impossible to get it right all the time. But I race designed to win, as long as I feel I'm doing it right.

71. Don't judge yourself by somebody else's standards. You will always lose.

72. Those who see their lives as spoiled and wasted crave equality and fraternity more than they do freedom. If they clamor for freedom, it is but freedom to establish equality and uniformity. The passion for equality is partly a passion for anonymity: to be one thread of the many which make up a tunic; one thread not distinguishable from the others. No one can then point us out, measure us against others and expose our inferiority. They who clamor loudest for freedom are often the ones least likely to be happy in a free society. The frustrated, oppressed by their shortcomings, blame their failure on existing restraints. Actually, their innermost desire is for an end to the 'free for all.' They want to eliminate free competition and the ruthless testing to which the individual is continually subjected in a free society.

73. Our enemies are resourceful and innovative, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we.

74. It isn't important who is ahead at one time or another in either an election or horse race. It's the horse that comes in first at the finish line that counts.

75. The worst of failure in this kind is that it spoils the market for more competent performers.

76. I wanted no part of politics. And I wasn't in Berlin to compete against any one athlete. The purpose of the Olympics, anyway, was to do your best. As I'd learned long ago... the only victory that counts is the one over yourself.

77. It was bad enough to have toppled from the Olympic heights to make my living competing with animals. But the competition wasn't even fair. No man could beat a race horse, not even for 100 yards. ... The secret is, first, get a thoroughbred horse because they are the most nervous animals on earth. Then get the biggest gun you can find and make sure the starter fires that big gun right by the nervous thoroughbred's ear.

78. Friendships are born on the field of athletic strife and the real gold of competition. Awards become corroded, friends gather no dust.

79. And while I at length debate and beat the bush, There shall step in other men and catch the birds.

80. 'The motivation for me is just the game itself, just playing the game the right way and trying to win, compete every time I step out there on the floor. That's motivation enough for me to go out there and play well.' - Kobe Bryant[2]

81. Really, I'm not out to destroy Microsoft. That will just be a completely unintentional side effect.

82. I used to think as I looked at the Hollywood night, 'There must be thousands of girls sitting alone like me, dreaming of becoming a movie star. But I'm not going to worry about them. I'm dreaming the hardest.'

83. Everything can collapse. Houses, bodies, and enemies collapse when their rhythm becomes deranged. In large-scale strategy, when the enemy starts to collapse you must pursue him without letting the chance go. If you fail to take advantage of your enemies' collapse, they may recover.

84. Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. Your hands can't hit what your eyes can't see, rumble young man, rumble!

85. I wonder sometimes if the motivation for writers ought to be contempt, not admiration. (from the introduction to the story collection Future on Fire, where he discusses writers he considers to be hacks.)

86. A lot of people run a race to see who is fastest. I run to see who has the most guts, who can punish himself into exhausting pace, and then at the end, punish himself even more. Nobody is going to win a 5,000 meter race after running an easy 2 miles. Not with me. If I lose forcing the pace all the way, well, at least I can live with myself.

87. If we stand idly by, if we seek merely swollen, slothful ease and ignoble peace, if we shrink from the hard contests where men must win at hazard of their lives and at the risk of all they hold dear, then the bolder and stronger peoples will pass us by, and will win for themselves the domination of the world.

88. The other team could make trouble for us if they win.

89. ... this dream that men shall cease to waste strength in competition and shall come to pool their powers of production is coming to pass all over the earth.

90. The funny thing was, you see, that Mike Fink didn't think of himself as a murderer. He thought of life as a contest, and dying was what happened to those who came out second best, but it wasn't the same as murder, it was a fair fight

91. No wonder you guys lost.

92. I like to make 'em squirm.

93. 'The healthiest competition occurs when average people win by putting in above-average effort.'

94. Competition is a sin.

95. So, naturalists observe, a flea Hath smaller fleas that on him prey; And these have smaller still to bit 'em; And so proceed ad infinitum. Thus every poet, in his kind, Is bit by him that comes behind.

96. 'I'm playing against great players, playing against the best in the world. The competition - that's what I've always wanted.' - Kobe Bryant[6]

97. 'The guy said NBA players are one in a million, ... I said, 'Man, look, I'm going to be that one in a million.' - Kobe Bryant[7]

98. Because I won't let them do it to me. I can't belive you haven't seen through all this crap yet, Ender. But I guess you're young. These other armies, they aren't the enemy. It's the teachers, they're the enemy. They get us to fight each other, to hate each other. The game is everything. Win, win, win. It amounts to nothing. We kill ourselves, go crazy trying to beat each other, and all the time the old bastards are watching us, studying us, discovering our weak points, deciding whether we're good enough or not. Well, good enough for what? I was six years old when they decided I was right for the program, but nobody ever asked if the program was right for me

99. I am your enemy, the first one you've ever had who was smarter than you. There is no teacher but the enemy. No one but the enemy will ever tell you what the enemy is going to do. No one but the enemy will ever teach you how to destroy and conquer. Only the enemy shows you where you are weak. Only the enemy tells you where he is strong. And the rules of the game are what you can do to him and what you can stop him from doing to you. I am your enemy from now on. From now on, I am your teacher. -Ender's Game

100. If you are The Game, then quite frankly, you need to go back to the drawing board because your game absolutely sucks!