Quotes About Competition

We look on childhood and youth as those "times of life" rich with possibility only because there still seem to remain so many paths open to a successful outcome. Each year that passes, however, increases the competitive value of making strategically correct decisions. The errors of childhood can be more easily amended than those of adulthood.

THERE ARE at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite, the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.

a finite game is to be won by someone it must come to a definitive end. It will come to an end when someone has won. We know that someone has won the game when all the players have agreed who among them is the winner. No other condition than the agreement of the players is absolutely required in determining who has won the game.

What one wins in a finite game is a title. A title is the acknowledgment of others that one has been the winner of a particular game. Titles are public. They are for others to notice. I expect others to address me according to my titles, but I do not address myself with them—unless, of course, I address myself as an other. The effectiveness of a title depends on its visibility, its noticeability to others.

Just as it is essential for a finite game to have a definitive ending, it must also have a precise beginning. Therefore, we can speak of finite games as having temporal boundaries—to which, of course, all players must agree. But players must agree to the establishment of spatial and numerical boundaries as well. That is, the game must be played within a marked area, and with specified players.

What is preserved by the constancy of numerical boundaries, of course, is the possibility that all contestants can agree on an eventual winner.

In one respect, but only one, an infinite game is identical to a finite game: Of infinite players we can also say that if they play they play freely; if they must play, they cannot play. Otherwise, infinite and finite play stand in the sharpest possible contrast.

If finite games must be externally bounded by time, space, and number, they must also have internal limitations on what the players can do to and with each other. To agree on internal limitations is to establish rules of play.

By contrast, infinite players have no interest in seduction or in restricting the freedom of another to one's own boundaries of play. Infinite players recognize choice in all aspects of sexuality. They may see in themselves and in others, for example, the infant's desire to compete for the mother, but they also see that there is neither physiological nor societal destiny in sexual patterns. Who chooses to compete with another can also choose to play with another.

The outcome of a finite game is the past waiting to happen. Whoever plays toward a certain outcome desires a particular past. By competing for a future prize, finite players compete for a prized past.

War is not an act of unchecked ruthlessness but a declared contest between bounded societies, or states. If a state has no enemies it has no boundaries.

It is convenient to think that sexual misfits violate rules. The matter is subtler by far. They are not concerned to oppose the rules themselves but to engage in competitive struggle by way of those rules. Sexual attractiveness, or sexiness, is effective only to the degree that someone is offended by it.

Sexuality is the only finite game in which the winner's prize is the defeated opponent.

Esto es una selva donde nos despedazamos todos: sólo sobreviven los más fuertes y los débiles se destruyen". -La Máquina Génesis.

Yeesh. I didn't exactly love the idea of racing against Bigs Maloney. I'd rather go swimming with Orca the Killer Whale.

In a competitive society, the thing people fear the most is love.

Nations that embrace the free market to the greatest extent prosper the most.

We humans have always sought to increase our personal energy in the only manner we have known, by seeking to psychologically steal it from the others--an unconscious competition that underlies all human conflict in the world.

The strong were always eating the weak.

As an example, one of the schools I have been studying is too small to compete effectively in most sports, but participates with vigor each year in the state music contests.

And LO and BEHOLD, I was on BOTH the six AND eleven o'clock newscasts! AND all the commercials, as well! ('Day of the drag queen at one area high school, controversy at six!') And it must have been a slow night because I was the SECOND PIECE of the night! The granny suicide bomber got the lead. BITCH! But I managed to beat out the president's pulled groin and day six of the Jessica Simpson chapped-lip crisis!

What makes a system successful is its ability to recognize losers and kill them quickly. Or, rather, what makes a system successful is its ability to generate lots of losers and then to recognize them as such and kill them off. Sometimes the messiest approach is the wisest.

This means that thousands of wine firms must compete to sell their products through a relatively small number of highly concentrated distributors.

The flames of a new economic evolution run around us, and we turn to find that competition has killed competition, that corporations are grown greater than the State . . . and that the naked issue of our time is with property becoming master, instead of servant.