Quotes About Competition

Far from being parasitic exploiters of the workers, most businessmen were innovators looking to outwit their rivals, by doing things better or cheaper, and in doing so they inevitably brought improvements to the living standards of consumers. Most

The market is a system of mass cooperation. You compete with rival producers, sure, but you cooperate with your customers, your suppliers and your colleagues. Commerce both needs and breeds trust.

This isn't about auctions,' said Meg Whitman, the chief executive of eBay, 'in fact it's not about economic warfare. It's the opposite.' It was survival of the nicest.

God, Smith just as surely defenestrated Leviathan.

Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!

Smith's genius as an individual, but I have one great advantage over him – I can read his book.

There are few clearings in an elm forest and few vacancies on an oyster bed. Each vacancy will attract many thousands of applicants in the form of new seeds or larvae. Therefore, it does not matter that your young are good enough to survive. What matters is whether they are the very best. Sex gives variety, so sex makes a few of your offspring exceptional and a few abysmal, whereas asex makes them all average.

In the world of the Red Queen, any evolutionary progress will be relative as long as your foe is animate and depends heavily on you or suffers heavily if you thrive, like the seals and the bears. Thus the Red Queen will be especially hard at work among predators and their prey, parasites and their hosts, and males and females of the same species. Every creature on earth is in a Red Queen chess tournament with its parasites (or hosts), its predators (or prey), and, above all, with its mate.

The struggle for existence never gets easier. However well a species may adapt to its environment, it can never relax, because its competitors and its enemies are also adapting to their niches. Survival is a zero-sum game. Success only makes one species a more tempting target for a rival species.

Red Queen theories hold that the world is competitive to the death. It does keep changing. But did we not just hear that species are static for many generations and do not change? Yes. The point about the Red Queen is that she runs but stays in the same place. The world keeps coming back to where it started; there is change but not progress.

Sex, according to the Red Queen theory, has nothing to do with adapting to the inanimate world—becoming bigger or better camouflaged or more tolerant of cold or better at flying—but is all about combating the enemy that fights back.

We use our intellects not to solve practical problems, but to outwit each other. Deceiving people, detecting deceit, understanding people's motives, manipulating people – these are what the intellect is used for.

the beauty of commerce is that when it works it rewards people for solving other people's problems. It is 'best understood as an evolutionary system, constantly creating and trying out new solutions to problems in a similar way to how evolution works in nature. Some solutions are "fitter" than others. The fittest survive and propagate. The unfit die.

Whenever you see the word equilibrium in a textbook, blot it out.' It is wrong because it assumes perfect competition, perfect knowledge and perfect rationality, none of which do or can exist.

Indeed, their bodies are designed with planned obsolescence called ageing that causes them to decay after they reach breeding age – or, in the case of squid or Pacific salmon, to die at once. None of this makes any sense unless you view the body as a vehicle for the genes, as a tool used by genes in their competition to perpetuate themselves. The body's survival is secondary to the goal of

Male gorillas monopolise their mates, so their sperm meets no competitors; male chimpanzees share their mates, so each needs to produce large quantities of sperm and mate frequently to increase his chances of being the father. It also explains why male birds sing so hard when already 'married'. They are looking for 'affairs'.

Market is not the opposite of regulation or government any more than swim meet is the opposite of swimming pool. Every market needs its rules, these rules necessarily come from outside the market itself, and they aren't always written down.

We no longer have natural selection. We have unnatural selection. Survival of the fittest has been replaced by survival of the fakest.

There is nothing so serious as a game.

Games are not fun when you don't know you're playing.

Top Trumps appeared to be a game in which you got cards, and the cards had a picture (in this case, of a horse), and told you all kinds of stats for that horse, how fast it was, how big it was, etc. Whoever had the better horse won both the cards. You repeated this until someone had all the cards. So, basically it was exactly like high school, except it only took three minutes. Which was really a bit more humane, if you thought about it.

You want to play? Ellis yelled. All right, then! I played a lot of video games as a kid, bitches! There! Oliver yelled. That way! Toward Boulevard Périphérique. There! There! The car swerved abruptly to the right. Ginny heard Keith swear for a solid ten seconds.

Yale and Princeton would bite their ivy-covered knuckles in jealousy over the red and gold bricks; tree-lined paths; sculptures; twee, twisting pathways; and Gothic spires.

He was so sick of being with these people all the time. He loved them, sure, but he was finished with it all. The drama. The competition. The never-ending need to impress, to entertain