competitive society Quotes

You can't have a competitive, egalitarian meritocracy if only some of your citizens have the opportunity for a good education.

The price which society pays for the law of competition is also great; but the advantages of the law are greater still.

'You, too, can be the President,' every American kid is told. But one unintended consequence of this belief, it is that, as a result of our being a meritocracy, if you have not succeeded, you are of lesser merit. It is shameful to be a failure in this country.

A capitalist democracy is a competitive society where predatory pressure groups struggle for wealth and prestige and jockey for power.

The professional celebrity, male and female, is the crowning result of the star system of a society that makes a fetish of competition. In America, this system is carried to the point where a man who can knock a small white ball into a series of holes in the ground with more efficiency than anyone else thereby gains social access to the President of the United States.

Grantland Rice told us that it matters not whether you win or lose. It’s how you play the game! I bought that when I was young. Then I found out that it was a lie. America is about winning!

The fundamental defect of fathers, in our competitive society, is that they want their children to be a credit to them. We all feel instinctively, that our children's success reflect glory upon ourselves, while their failures make us feel shame. Unfortunately, the successes which cause us to swell with pride are often of an undesirable kind.... Neither happiness nor virtue, but worldly success, is what the average father desires for his children.

All the world loves a winner and has no time for a loser.

Women were also urged to work on a mysterious quality called 'fascination.' Coming of age in the 1920's was a competitive business.

The fundamental defect of fathers, in our competitive society, is that they want their children to be a credit to them.

The Founding Fathers set up a system that heavily relied upon self-reliance and competition, with only a small dose of government intrusion.

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

The kind of society which we still have is maybe, in some cases, getting worse. Competition is becoming a virtue. Intense competition drives people to go more and more into self-interest. Even to see other folks as competition.

Many economists are great believers in the idea that everything in nature is competitive and that we should set up a society which is competitive to reflect that. Anyone who cannot keep up, well, too bad.

There's no religious test in our country, and there shouldn't be. We're an open, competitive society.

I think very often when we think we are aiming at the best for our children, what we are really doing is trying to position them for competitive success in an intensely driven kind of society. I'm not sure that always leads to the good life or to happiness.

Nobody is glad in the gladness of another, and our system is one of war, of an injurious superiority. Every child of the Saxon race is educated to wish to be first. It is our system; and a man comes to measure his greatness by the regrets, envies, and hatreds of his competitors.

In a competitive world of limited resources, total freedom of individual action is intolerable

In a world as competitive as ours, the child who does not get a decent education is condemned to the fringes of society. I think all Australians agree that this is intolerable. So we must demand as much of our schools as we do of our sports teams - and ensure that they keep the Australian dream alive for every child.

Selsdon Man is designing a system of society for the ruthlessness and the pushing, the uncaring. His message to the rest is: you're out on your own.

We are a democratic, egalitarian people who spend our days desperately trying to climb over each other.

All of us have been trained by education and environment to seek personal gain and security and to fight for ourselves. Though we cover it over with pleasant phrases, we have been educated for various professions within a system which is based on exploitation and acquisitive fear.