Quotes about competition
page 3

“We [Barça] are a unique club in the world, no one has kept their jersey intact throughout their history, yet have remained as competitive as they come. (…) We have sold this uniqueness for about six percent of our budget. I understand that we are currently losing more than we are earning. However, by selling the shirt it shows me that we are not being creative, and that we have become vulgar.”

Johan Cruyff (1947–2016) Dutch association football player

Cruyff criticises club's shirt sponsorship deal with Qatar Foundation ( Goal.com, 22 April 2011 http://www.goal.com/en/news/12/spanish-football/2011/04/22/2452965/qatar-foundation-deal-may-have-kept-messi-at-barcelona-but).

World, History, Understanding

“Villa could struggle to get fourth - and there’s stiff competition too from Liverpool, Everton…and, dare I say it…Man City!”

Simon Hill (1967) Australian television presenter

From Live Q&A with Simon Hill Fri 25 Jan 08
Quotes from His time at Foxsports

“With Oasis stepping up a gear and proving they've still got it, they need to be shown there are people out there who can surpass them. Can we match them? The quality is good (in Oasis), but there really is no competition because my band is the greatest in the world and we're going to prove it.”

Pete Doherty (1979) English musician, writer, actor, poet and artist

May 2009, latest news
Oasis (band)

People, World

“The higher people get, the more evolved and psychologically healthy people get, the more will enlightened management policy be necessary in order to survive in competition and the more handicapped will be an enterprise with an authoritarian policy.”

Abraham Maslow (1908–1970) American psychologist

Summer notes on social psychology of industry and management at Non-Linear Systems, inc., Del Mar, California, ‎Non-Linear Systems, Inc, 1962, p. 81.
1940s-1960s

People

“Like many of her sex, Sophie was fiercely competitive with other women, working on the crackpot theory that if she could be better in some way, men would like her more, respect her. Make her happy. She never cottoned on that the men she was attracted to, the men who found her attractive, didn’t like women.”

Craig Ferguson book Between the Bridge and the River

Between the Bridge and the River (2006)

Women, Men, Sex, Way

“One of the biggest lies in capitalism is that companies like competition. They don't. Nobody likes competition.”

Eliot Spitzer (1959) 54th Governor of New York

[William D. Cohan, http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-01/how-wall-street-scams-counties-into-bankruptcy.html, How Wall Street Scams Counties into Bankruptcy, Bloomberg L.P., July 1, 2012, 2012-10-15]

“A fundamental change is taking place in the nature and application of technology in business, a change with profound and far-reaching implications for companies of every size and shape. A multimillion dollar research program conducted by the DMR Group, Inc., studied more than 4,500 organizations in North America, Europe, and the Far East to investigate the nature and impact of changes in technology. The synthesis and analysis of this information indicate that information technology is going through its first paradigm shift. Driven by the demands of the competitive business environment and profound changes in the nature of computers, the information age is evolving into a second era. Computing platforms in most organizations today are not able to deliver the goods for corporate rebirth. It is only through open network computing that the open networked client/server enterprise can be achieved. In nontechnical language this book shows managers and professionals how to take immediate action for the short-term benefits of the new technology while positioning their organizations for long-term growth and transformation…”

Don Tapscott (1947) Canadian businessman

Don Tapscott and Art Caston (1993) Paradigm Shift: The New Promise of Information Technology. McGraw Hill, Inc. Abstract

Books, Age, Business, Nature

“The medieval peasant prior to the 13th century does not compare himself to the feudal lord, nor does the artisan compare himself to the knight. … From the king down to the hangman and the prostitute, everyone is “noble” in the sense that he considers himself as irreplaceable. In the “system of free competition,” on the other hand, the notions on life’s tasks and their value are not fundamental, they are but secondary derivations of the desire of all to surpass all the others. No “place” is more than a transitory point in this universal chase.”

Max Scheler (1874–1928) German philosopher

Source: Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen (1912), L. Coser, trans. (1973), p. 56

Life, Sense, Universe

“In my message last year I emphasized the necessity for further legislation with a view to expediting the consolidation of our rail ways into larger systems. The principle of Government control of rates and profits, now thoroughly embedded in our governmental attitude toward natural monopolies such as the railways, at once eliminates the need of competition by small units as a method of rate adjustment. Competition must be preserved as a stimulus to service, but this will exist and can be increased tinder enlarged systems. Consequently the consolidation of the railways into larger units for the purpose of securing the substantial values to the public which will come from larger operation has been the logical conclusion of Congress in its previous enactments, and is also supported by the best opinion in the country. Such consolidation will assure not only a greater element of competition as to service, but it will afford economy in operation, greater stability in railway earnings, and more economical financing. It opens large possibilities of better equalization of rates between different classes of traffic so as to relieve undue burdens upon agricultural products and raw materials generally, which are now not possible without ruin to small units owing to the lack of diversity of traffic. It would also tend to equalize earnings in such fashion as to reduce the importance of section 15A, at which criticism, often misapplied, has been directed. A smaller number of units would offer less difficulties in labor adjustments and would contribute much to the, solution of terminal difficulties.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Second State of the Union Address (1924)

Way, Fashion, Support, Nature

“[Central banks might have to intervene to counter "perverse" or "grossly excessive" speculation. ] By such means, the monetary authorities can attempt to make the market for foreign exchange approximate toward what it would have been if there had been free competitive speculation with correct foresight of future movements. In this case all that the authorities have to do is to anticipate more correctly than private speculators the future course of exchange rates. And in so far as they do so they will make a profit at the expense of the private speculator.”

James Meade (1907–1995) British economist

James Meade (1951), The theory of international economic policy, Vol. 1, p. 224; as cited in: Peter B. Kenen (1994), Exchange Rates and the Monetary System, p. 74

Future

“In contrast to earlier gay law reform and equality-oriented movements, the 1970s LGBT liberation movement did not seek to ape heterosexual values or secure the acceptance of sexual orientation and gender identity minorities within the existing sexual conventions. Indeed, it repudiated the prevailing sexual morality and institutions - rejecting not only heterosexism (heterosexual supremacism) but also male machismo, with its oppressive predisposition to rivalry, toughness and aggression; the extreme expressions of which are the rapist, queer-basher, racist murderer and war criminal.
The "radical drag" and "gender-bender" politics of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) in the early 1970s glorified and promoted male gentleness. A conscious, if sometimes exaggerated, attempt to renounce the oppressiveness of masculinity and male privilege, it rejected straight macho values; identifying them with the subordination of women and LGBT people. The GLF was truly revolutionary because it attempted to subvert male-female gender roles and straight patriarchy. It denounced the ethos of masculine competitiveness, domination and violence; instead affirming the worthwhileness of male sensitivity and affection between men and, in the case of lesbians, the intrinsic value of an eroticism and love independent of maleness.
These ideas led me to propose that without the construction of a cult of machismo and a mass of aggressive male egos, neither sexual, gender, class, racial, speciesist nor imperialist oppression are possible.”

Peter Tatchell (1952) British gay rights activist

Machismo Underpins War and Tranny http://www.petertatchell.net/masculinity/machismo-underpins-war-and-tyranny.htm, Official Website

Love, Women, Men, War

“Very often I receive raccomandazioni for young Fascists or officers or, even worse, persons who do not belong to the organization, with requests that I do something for them in competitive examinations.”

Achille Starace (1889–1945) Italian Fascist general

Quoted in "Mussolini's Italy; Twenty Years of the Fascist Era" - Page 271 - by Max Gallo - Fascism - 1973.

Personality

“It is not to be inferred that it would be anything less than courting national disaster to leave our country barren of defense. Human nature is a very constant quality. While there is justification for hoping and believing that we are moving toward perfection, it would be idle and absurd to assume that we have already reached it. We can not disregard history. There have been and will be domestic disorders. There have been and will be tendencies of one nation to encroach on another. I believe in the maintenance of an Army and Navy, not for aggression but for defense. Security and order are our most valuable possessions. They are cheap at any price. But I am opposed to every kind of military aggrandizement and to all forms of competitive armament. The ideal would be for nations to become parties to mutual covenants limiting their military establishments, and making it obvious that they are not maintained to menace each other. This ideal should be made practical as fast as possible.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Freedom and its Obligations (1924)

Hope, History, Nature, Perfection

“The conclusions are self-evident, so I just state them. Electoral winners and losers obey the results of democratic competition and thus democracy is sustained merely as a consequence of political forces pursuing their interests. Whether this explanation is sufficient or some cultural patterns are necessary for democracy to endure is just hard to tell, as is whether democracy can survive even when it is not supported by economic self-interest.”

Adam Przeworski (1940) Polish-American academic

Chapter 5. "Why Do Political Parties Obey Results of Elections?" in Democracy and the Rule of Law (2003) edited by José María Maravall and Adam Przeworski

Democracy, Support

“Evolution is all about processes that almost never happen. Every birth in every lineage is a potential speciation event, but speciation almost never happens, not once in a million births. Mutation in DNA almost never happens — not once in a trillion copings — but evolution depends on it. Take the set of infrequent accidents — things that almost never happen — and sort them into the happy accidents, the neutral accidents, and the fatal accidents; amplify the effects of the happy accidents — which happens automatically when you have replication and competition — and you get evolution.”

Daniel Dennett book Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon

Breaking the Spell (2006)

Birth, Dependency, Happiness

“In the course of some ninety years, the wheel has certainly turned full circle. The Protectionist case, which seemed to most of our fathers and grandfathers so outrageous, even so wicked, has been re-stated and carried to victory. Free Trade, which was almost like a sacred dogma, is in its turn rejected and despised… many acute and energetic minds in the ’forties “looked to the end.” They foresaw what seemed beyond the vision of their rivals— that after the period of expansion would come the period of over-production… [Disraeli] perceived only too clearly the danger of sacrificing everything to speed. Had he lived now, he would not have been surprised. The development of the world on competitive rather than on complementary lines; the growth of economic nationalism; the problems involved in the increasing productivity of labour, both industrial and agricultural; the absence of any new and rapidly developing area offering sufficient attractive opportunities for investment; finally, the heavy ensuing burden of unemployment, in every part of the world— all these phenomena, so constantly in our minds as part of the conditions of crisis, would have seemed to the men of Manchester nothing but a hideous nightmare. Disraeli would have understood them. I think he would have expected them.”

Harold Macmillan (1894–1986) British politician

‘Preface’ to Derek Walker-Smith, The Protectionist Case in the 1840s (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1933), pp. vii-viii.
1920s-1950s

Men, World, Problem, Thinking

“Industrial age companies created sharp distinctions between two groups of employees. The intellectual elite—managers and engineers—used their analytical skills to design products and processes, select and manage customers, and supervise day-to-day operations. The second group was composed of the people who actually produced the products and delivered the services. This direct labor work force was a principal factor of production for industrial age companies, but used only their physical capabilities, not their minds. They performed tasks and processes under direct supervision of white-collar engineers and managers. At the end of the twentieth century, automation and productivity have reduced the percentage of people in the organization who perform traditional work functions, while competitive demands have increased the number of people performing analytic functions: engineering, marketing, management, and administration. Even individuals still involved in direct production and service delivery are valued for their suggestions on how to improve quality, reduce costs, and decrease cycle times…
Now all employees must contribute value by what they know and by the information they can provide. Investing in, managing, and exploiting the knowledge of every employee have become critical to the success of information age companies”

David P. Norton (1941) American business theorist, business executive and management consultant

Source: The Balanced Scorecard, 1996, p. 5-6

People, Age, Knowledge, Time

“Nerds serve two masters. They want to be popular, certainly, but they want even more to be smart. And popularity is not something you can do in your spare time, not in the fiercely competitive environment of an American secondary school.”

Paul Graham (1964) English programmer, venture capitalist, and essayist

"Why Nerds are Unpopular," February 2003

School, Time

“At no point do I wish to be in conflict with any man or masculine thought. It doesn't enter my consciousness. I think art is anonymous. It's not competitive with men. It's a complementary contribution. I've said that and I do believe it, that one does contribute to art and that's nothing to do with being male or female... I don't think a good work of art can just be said to be feminine or masculine.... art's either good or isn't.”

Barbara Hepworth (1903–1975) English sculptor

Source: 1961 - 1975, Art Talk, conversations with 15 woman artists', (1975), pp. 15-16

Men, Art, Thinking

“I have been wanting to write to you for some time, but never have time, so absorbed I am in playing chess. I play night and day and nothing in the whole world interests me more than finding the right move... Nothing transcendental going on here – strikes [in Buenos Aires, where chess competitions were organized that year for not professionals] a lot of strikes, the people are on the move. Painting interests me less and less.”

Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) French painter and sculptor

a daily life quote, in Duchamp's letter to the Stettheimers family in New York, from Buenos Aires 3 Mai 1919; as quoted in The Duchamp Book, ed. Gavin Parkinson, Tate Publishing, London 2008 p. 159
1915 - 1925

People, World, Time, Painting

“Why you think I play this game? I play to win. Competition is the thing. I want to play on a winning team. I don't want to play for sixth place. I like to play for all the marbles, where every game means something. I like to play for real, not for fun.”

Roberto Clemente (1934–1972) Puerto Rican baseball player

As quoted in "Clemente Says Hitting Does Not Come Easy"
Baseball-related, <big><big>1960s</big></big>, <big>1968</big>

Game, Thinking

“In today's volatile world, organizational design is an everyday, ongoing activity and challenge for every executive, whether managing a global enterprise or a small work team. Globalization, worldwide competition, deregulation, and ever-new technologies drive the ongoing reassessment of the organization. The executive response has been many new forms of organizational design: virtual, learning, modular, cellular, network, alliance, or spaghetti – to name a few. New organizational forms challenge old ways of organizing for efficiency and effectiveness. Yet fundamental design principles underlie any well-functioning organization. Organizations still require a formal design.”

Richard M. Burton (1939)

Richard M. Burton, ‎Børge Obel, ‎Gerardine DeSanctis (2011). Organizational Design: A Step-by-Step Approach. p. 3

World, Way, Learning

“If there is to be a competition, there must be some basis for resolving it. It is also clear that the competition should be experienced based.”

John H. Holland (1929–2015) US university professor

, p. 53
Hidden Order - How Adaptation Builds Complexity (1995), Ch 2. Adaptive Systems

“An examination of our terms, such as competition, rivalry, emulation, etc., reveals that the traditional perspective remains inscribed in the language. Competitors are fundamentally those who run or walk together, rivals who dwell on opposite banks of the same river, etc…The modern view of competition and conflict is the unusual and exceptional view, and our incomprehension is perhaps more problematic than the phenomenon of primitive prohibition. Primitive societies have never shared our conception of violence. For us, violence has a conceptual autonomy, a specificity that is utterly unknown to primitive societies. We tend to focus on the individual act, whereas primitive societies attach only limited importance to it and have essentially pragmatic reasons for refusing to isolate such an act from its context. This context is one of violence. What permits us to conceive abstractly of an act of violence and view it as an isolated crime is the power of a judicial institution that transcends all antagonists. If the transcendence of the judicial institution is no longer there, if the institution loses its efficacy or becomes incapable of commanding respect, the imitative and repetitious character of violence becomes manifest once more; the imitative character of violence is in fact most manifest in explicit violence, where it acquires a formal perfection it had not previously possessed. At the level of the blood feud, in fact, there is always only one act, murder, which is performed in the same way for the same reasons in vengeful imitation of the preceding murder. And this imitation propagates itself by degrees. It becomes a duty for distant relatives who had nothing to do with the original act, if in fact an original act can be identified; it surpasses limits in space and time and leaves destruction everywhere in its wake; it moves from generation to generation. In such cases, in its perfection and paroxysm mimesis becomes a chain reaction of vengeance, in which human beings are constrained to the monotonous repetition of homicide. Vengeance turns them into doubles.”

René Girard book Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World

Source: Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (1978), p. 11-12.

Way, Distant, Time, Perfection

“I distinguish two kinds of "applied" research: problem-solving research — government or commercially initiated, centrally managed and institutionally coupled to a plan for application of the results, useful science — investigator-initiated, competitively evaluated and widely communicated. Then we have basic science — useful also, also investigator-initiated, competitively evaluated and widely communicated.”

Lewis M. Branscomb (1926) physicist and science policy advisor

Source: Confessions of a Technophile (1994), p. 31

Communication, Problem, Science

“My friend Sir G. Johnson subsequently became the leader of one of the two opposed methods of dealing with cholera. His was the “ eliminative” view, namely, that there was mischief in the system that Nature strove to eliminate, so he prescribed castor oil to expedite matters; others took the exactly opposite view, consequently there was open war between the two methods. I read somewhere that one of Johnson’s most fiery opponents considered the number of deaths occasioned by his method to amount to eleven thousand. Leaving aside all question of the accuracy of the estimate of this particular treatment, it is easy to see that when a pestilence lies heavily on a nation, the numbers affected are so large that a proper or improper treatment may be capable of saving or of destroying many thousands of lives. By all means, then, let competitive methods be tested at hospitals on a sufficiently large scale to settle their relative merits. Of this I will speak further almost immediately.”

Francis Galton (1822–1911) British polymath: geographer, statistician, pioneer in eugenics

Source: Memories of My Life (1908), Ch. III Medical Studies

Death, War, Question, Nature

“Thou shalt not covet, but tradition
Approves all forms of competition.”

Arthur Hugh Clough (1819–1861) English poet

The Latest Decalogue, l. 19-20.

“Since Moon's takeover the peninsula has become less like divided Germany than ever. The ROK has abandoned the competition for legitimacy, instead ceding the North’s superiority on nationalist grounds while reaffirming that these matter more than liberal democratic ones. I’m not sure a league will ever come about, but if it does, it will hitch a proudly radical nationalist state to an unloved, moderate-nationalist one too shamefaced to celebrate its own founding. If the South is already unwilling to criticize the North, or to renew a commitment to its own constitutional values, it’s hardly likely to mount a strong defense of human rights later on.”

Brian Reynolds Myers (1963) American professor of international studies

2010s, Confederation Again (July 2018)

Strong

“The world is divided into people who do things and people who get the credit. Try, if you can, to belong to the first class. There's far less competition.”

Dwight Morrow (1873–1931) American politician

From a letter to his son, as quoted in Harold Nicolson, Dwight Morrow (1935), p. 52

People, World

“Competition among capitalists requires that they constantly reduce the costs of production, by cutting wages or some other means, while increasing output through technological change and greater efficiency. The process, then, involves three intertwined aspects:
(1) capitalists control the means of production,
(2) laborers must sell their labor to survive because they lack access to the means of production, and
(3) there must be constant changes to increase production and cut costs.”

Ted C. Lewellen (1940–2006) American writer

Political Anthropology: An Introduction (2003), p. 213

Change

“No more important development has taken place in the last year than the beginning of a restoration of agriculture to a prosperous condition. We must permit no division of classes in this country, with one occupation striving to secure advantage over another. Each must proceed under open opportunities and with a fair prospect of economic equality. The Government can not successfully insure prosperity or fix prices by legislative fiat. Every business has its risk and its times of depression. It is well known that in the long run there will be a more even prosperity and a more satisfactory range of prices under the natural working out of economic laws than when the Government undertakes the artificial support of markets and industries. Still we can so order our affairs, so protect our own people from foreign competition, so arrange our national finances, so administer our monetary system, so provide for the extension of credits, so improve methods of distribution, as to provide a better working machinery for the transaction of the business of the Nation with the least possible friction and loss. The Government has been constantly increasing its efforts in these directions for the relief and permanent establishment of agriculture on a sound and equal basis with other business.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Second State of the Union Address (1924)

People, Law, Business, Support

“So the Bush-Obama administration has taken a fiscal stance diametrically opposed to that of the patron saint of free enterprise. While escalating war in Afghanistan and maintaining over 850 military bases around the world, the administration has run up the national debt that Smith decried. By shifting the tax burden off property and off rent-seeking monopolies – above all, off the financial sector – this policy has raised America’s cost of living and doing business, thereby undercutting its competitive power and running up larger and larger foreign debt.”

Michael Hudson (economist) (1939) American economist

Adam Smith critiques the Deficit Reduction Commission http://michael-hudson.com/2010/12/adam-smith-critiques-the-deficit-reduction-commission/ (December 6, 2010) Michael-Hudson.com, 1998-

War, World, Business

“The ideology of "competitive, atomistic can make a place for themselves only if they first create, via critiques, an awareness of the factors that alienate them. Many individual white women found in the women's movement a liberatory solution to personal dilemmas. Having directly benefited from the movement, they are less inclined to criticize it or to engage in rigorous examination of its structure than those who feel it has not had a revolutionary impact on their lives or the lives of masses of women in our society. Non-white women who feel affirmed within the current structure of feminist movement (even though they may form autonomous groups) seem to also feel that their definitions of the party line, whether on the issue of black feminism or on other issues, is the only legitimate discourse. Rather than encourage a diversity of voices, critical dialogue, and controversy, they, like some white women, seek to stifle dissent. As activists and writers whose work is widely known, they act as if they are best able to judge whether other women's voices should be heard.”

Bell Hooks book Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center

Source: Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), Chapter 1: Black Women: Shaping Feminist Theory, p. 9.

Women, Feeling, Personality

“Antitrust laws ought to be deployed, not against business, but to bust this two-party monopoly, which subverts competition in government and rewards the colluding quislings with sinecures in perpetuity.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

"Party of Traitors," http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=50375 WorldNetDaily.com, May 26, 2006. 2000s, 2006

Law, Business

“The inescapable fact is that when we build a society based on greed, selfishness, and ruthless competition, the fruits we can expect to reap are economic insecurity at home and international discord abroad.”

Tommy Douglas (1904–1986) Scottish-born Canadian politician

Annual Convention of the Saskatchewan CCF, Regina, July 1951.

Home, Selfishness

“Hannan and Freeman examine the ecology of organizations by exploring the competition for resources and by trying to account for rates of entry and exit and for the diversity of organizational forms. They show that the destinies of organizations are determined more by impersonal forces than by the intervention of individuals by the intervention of individuals.”

John H. Freeman (1944–2008) (1944-2008) US-American sociologist and organizational theorist

Michael T. Hannan and John Freeman. Organizational ecology. Harvard University Press, 1993; Abstract.

“The orthodox doctrines of economics which were dominant in the last quarter of the nineteenth century had a clear message. They supported laisser faire, free trade, the gold standard, and the universally advantageous effects of the pursuit of profit by competitive private enterprise.”

Joan Robinson (1903–1983) English economist

Introduction, p. vii
Economic Heresies (1971)

Support, Universe

“As Blake said, there is no competition between true poets.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“John Ransom’s Poetry”, p. 98
Poetry and the Age (1953)

“You're damn right I'm in it to make money. This is prizefighting, I'm in it to get rich; fast. And then I'm in it to get out… I'm in the business of securing my own future, my family's future, and that's it. That's what I'm in it for. The fight game doesn't last long, competitive fighting doesn't last long. Learning martial arts, and training, is for life because that's medication to me so I will do that forever. But, as far as the fight game, I'm in it to get all the money, all the belts, and then I'm gone.”

Conor McGregor (1988) Irish mixed martial artist and boxer

Setanta Sports interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AaZQw3Dh0K0 (September 2014) 2010s, 2014

Life, Money, Family, Art

“In fact, my best year of track competition was the first year I ate a vegan diet. Moreover, by continuing to eat a vegan diet, my weight is under control, I like the way I look. (I know that sounds vain, but all of us want to like the way we look.) I enjoy eating more, and I feel great. … I remember vividly making the decision in July of 1990 to become a vegan. … And I had my best year as an athlete ever! … Your body is your temple. If you nourish it properly, it will be good to you and you will increase its longevity.”

Carl Lewis (1961) US track & field athlete

Introduction https://books.google.it/books?id=gRB5UjsxHy0C&pg=PT5 to Very Vegetarian by Jannequin Bennett (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2001, ISBN 1-55853-952-2)

Way, Feeling, Decision

“The social structures of markets and the internal organisation of firms are best viewed as attempts to mitigate the effects of competition with other firms.”

Neil Fligstein (1951) American sociologist

Source: Markets as politics: A political-cultural approach to market institutions, 1996, p. 657

“I watch a lot of TV, but I find that recently it’s largely oddball stuff … Scripted stuff sometimes feels like homework, like I'm scoping out the competition or something.”

Jane Espenson (1964) American television writer and producer

Ain't It Cool News interview (17 July 2003)

Feeling

“The professional philosopher in keen competition with the natural scientist resolves to be more certain about less.”

Russell Jacoby (1945) American historian

Source: Social Amnesia: A Critique of Conformist Psychology from Adler to Laing (1975), p. 59

Nature

“If it came on the evening news tonight that there were five grizzly bears roaming around Cobb County, do you know what would happen by six o'clock in the morning? They would all be dead. Because every redneck in four states would be out there with a rifle, trying to shoot one, right? And whoever could shoot the biggest one would be a hero. They would have his picture on the front page, "Bubba shot the Grizzly Bear" and saved the village. That is exactly what happened to the dragons. If you could figure out a way to kill a dragon, they would be telling stories about you around the campfire. People killed dragons for meat, because they were a menace, to prove that you were a hero, or to prove that you are superior, in competition for land, or for medicinal purposes. Many ancient recipes call for dragon blood, dragon bones, dragon saliva, why? Gilgamesh is famous for slaying a dragon. A Chinese legend tells about a guy named Yu that surveyed the land of China. It says, that after the Flood he surveyed the land, he divided it off into sections. He built channels to drain water off to sea and make the land livable again. Many snakes and dragons were driven from the marshlands. You know that's normal that if you want to build a city. You have to drive off the dragons, then build your city. It was expected that you have got to drive the dragons away or kill them. Why would the Chinese calendar have eleven real animals: the pig, the duck, the dog, and … the dragon? Why would they put just one "mythical" animal in there? Could it be at the time they that they came up with these animals there were 12 real animals? There is one of the oldest pieces of pottery on Planet Earth. It's a piece of slate from Egypt; the first dynasty of United Egypt. It shows long necked dragons […] Why would they put long necked dinosaurs on pottery 3,800 years ago? Here are two long necked dinosaurs with a sheep in between them in their mouths. Here is a hippo tusk from the twelve century B. C., showing an animal with a long neck, and a long tail. Here's a cylinder seal, showing what appears quite obviously to be a long neck dinosaur. The Bible talks about a fiery flying serpent, in Isaiah 14.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Creation seminars (2003-2005), Dinosaurs and the Bible

People, Dogs, Way, Guy

“Android continues to stomp its competition flat. Even the post-Jobs Apple can't stem the tide; it's pretty close to the 10% niche market share I predicted back in 2009 already, with no sign that trend will or can be reversed.”

Eric S. Raymond (1957) American computer programmer, author, and advocate for the open source movement

The Smartphone Wars: Nokia gives it up for Microsoft http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5039 in Armed and Dangerous (3 September 2013)

“The delicate and intricate pattern of competition and cooperation in the economic behavior of the hundreds of thousands of citizens of Stockholm offers a challenge to the economist that is perhaps as complex as the challenges of the physicist and the chemist.”

George Stigler (1911–1991) American economist

"George J. Stigler - Banquet Speech," 1982

Behavior

“The production of security should, in the interests of the consumers of this intangible commodity, remain subject to the law of free competition.”

Gustave de Molinari (1819–1912) Belgian political economist and classical liberal theorist

Source: The Production of Security (1849), p. 22–23.

Law

“A competitive athlete is painful to look at; trying hard to become an animal rather than a man, he will never be as fast as a cheetah or as strong as an ox.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb book The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms

Source: The Bed of Procrustes: Philosophical and Practical Aphorisms (2010), p. 41

Pain, Strong, Animals

“The bumping of lower-quality men out of their marriages through competitive reductions in the incomes of higher-quality men continues until the incomes of the lowest quality men are reduced to their single levels.”

Gary S. Becker book A Treatise on the Family

Source: A Treatise on the Family, 1981, p. 79

Men, Marriage

“Science would be ruined if (like sports) it were to put competition above everything else, and if it were to clarify the rules of competition by withdrawing entirely into narrowly defined specialties. The rare scholars who are nomads by choice are essential to the intellectual welfare of the subtle disciplines”

Benoît Mandelbrot (1924–2010) Polish-born, French and American mathematician

Benoit Mandelbrot cited in James Gleick (1987) Chaos: Making a New Science p. 70

Sport, Science

“The Partnership for a Drug Free America? Please, make me laugh and gag at the same time with that title. They're a lobbying arm for the liquor and prescription drug industries. They don't want a drug-free America, they want an America free of the drugs that are their competition.”

Bill Maher (1956) American stand-up comedian

Prozac doesn't want to go up against marijuana, it will lose.
Be More Cynical (2000)

Time, Marijuana, Partnership

“As an advocate of birth control I wish … to point out that the unbalance between the birth rate of the 'unfit' and the 'fit,' admittedly the greatest present menace to civilization, can never be rectified by the inauguration of a cradle competition between these two classes. In this matter, the example of the inferior classes, the fertility of the feeble-minded, the mentally defective, the poverty-stricken classes, should not be held up for emulation…. On the contrary, the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective.”

Margaret Sanger (1879–1966) American birth control activist, educator and nurse

"The Eugenic Value of Birth Control Propaganda", October 1921, page 5.
Birth Control Review, 1918-32

Birth, Problem

“A prominent manufacturer once said that although he could see some use for an organization chart for his factory, he had refused to chart the organization above the level of factory superintendent. His argument was that charts tend to make people overly conscious of being superiors or inferiors, tend to destroy team feeling, and give persons occupying a box on the chart too great a feeling of "ownership"? Another top executive once said that if an organization is left uncharted, it can be changed more easily and that the absence of a chart also encourages a competitive drive for higher executive positions on the part of the uncharted middle-management group.
These reasons for not charting organization structures are clearly unsound. Subordinate - superior relationships exist not because of charting but because of essential reporting relationships. As for a chart's creating a too comfortable feeling and causing a lack of drive on the part of those who have "arrived", these are matters of top leadership - of reorganizing whenever the enterprise environment demands, of developing a tradition of change, and of making subordinate managers continue to meet adequate and well-understood standards of performance.”

Harold Koontz (1909–1984)

Source: Principles of management, 1968, p. 379; About the advantages of organizational charts

People, Feeling, Change, Parting

“[In the early 1900s, ecologists Alfred Lotka and Vito Volterra] independently proposed models of populations dynamics that incorporate effects of competition between populations.”

Michael T. Hannan (1943) US-American sociologist of Stanford University

Source: Organizational ecology, 1989, p. 99; As cited in: George Zinkan (2012), Advertising Research, p. 198

“Technology moves with terrifying speed. If the traffic rules are explicit and understandable, and accompanied by common-sense protective designs, this technology will be an incalculable boon to America, a shot in the arm to our international competitiveness, and a stimulus to our creative industries. If not, then the information superhighway, cyberspace, the Internet, call it what you will, technology will collapse the great wonder of intellectual property. The country will be the loser. Big time.”

Jack Valenti (1921–2007) President of the MPAA

Testimony to the U.S. House of Representatives on copyright immunities for ISPs. (7 February 1996)

Understanding, Sense, Time, Speed

“Companies are in the midst of a revolutionary transformation. Industrial age competition is shifting to information age competition. During the industrial age, from 1850 to about 1975, companies succeeded by how well they could capture the benefits from economies of scale and scope. Technology mattered, but, ultimately, success accrued to companies that could embed the new technology into physical assets that offered efficient, mass production of standard products.
During the industrial age, financial control systems were developed in companies, such as General Motors, DuPont, Matsushita, and General Electric, to facilitate and monitor efficient allocations of financial and physical capital. A summary financial measure such as return-on-capital employed (ROCE) could both direct a company’s internal capital to its most productive use and monitor the efficiency by which operating divisions used financial and physical capital to create value for shareholders.
The emergence of the information era, however, in the last decades of the twentieth century, made obsolete many of the fundamental assumptions of industrial age competition. No longer could companies gain sustainable competitive advantage by merely deploying new technology into physical assets rapidly, and by excellent management of financial assets and liabilities.”

David P. Norton (1941) American business theorist, business executive and management consultant

Source: The Balanced Scorecard, 1996, p. 2-3

Age, Success

“Despite the roar of voices wanting to equate strategy with ambition, leadership, “vision,” planning, or the economic logic of competition, strategy is none of these. The core of strategy work is always the same: discovering the critical factors in a situation and designing a way of coordinating and focusing actions to deal with those factors.”

Richard Rumelt (1942) American economist

Source: Good Strategy Bad Strategy, 2011, p. 3

Way

“Everything we hope to do, depends on an expanding economic pie. And only a vibrant, competitive, thriving private sector can create that. Government is a necessary partner, but it is the junior partner. Only the private sector can produce the revenues for the social programs that we Democrats care so much about. The financing of those programs through ever more public debt violates our generation responsibility.”

Paul Tsongas (1941–1997) American politician

ibid.

Hope, Dependency

“It is true that I described antisocial, parsimonious, sanctimonious, and wasteful behavior by the owners over the years, but baseball's problem is structural, not individual. Put any individual into a position of power with an opportunity to make tens of millions of dollars in an industry that is on a cultural pedestal and protected from all forms of competition, and the odds are against the second coming of Lee Iacocca or Ralph Nader.”

Andrew Zimbalist (1947) American economist

Preface to The Updated Edition, p. xiii-xiv
Baseball And Billions - Updated edition - (1992)

Behavior, Problem

“One of our immediate educational objectives must be the elimination of the competitive spirit, and the substitution of the co-operative consciousness. p. 74”

Alice A. Bailey (1880–1949) esoteric, theosophist, writer

Education in the New Age (1954)

Education

“Labor is a commodity, like any other, and its price is therefore determined by exactly the same laws that apply to other commodities. In a regime of big industry or of free competition – as we shall see, the two come to the same thing – the price of a commodity is, on the average, always equal to its cost of production. Hence, the price of labor is also equal to the cost of production of labor. But, the costs of production of labor consist of precisely the quantity of means of subsistence necessary to enable the worker to continue working, and to prevent the working class from dying out. The worker will therefore get no more for his labor than is necessary for this purpose; the price of labor, or the wage, will, in other words, be the lowest, the minimum, required for the maintenance of life.”

Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) German social scientist, author, political theorist, and philosopher

(1847)

Life, Law

“It just takes one moment to make the difference here for the USA of staying in this competition or leaving it.”

Ian Darke (1950) British association football and boxing commentator

United States v. Algeria http://www.listenonrepeat.com/watch/?v=DALDkkXodRU (23 June 2010). 2010s, 2010, 2010 FIFA World Cup

“It has become clear from the rumblings and soul-searching in the field of competitive strategy that a revolution is brewing. Managers and strategy researchers are discovering that existing models of strategy are nearly obsolete in the intensity of today's fast-paced competition. Some have called for a more dynamic approach, even questioning the sustainability of competitive advantage in this new environment. But so far, this revolution-waiting-to-happen has had no leader. Now it has.”

Richard D’Aveni (1953) American economist

Foreword
Hypercompetitive rivalries, 1994

Soul, Search, Question, Waiting

“Against this view, it is still possible to identify some cultural continuities. Kitromilides himself alludes to some of them, when he mentions “inherited forms of cultural expression, such as those associated with the Orthodox liturgical cycle and the images of emperors, the commemoration of Christian kings, the evocation of the Orthodox kingdom and its earthly seat, Constantinople, which is so powerfully communicated in texts such as the Akathist Hymn, sung every year during Lent and forming such an intimate component of Orthodox worship...“ (Kitromilides 1998, 31). There are other lines of Greek continuity. Despite the adoption of a new religion, Christianity, certain traditions, such as a dedication to competitive values, have remained fairly constant, as have the basic forms of the Greek language and the contours of the Greek homeland (though its centre of gravity was subject to change). And John Armstrong has pointed to the “precocious nationalism” that took hold of the Greek population of the Byzantine Empire under the last Palaeologan emperors and that was directed as much against the Catholic Latins as against the Muslim Turks—an expression of medieval Greek national sentiment as well as a harbinger of later Greek nationalism. But again, we may ask: was this Byzantine sentiment a case of purely confessional loyalty or of ethnoreligious nationalism?”

Anthony D. Smith (1939–2016) British academic

See Armstrong 1982, I74—8I cf. Baynes and Moss 1969, 119—27, and Carras 1983.
Source: The Nation in History (2000), p. 42-43.

Religion, Communication, Change, Loyalty

“Power is dispersed through many different families, churches, schools, universities, corporations, partnerships, business associations, scientific societies, unions, clubs, and myriad other associations. There’s plenty of competition, and people have overlapping interests. The social order isn’t controlled by anybody—it evolves spontaneously.”

Rudolph Rummel (1932–2014) American academic

People, School, Family, Business

“Dour, anxious Hesiod writes about the daily round of farming and the effects if the seasons on rural life but also speaks in his Works and Days about the value of festal competitions with "potter against potter, carpenter against carpenter… poet against poet."”

Thomas Cahill (1940) American scholar and writer

Source: Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter (2003), Ch. III The Poet: How to Party

Life, Season

“So let's start telling the truth: competitiveness is a meaningless word when applied to national economies. And the obsession with competitiveness is both wrong and dangerous.”

Paul Krugman (1953) American economist

Pop Internationalism (1996), Competitiveness: A Dangerous Obsession (1994)

Truth

“Economic theory makes a fundamental assumption that maximizing profits is the basic objective of every firm. But in recent years, profit maximization has been extensively qualified by theorists to refer to the long run; to refer to management’s rather than to owners’ income; to include non-financial income such as increased leisure for high-strung executives and more congenial relations between executive levels within the firm; and to make allowance for special considerations such as restraining competition, maintaining management control, warding off wage demands, and forestalling anti-trust suits. The concept has become so general and hazy that it seems to encompass most of men’s aims in life.
This trend reflects a growing realization by theorists that many firms, and particularly the big ones, do not operate on the principle of profit maximizing in terms of marginal costs and revenues…”

Joel Dean (1906–1979) American economics wrtier

Source: Managerial Economics, 1951, p. 28; Cited in: Peter F. Drucker, Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices, New York: Harper & Row, 1973.

Life, Men

“Sales personnel in all six organizations indicated a primary concern with customer problems, competitive activities, and other events in the marketplace. Manufacturing personnel were all primarily interested in problems of cost reduction, process efficiency, and similar matters.”

Paul R. Lawrence (1922–2011) American business theorist

Source: Organization and environment: Managing differentiation and integration, 1967, p. 37

Problem

“Today we are practically living a trade war, a currency war because the exchange rate today is one of the important factors to determine the competitiveness or not of products. Generalized currency depreciation in my view is an explicit strategy used by countries and that threatens us.”

Guido Mantega (1949) Brazilian economist

Speech at the seminar " The Role of Industry in the Growth of Brazil https://www.fazenda.gov.br/divulgacao/noticias/2010/setembro/governo-nao-pretende-taxar-investimentos-estrangeiros-diz-mantega" organized by the Getulio Vargas Foundation, September 27, 2010

War, Country

“The competitive ethic, which teaches children that they must advance at the expense of others, should be replaced by values of cooperation and a pursuit of excellence for its own sake.”

James W. Prescott (1930) American psychologist

"Body Pleasure and the Origins of Violence" (1975)

Children

“Game theory, analyzing in a novel mathematical framework, rational competition between two or more antagonists for maximum gain and minimum loss.”

Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–1972) austrian biologist and philosopher

General System Theory (1968), 4. Advances in General Systems Theory

Game, Mathematics, Loss

“While the law [of competition] may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it insures the survival of the fittest in every department. We accept and welcome, therefore, as conditions to which we must accommodate ourselves, great inequality of environment, the concentration of business, industrial and commercial, in the hands of the few, and the law of competition between these, as being not only beneficial, but essential for the future progress of the race.”

Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919) American businessman and philanthropist

Source: Wealth, 1889, p. 655

Law, Business, Future

“A widely heralded view holds that nuclear power is experiencing a dramatic worldwide revival and vibrant growth, because it’s competitive, necessary, reliable, secure, and vital for fuel security and climate protection. That’s all false. In fact, nuclear power is continuing its decades-long collapse in the global marketplace because it’s grossly uncompetitive, unneeded, and obsolete—so hopelessly uneconomic that one needn’t debate whether it’s clean and safe; it weakens electric reliability and national security; and it worsens climate change compared with devoting the same money and time to more effective options.”

Amory B. Lovins (1947) American physicist

The Nuclear Illusion http://www.rmi.org/images/PDFs/Energy/E08-01_AmbioNuclIlusion.pdf p. 1. (May 2008)

Money, Change, Time, Falseness

“An ethic, ecologically, is a limitation on freedom of action in the struggle for existence. An ethic, philosophically, is a differentiation of social from anti-social conduct. These are two definitions of one thing. The thing has its origin in the tendency of interdependent individuals or groups to evolve modes of co-operation. The ecologist calls these symbioses. Politics and economics are advanced symbioses in which the original free-for-all competition has been replaced, in part, by co-operative mechanisms with an ethical content.”

Aldo Leopold book A Sand County Almanac

Source: A Sand County Almanac, 1949, "The Land Ethic", p. 202.

Freedom, Parting

“At this time I was hesitant to venture into the greenery, because I wasn't keen on the possibility of having spiders the size of basketballs drop onto my face from overhead branches and refuse to let go. (…) Hunger pains were moving to the 'excruciating' stage by mid-morning. After a last-ditch attempt to extract nutrients from filling my mouth with sand, I decided that, if a big spider the size of a basketball dropped onto my face and tried to eat it, I would eat it back and we could turn the whole thing into an exciting competition.”

Ben Croshaw (1983) English video game journalist

Source: Fullyramblomatic Novels, Fog Juice, Chapter Two

Hunger, Pain, Time

“Optimization is generally detrimental to future success, but it is the only way to accomplish present success in competition with others who are equally interested in short-term results.”

Erik Naggum (1965–2009) Norwegian computer programmer

Re: O'reilly subjugated to the Lisp juggenaut http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/a10d0e7d8e7354b2 (Usenet article). Usenet articles, Miscellaneous

Way, Optimism, Success, Future

“The innovation is hazardous, impossible for most producers. But if someone establishes a business having regard to this source of supply, and everything goes well, then he can produce a unit of product more cheaply, while at first the existing prices substantially continue to exist. He then makes a profit. Again he has contributed nothing but will and action, has done nothing but recombine existing factors. Again he is an entrepreneur, his profit entrepreneurial profit. And again the latter, and also the entrepreneurial function as such, perish in the vortex of the competition which streams after them. The case of the choice of new trade routes belongs here.”

Joseph Alois Schumpeter The Theory of Economic Development

The Theory of Economic Development (1934), Ch. 4 : Entrepreneurial Profit

Business

“In brief, all this Mammon- Gospel, of Supply-and-demand, Competition, Laissez-faire, and Devil take the hindmost, begins to be one of the shabbiest Gospels ever preached on Earth; or altogether the shabbiest.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1840s, Past and Present (1843)

“Surely, the violence and the entity who says, "I must change violence into non-violence", are both the same. To recognize that fact is to put an end to all conflict, is it not? There is no longer the conflict of trying to change, because I see that the very movement of the mind not to be violent is itself the outcome of violence.
So, the questioner wants to know why it is that he cannot go beyond all these superficial wrangles of the mind. For the simple reason that, consciously or unconsciously, the mind is always seeking something, and that very search brings violence, competition, the sense of utter dissatisfaction. It is only when the mind is completely still that there is a possibility of touching the deep waters.”

Jiddu Krishnamurti (1895–1986) Indian spiritual philosopher

Further response to the above question
1950s, Freedom From the Self (1955)

Search, Question, Sense, Water

“Growing up, my diet was pretty easy and simple — I was raised on a vegetarian diet. … When I was 15, I watched the documentary Glass Walls [by PETA] and read The China Study [by T. Colin Campbell], and then it became quite clear to me why I wanted to be vegetarian and why I wanted to adopt a vegan lifestyle. After doing my research, I chose to go vegan and have been dedicated to a vegan diet for four years now. … I feel healthier on a clean, whole foods diet that is very simple — especially during competition. And since a plant-based diet is less calorically dense than other diets, I need to make sure I’m eating enough food so I up my portions a lot. I think of veggies as nutrition and water, not a food where I can get energy so I don’t even count veggies when I’m counting calories and nutrition. For energy, I go to potatoes, whole grains, and starchy veggies. I’m obsessed with carrots and sweet potatoes.”

Tia Blanco (1997)

"Why Surfer Tia Blanco Is Vegan" https://web.archive.org/web/20170315222610/http://www.mensjournal.com:80/health-fitness/articles/why-surfer-tia-blanco-is-vegan-w471552, interview with Men's Journal (March 2017).

Food, Feeling, Thinking, Study

“Lastly, isolation, by checking immigration and consequently competition, will give time for any new variety to be slowly improved; and this may sometimes be of importance in the production of new species. If, however, an isolated area be very small, either from being surrounded by barriers, or from having very peculiar physical conditions, the total number of the individuals supported on it will necessarily be very small; and fewness of individuals will greatly retard the production of new species through natural selection, by decreasing the chance of the appearance of favourable variations.”

Charles Darwin book On the Origin of Species (1859)

This passage has been cited as an anticipation of the idea of punctuated equilibrium. Source: On the Origin of Species (1859), chapter IV: "Natural Selection", page 105 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=120&itemID=F373&viewtype=image

Support, Nature, Appearance, Chance

“It is an easy and patriotic matter for the lawyer, minister, professor, employer, or investor, placed above the arena of competition, to proclaim the equal right of all races to American opportunities; to avow his own willingness to give way should even a better Chinaman, Hindu, or Turk come in to take his place; and to rebuke the racial hatred of those who resist this displacement. His patriotism and world-wide brotherhood cost him and his family nothing, and indeed they add to his profits and leisure.”

John R. Commons (1862–1945) United States institutional economist and labor historian

pgs. 115-16.
Races and Immigrants in America, 1907

World, Family, Way

“The generally accepted image of international trade is one in which a number of trading communities… are engaged in striving each to win for itself, and at the expense of the others, the largest possible share of a strictly limited objective—the world market. … So far as world or international trade is rightly presented as a competitive process, that competition takes place not between America, Britain, Germany, but between a number of separate American, British, German, firms. The immediate interests of these firms is not directed along political lines.”

J.A. Hobson (1858–1940) English economist, social scientist and critic of imperialism

The Morals of Economic Irrationalism (1920)

World, Communication

“# General system theory in the narrower sense (G. S. T.), trying to derive from a general definition of “system” as complex of interacting components, concepts characteristic of organized wholes such as interaction, sum, mechanization, centralization, competition, finality, etc., and to apply them to concrete phenomena.
While systems theory in the broad sense has the character of a basic science, it has its correlate in applied science, sometimes subsumed under the general name of Systems Science.”

Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–1972) austrian biologist and philosopher

Source: General System Theory (1968), 4. Advances in General Systems Theory, p. 90-91

Sense, Science

“The 'enduring theme' [in fiction] of male competition and female competition for the hero/survivor has taken us from the fittest surviving to the brink of no one surviving. Sex roles have gone from functional to dysfunctional almost overnight. This is why the enduring theme must be questioned now.”

Warren Farrell (1943) author, spokesperson, expert witness, political candidate

Source: Why Men Are the Way They Are (1988), p. 91.

Sex, Question

“What's not realized about good novelists is that they're as competitive as good athletes. They study each other — where the other person is good and where the person is less good. Writers are like that but don't admit it.”

Norman Mailer (1923–2007) American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film maker, actor and political candidate

Interview for French TV (1998)

Study, Personality

“Peace has an economic foundation to which too little attention has been given. No student can doubt that it was to a large extent the economic condition of Europe that drove those overburdened countries headlong into the World War. They were engaged in maintaining competitive armaments. If one country laid the keel of one warship, some other country considered it necessary to lay the keel of two warships. If one country enrolled a regiment, some other country enrolled three regiments. Whole peoples were armed and drilled and trained to the detriment of their industrial life, and charged and taxed and assessed until the burden could no longer be borne. Nations cracked under the load and sought relief from the intolerable pressure by pillaging each other. It was to avoid a repetition of such a catastrophe that our Government proposed and brought to a successful conclusion the Washing- ton Conference for the Limitation of Naval Armaments. We have been altogether desirous of an extension of this principle and for that purpose have sent our delegates to a preliminary conference of nations now sitting at Geneva. Out of that conference we expect some practical results. We believe that other nations ought to join with us in laying aside their suspicions and hatreds sufficiently to agree among themselves upon methods of mutual relief from the necessity of the maintenance of great land and sea forces. This can not be done if we constantly have in mind the resort to war for the redress of wrongs and the enforcement of rights. Europe has the League of Nations. That ought to be able to provide those countries with certain political guaranties which our country does not require. Besides this there is the World Court, which can certainly be used for the determination of all justifiable disputes. We should not underestimate the difficulties of European nations, nor fail to extend to them the highest degree of patience and the most sympathetic consideration. But we can not fail to assert our conviction that they are in great need of further limitation of armaments and our determination to lend them every assistance in the solution of their problems. We have entered the conference with the utmost good faith on our part and in the sincere belief that it represents the utmost good faith on their part. We want to see the problems that are there presented stripped of all technicalities and met and solved in a way that will secure practical results. We stand ready to give our support to every effort that is made in that direction.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Ways to Peace (1926)

Life, War, People, World

“Someone [on the staff of The Times] had invented a game – a competition with a small prize for the winner – to see who could write the dullest headline. It had to be a genuine headline, that is to say one which was actually printed in the next morning's newspaper. I won it only once with a headline which announced: "Small Earthquake in Chile. Not many dead."”

Claud Cockburn (1904–1981) Irish journalist

Page 139
No such headline has ever been found in The Times at the period in question (the spring and summer of 1929), though one paragraph reads "An earthquake was felt yesterday between Illapel, to the north, and Talca, to the south, in Chile. No damage was done." (August 6, 1929). Source: The Quote... Unquote Newsletter (October, 2000) pp. 2-3.
A Discord of Trumpets (1956)

Game, Time, Dead

“My interest had been in a broad class of situations, broader than the advanced industrial market economies, including situations in third world countries, and in countries attempting to have some kind of socialist approach to their problems. I have been interested in how one can construct efficient mechanisms that have the decentralization features similar to a market but that do not necessarily resemble a market. For this purpose, I formulated the notion of an informationally-decentralized economy in which perfect competition was just a very special case…”

Leonid Hurwicz (1917–2008) Russian-American economist and mathematician

Source: David Warsh, " The Road to a System that Works (Without Shooting People) http://www.economicprincipals.com/issues/2007.10.21/69.html" at economicprincipals.com, October 21, 2007.

World, Problem, Perfection, Country

“Reproducing sexually must improve an individual´s reproductive success or else sex would not persist… It is increasingly hard to understand how human beings came to be so clever without considering sexual competition.”

Matt Ridley (1958) economist

Source: The Red Queen (1993), Ch. 1. Human Nature

Sex, Understanding, Success

“I think the best thing is being able to play golf competitively for a living. Ever since I was a little boy, that's something I've always wanted to do, and now I get a chance to live out my dreams.”

Tiger Woods (1975) American professional golfer

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0971329/bio

Dreams, Boy, Thinking, Chance

“It is characteristic of the technocracy to render itself invisible. Its assumptions about reality and its values become as unobtrusively pervasive as the air we breathe…. the technocracy increases and consolidates its power… following the dictates of industrial efficiency, rationality, and necessity…. the technocracy assumes a position similar to that of the purely neutral umpire in an athletic contest…. we tend to ignore the man… Yet… he alone sets the limits and goals of the competition and judges the contenders.”

Theodore Roszak (1933–2011) American social historian, social critic, writer

Reality

“In the long run, competitiveness derives from an ability to build, at lower cost and more speedily than competitors, the core competencies that spawn unanticipated products.”

Gary Hamel (1954) American management expert

Source: "The Core Competence of the Corporation," 1990, p. 4

“The present estimated margin between public receipts and expenditures for this fiscal year is very small. Perhaps the most important work that this session of the Congress can do is to continue a policy of economy and further reduce the cost of government, in order that we may have a reduction of taxes for the next fiscal year. Nothing is more likely to produce that public confidence which is the forerunner and the mainstay of prosperity, encourage and enlarge business opportunity with ample opportunity for employment at good wages, provide a larger market for agricultural products, and put our country in a stronger position to be able to meet the world competition in trade, than a continuing policy of economy. Of course necessary costs must be met, proper functions of the Government performed, and constant investments for capital account and reproductive effort must be carried on by our various departments. But the people must know that their Government is placing upon them no unnecessary burden.”

Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933) American politician, 30th president of the United States (in office from 1923 to 1929)

1920s, Second State of the Union Address (1924)

People, World, Confidence, Business

“The size of a firm influences its competitive policies in a number of ways. In the first place the scale of its purchases and sales relative to the total volume of transactions in the firm's market is one indication of the extent of its market control. Taken in conjunction with other data it may throw a good deal of light on price and production policies. Certain authorities, on the other hand, brush aside figures on the relative size of firms as irrelevant and emphasize the decisive importance of the elasticity of the firm's demand curve. 3 It would no doubt be extremely convenient if economists knew the shape of individual demand and cost curves and could proceed forthwith, by comparisons of price and marginal cost, to conclusions regarding the existing degree of monopoly power. The extent to which the monopoly theorists, however, refrain from an empirical application of their formulae is rather striking.”

Edward S. Mason (1899–1992) American economist

Source: "Price and production policies of large-scale enterprise," 1939, p. 62

Way, Decision, Light

“We all know that election reform takes time. That’s because those who have benefited from the system are the ones who fight hardest to preserve it. So if we’re going to succeed, we need an independent coalition of citizens who believe in reform, who believe that our election laws should treat every voter equally, who believe that low levels of competition and participation are not healthy for democracy. The Independence Party is helping to build that coalition and I am happy to join you in doing so.”

Michael Bloomberg (1942) American businessman and politician, former mayor of New York City

http://www.independentvoting.org/Bloomberg.html
Politics

Law, Democracy, Time, Help

“To one extent or another, then, you learn to constantly monitor your behavior, so that it conforms to the established criteria set up for sane or rational experience. You are social creatures, as the animals are. Despite many of your cherished, erroneous beliefs, your nations exist as the result of cooperation, not competition, as do all social groupings.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Session 758, Page 23
The Nature of the Psyche: Its Human Expression (1979)

Behavior, Learning, Animals

“Failing candidate Hillary Clinton, who is desperately trying to hold on to her lead in the democratic primary against Bernie Sanders, is knowingly putting out lies about my stance on illegal immigration. I said "Mexico is sending"— I'm not knocking immigration or immigrants, but rather am very critical of the country of Mexico for sending us people that they don't want. Likewise I am very critical of illegal immigration and the tremendous problems including crime, which it causes. She is desperate, she is sad, and she is obviously very nervous when she has to revert to issues that have already been settled given the absolute accuracy of my statement. She speaks about "my tone" and that's the problem with our country's leaders. They are more worried about tone than results! It's not about being nice— it's about being competent. Hillary should spend more time producing her illegally hidden emails and less time trying to obfuscate a statement by me that is totally clear and obviously very much accepted by the public as true. I am honored, however, that she is attacking me, instead of Jeb Bush. Obviously she knows that JEB is no longer her real competition. The last person she wants to face is Donald Trump.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

Facebook post https://www.facebook.com/DonaldTrump/posts/10155829886030725 (14 July 2015) 2010s, 2015

People, Sadness, Problem, Time

“Competition without solidarity is predator behaviour, especially when competition is rigged in favour of mega-corporations and monopolies.”

Alfred de Zayas (1947) American United Nations official

Report of the Independent Expert on the promotion and protection of all human rights, civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights, including the right to development https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/G16/151/19/PDF/G1615119.pdf?OpenElement. 2016, Report submitted to the UN Human Rights Council

Quotes about competition page 3

Quotes about competition
page 3