Quotes About One-upmanship

Humor was a big part of my childhood. My family was full of comedians. We'd sit around the dinner table and try to one-up each other. It sometimes ended in tears, but usually in laughter.

So much of what passes for conversation today is degraded. It's either about one-upmanship, or dreary trivia. Even the cut and thrust of wit and bons mots is a form of bedazzlement designed to stop conversations dead rather than broaden them.

I think everyone can recognize the one-upmanship and the competition that go on wherever you are, especially among groups where the women don't have to hold down office jobs and instead get in a total snit about who won the longest carrot contest or took first prize for summer chutney in the August fete.

And no doubt there was also a hint of one-upmanship in Debbie not passing on the information to the SIO in charge of her sister's case. It was human nature to get resentful and bloody-minded when pressed too far, after all.

I do love one-upmanship sometimes, like when you see kids breakdancing and who can do the best tricks. It's common, it's in our nature as animals, like the birds of paradise who've got the best feathers and that sort of stuff. But it's fun when it's impulsive and it's about fun.

I think one reason we admire cats, those of us who do, is their proficiency in one-upmanship. They always seem to come out on top, no matter what they are doing - or pretend they do. Rarely do you see a cat discomfited. They have no conscience, and they never regret. Maybe we secretly envy them.

Have to do what? One-upmanship. I kill one, you have to kill two. The big bad hunter flexing his muscles. It's annoying. You are not going to whine simply because I have superior hunting skills, are you? He rubbed her knuckles along his jaw, wanting the contact. Needing to show her what he felt too deeply to say. It did not occur to me you would whine.

Underground people pay a desperate toll finding out things nobody else has discovered yet. We run around like headless chickens looking for the next cultural fix to spiral around in before it gets appropriated somewhere else and becomes something it never was. There's this sort of one-upmanship in the underground.

My brothers must be as tired of this as I, dragging love as a tally board behind us, marking off an endless but complex math of ego and one-upmanship and debt. But the men who came before us didn't teach us another way.

In the metropolitan haunts of the highly sophisticated, the cocktail is no longer an instrument of friendship but a competitive fashion statement, or one-upmanship.

So we thrash about in a pool of comparison and one-upmanship. Our lives become burdened by the heaviness of getting it right. Our joy becomes brittle, and our hearts slowly break. The only possible outcome of this hurry-up-and-matter hustle is the slow crushing of our souls.

The abuser's worth is derived from a sense of one-upmanship and winning over. If the partner accomplishes something, the abuser views her accomplishment