Loser To Winner Quotes

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History is always written by the winners. When two cultures clash, the loser is obliterated, and the winner writes the history books-books which glorify their own cause and disparage the conquered foe. As Napoleon once said, 'What is history, but a fable agreed upon?
Dan Brown (The Da Vinci Code (Robert Langdon, #2))
Winners are not afraid of losing. But losers are. Failure is part of the process of success. People who avoid failure also avoid success.
Robert T. Kiyosaki (Rich Dad, Poor Dad)
There are always sides. There is always a winner and a loser. For every person who gets, there's someone who must give.
Jodi Picoult (My Sister’s Keeper)
The act of taking the first step is what separates the winners from the losers.
Brian Tracy
Problem #1: Winners and losers have the same goals.
James Clear (Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones)
winners see the gain; losers see the pain.
Shiv Khera (You Can Win : A Step by Step Tool for Top Achievers)
In this world, whenever there is light, there are also shadows. As long as the concept of winners exist, there must also be losers. The selfish desire of wanting to maintain peace causes wars and hatred is born to protect love.
Masashi Kishimoto
We all got to be winners sometimes. But what he didn’t understand was that we all had to be losers, too. Because you can’t have one without the other.
Jennifer Brown (Hate List)
Doing the tough things sets winners apart from losers.
Stephen Richards (Cosmic Ordering: You can be successful)
The difference between winners and losers is that winners do things losers don't want to do.
Phillip C. McGraw
What separates the winners from the losers is how a person reacts to each new twist of fate.
Donald J. Trump
Where's the pleasure in bein' the winner if the loser ain't alive to know they've lost?
Terry Pratchett (Witches Abroad (Discworld, #12; Witches, #3))
Winners and losers aren't born, they are the products of how they think
Lou Holtz
I'd rather be your loser than some other girl's winner.
Chelsea M. Cameron (My Favorite Mistake (My Favorite Mistake, #1))
There doesn’t need to be a winner and a loser. You just have to care how the other person feels. You have to care more about them than you do about being right.
Emily Henry (Happy Place)
What a lousy earth! He wondered how many people were destitute that same night even in his own prosperous country, how many homes were shanties, how many husbands were drunk and wives socked, and how many children were bullied, abused, or abandoned. How many families hungered for food they could not afford to buy? How many hearts were broken? How many suicides would take place that same night, how many people would go insane? How many cockroaches and landlords would triumph? How many winners were losers, successes failures, and rich men poor men? How many wise guys were stupid? How many happy endings were unhappy endings? How many honest men were liars, brave men cowards, loyal men traitors, how many sainted men were corrupt, how many people in positions of trust had sold their souls to bodyguards, how many had never had souls? How many straight-and-narrow paths were crooked paths? How many best families were worst families and how many good people were bad people? When you added them all up and then subtracted, you might be left with only the children, and perhaps with Albert Einstein and an old violinist or sculptor somewhere.
Joseph Heller (Catch-22)
A winner knows how much he still has to learn, even when he is considered an expert by others; a loser wants to be considered an expert by others before he has learned enough to know how little he knows.
Sydney J. Harris
Success in life is not for those who run fast, but for those who keep running and always on the move.
Bangambiki Habyarimana (Pearls Of Eternity)
H is for Habit, winners make a habit of doing the things losers don't want to do.
Lucas Remmerswaal (The A-Z of 13 Habits: Inspired by Warren Buffett)
A winner is just a loser who tried one more time.
George Moore
Law is made by the winner to preserve victory over the loser.
Toba Beta (Betelgeuse Incident: Insiden Bait Al-Jauza)
Winners will be losers if they don't support the losers.
Arthur Hailey
A person either hates losing enough to change or he hates changing enough to lose.
Orrin Woodward
Losers, like autodidacts, always know much more than winners. If you want to win, you need to know just one thing and not to waste your time on anything else: the pleasures of erudition are reserved for losers. The more a person knows, the more things have gone wrong.
Umberto Eco (Numero Zero)
REMEMBER YOUR GREATNESS Before you were born, And were still too tiny for The human eye to see, You won the race for life From among 250 million competitors. And yet, How fast you have forgotten Your strength, When your very existence Is proof of your greatness. You were born a winner, A warrior, One who defied the odds By surviving the most gruesome Battle of them all. And now that you are a giant, Why do you even doubt victory Against smaller numbers, And wider margins? The only walls that exist, Are those you have placed in your mind. And whatever obstacles you conceive, Exist only because you have forgotten What you have already Achieved. Poetry by Suzy Kassem
Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
People don't change. There are two kinds of people in the world: winners and losers. Black and white. I don't know where gray fits in, or if you can even live in that shade.
Julie Anne Peters (By the Time You Read This, I'll Be Dead)
Losers have goals. Winners have systems.
Timothy Ferriss (Tools of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers)
Long before I became a feminist in any explicit way, I had turned from writing love stories about women in which women were losers, and adventure stories about men in which the men were winners, to writing adventure stories about a woman in which the woman won. It was one of the hardest things I ever did in my life.
Joanna Russ
The gain to the winner is always less than the loss to the loser.
Ian Fleming (Live and Let Die (James Bond, #2))
A loser doesn’t know what he’ll do if he loses but talks about what he’ll do if he wins and a winner doesn’t talk about what he’ll do if he wins but knows what he’ll do if he loses.
Eric Berne
This is a war universe. War all the time. That is its nature. There may be other universes based on all sorts of other principles, but ours seems to be based on war and games. All games are basically hostile. Winners and losers. We see them all around us: the winners and the losers. The losers can oftentimes become winners, and the winners can very easily become losers.
William S. Burroughs
You were not born a winner, and you were not born a loser. You are what you make yourself be.
Lou Holtz
If losers can exploit what their adversaries teach them, yes, losers can become winners in the long term.
David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas)
You were born a winner, a warrior, one who defied the odds by surviving the most gruesome battle of them all - the race to the egg. And now that you are a giant, why do you even doubt victory against smaller numbers and wider margins? The only walls that exist are those you have placed in your mind. And whatever obstacles you conceive, exist only because you have forgotten what you have already achieved.
Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
Losers have goals. Winners have systems.
Scott Adams
Obstacles are challenges for winners and excuses for losers
M.E. Kerr
I have seen flowers come in stony places And kind things done by men with ugly faces, And the gold cup won by the worst horse at the races, So I trust, too.
John Masefield
Part of being a big winner is the ability to be a big loser. There is no paradox involved. It is a distinctly Harvard thing to be able to turn any defeat into victory
Erich Segal
So winners, Hae-Joo proposed, are the real losers because they learn nothing? What, then, are losers? Winners?
David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas)
Wars make history seem deceptively simple. They provide clear turning points, easy distinctions.: before and after, winner and loser, right and wrong. True history, the past, is not like that. It isn't flat or linear. It has no outline. It is slippery, like liquid; infinite and unknowable, like space. And it is changeable: just when you think you see a pattern, perspective shifts, an alternate version is proffered, a long-forgotten memory resurfaces.
Kate Morton (The House at Riverton)
They ought to do away with divorce settlements. Instead, both parties should flip a coin. The winner gets to stay where he or she is and keep everything. The loser goes to Paraguay. That´s it.
Suzanne Finnamore (Split: A Memoir of Divorce)
THE GREATEST DISAPPOINTMENT IS WINNING ALL THE BATTLES THEN LOSING THE WAR
Mouloud Benzadi
Discourage litigation. Persuade your neighbors to compromise whenever you can. Point out to them how the nominal winner is often a real loser - in fees, expenses, and waste of time. As a peacemaker the lawyer has a superior opportunity of being a good man. There will still be business enough.
Abraham Lincoln
Non-violence means dialogue, using our language, the human language. Dialogue means compromise; respecting each other’s rights; in the spirit of reconciliation there is a real solution to conflict and disagreement. There is no hundred percent winner, no hundred percent loser—not that way but half-and-half. That is the practical way, the only way.
Dalai Lama XIV
I have to introduce the part of me that feels like a winner to the part of me convinced I’m a loser, and see if they can’t agree to exist somewhere closer to the middle.
Lauren Graham
The measure of a man's real character is what he would do if he knew he would never be found out.
Greg Laurie (Losers and Winners, Saints and Sinners: How to Finish Strong in the Spiritual Race)
Don’t be disappointed, the winning side is not always the right one.
M.F. Moonzajer
Peace We passed their graves: The dead men there, Winners or losers, Did not care. In the dark They could not see Who had gained The victory.
Langston Hughes
The winner is just the loser who never gave up!
Mika (The Small Stock Trader) (The Small Stock Trader)
Remember, it's the winners write the history books, and the losers get the leavings.
Joanne Harris
Winners have no interest or association in the opinions, actions or affairs of losers.
Jeffrey Fry
The difference between winners and losers is... winners provide energy while losers consume energy.
Meir Ezra
I have it in my head that when we’re born, God writes things down on our hearts. See, on some people’s hearts he writes “happy” and on some people’s hearts he writes “sad” and on some people’s hearts he writes “crazy” and on some people’s hearts he writes “genius” and on some people’s hearts he writes “angry” and on some people’s hearts he writes “winner” and on some people’s hearts he writes “loser.” I keep seeing a newspaper being tossed around in the wind. And then a strong gust comes along and the newspaper is thrown against a barbed wire fence and it gets ripped to shreds in an instant. That’s how I feel. I think God is the wind. It’s all like a game to him. Him. God. And it’s all pretty much random. He takes out his pen and starts writing on our blank hearts. When it came to my turn, he wrote “sad.” I don’t like God very much. Apparently, he doesn’t like me very much either.
Benjamin Alire Sáenz (Last Night I Sang to the Monster)
I just keep losing. I mean, some people just...are supposed to lose? For balance in the universe? I mean, like, are there just some people on earth who...are supposed to be here just to make it easier for the winners?
Donald Glover
There's two kinds of people in this world, there's winners and there's losers. Okay, you know what the difference is? Winners don't give up.--Little Miss Sunshine
Richard Hoover
Is it always to be a winners-losers world, or can we keep everyone in the game? Do we still have what it takes to find a better way?
Robert Fulghum (Maybe, Maybe Not)
In the game of life; Sometimes we win, Sometimes we loss, Either ways, we should always keep playing.
Lailah Gifty Akita (Think Great: Be Great! (Beautiful Quotes, #1))
Be brave. Even if you're not, pretend to be. No one can tell the difference. Don't allow the phone to interrupt important moments. It's there for your convenience, not the callers. Don't be afraid to go out on a limb. That's where the fruit is. Don't burn bridges. You'll be surprised how many times you have to cross the same river. Don't forget, a person's greatest emotional need is to feel appreciated. Don't major in minor things. Don't say you don't have enough time. You have exactly the same number of hours per day that were given to Pasteur, Michaelangelo, Mother Teresa, Helen Keller, Leonardo Da Vinci, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein. Don't spread yourself too thin. Learn to say no politely and quickly. Don't use time or words carelessly. Neither can be retrieved. Don't waste time grieving over past mistakes Learn from them and move on. Every person needs to have their moment in the sun, when they raise their arms in victory, knowing that on this day, at his hour, they were at their very best. Get your priorities straight. No one ever said on his death bed, 'Gee, if I'd only spent more time at the office'. Give people a second chance, but not a third. Judge your success by the degree that you're enjoying peace, health and love. Learn to listen. Opportunity sometimes knocks very softly. Leave everything a little better than you found it. Live your life as an exclamation, not an explanation. Loosen up. Relax. Except for rare life and death matters, nothing is as important as it first seems. Never cut what can be untied. Never overestimate your power to change others. Never underestimate your power to change yourself. Remember that overnight success usually takes about fifteen years. Remember that winners do what losers don't want to do. Seek opportunity, not security. A boat in harbor is safe, but in time its bottom will rot out. Spend less time worrying who's right, more time deciding what's right. Stop blaming others. Take responsibility for every area of your life. Success is getting what you want. Happiness is liking what you get. The importance of winning is not what we get from it, but what we become because of it. When facing a difficult task, act as though it's impossible to fail.
Jackson H. Brown Jr.
You don't need to work hard to earn an empire; there is an army of slaves to do it for you.
Bangambiki Habyarimana (Pearls Of Eternity)
An entrepreneur is a man who knows he can fail, but he does not accept to fail before he actually fails, and when he fails he learns from his errors and moves on.
Bangambiki Habyarimana (Pearls Of Eternity)
Associating with winners may not make you a winner, but associating with losers will definitely not make you one.
Jeffrey Fry
This world was designed to generate winners and losers, and it showed a lack of character to wish yourselves a winner without accepting what it does to those who lose.
Jonathan Sims (Thirteen Storeys)
It’s important never to be ‘ambitious.’ Men of ‘ambition’ are losers. Act and feel like a winner and good things, friends, and victory will come.
Bronze Age Pervert (Bronze Age Mindset)
Magic always happens when you direct your inner powers to the object you want to change.
Bangambiki Habyarimana (Pearls Of Eternity)
Nothing says "you're a loser" more than owning a motivational poster about being a winner.
Justin Sewell
You crave winning and fear losing instead of just doing. To succeed you must remove your self-imposed limitations.
Wayne Gerard Trotman (Veterans of the Psychic Wars)
You aren't born a winner, you aren't born a loser, you're born a chooser.
Shawn L. Harper
Most important, understand that goals are for losers and systems are for winners.
Scott Adams (How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life)
In a way, Nick had been right: We all got to be winners sometimes. But what he didn't understand was that we all had to be losers, too. Because you can't have one without the other.
Jennifer Brown (Hate List)
But it is very, very rare that young white Americans come across someone who tells them in harsh, unforgiving terms that they might be merely the easy winners of an ugly game, and indeed because of their ignorance and misused power, they might actually be the losers within a greater moral universe.
Suzy Hansen (Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World)
Never seek to please anyone. Seek to evolve thyself.
Lailah Gifty Akita (Pearls of Wisdom: Great mind)
Guns make losers feel like winners. That's why people who suck at life don't want to give up their guns.
Oliver Markus Malloy (Inside The Mind of an Introvert)
If you have an orderly mind, you'll be a winner no matter where you end up. If your mind is a jumble of junk, you'll be a loser. It's as simple as that.
Jack Gantos (Jack on the Tracks: Four Seasons of Fifth Grade (Jack Henry, #4))
Treason is a charge invented by winners as an excuse for hanging the losers.
Sherman Edwards (1776: A Musical Play)
Life is unfair and there are winners and losers, regardless of how much overprotective parents attempt to shield their offspring from reality.
Jen Lancaster (Jeneration X: One Reluctant Adult's Attempt to Unarrest Her Arrested Development; Or, Why It's Never Too Late for Her Dumb Ass to Learn Why Froot Loops Are Not for Dinner)
People who hold important positions in society are commonly labelled "somebodies," and their inverse "nobodies"-both of which are, of course, nonsensical descriptors, for we are all, by necessity, individuals with distinct identities and comparable claims on existence. Such words are nevertheless an apt vehicle for conveying the disparate treatment accorded to different groups. Those without status are all but invisible: they are treated brusquely by others, their complexities trampled upon and their singularities ignored.
Alain de Botton (Status Anxiety)
Never bring a lot of money to where a poor man lives. He can only lose what little he has. On the other hand it is mathematically possible that he might win whatever you bring with you. What you must do, with money and the poor, is never let them get too close to one another.
Charles Bukowski (Ham on Rye)
Why did her family think pachinko was so terrible? Her father, a traveling salesman, had sold expensive life insurance policies to isolated housewives who couldn't afford them, and Mozasu created spaces where grown men and women could play pinball for money. Both men had made money from chance and fear and loneliness. Every morning, Mozasu and his men tinkered with the machines to fix the outcomes--there could only be a few winners and a lot of losers. And yet we played on, because we had hope that we might be the lucky ones. How could you get angry at the ones who wanted to be in the game? Etsuko had failed in this important way--she had not taught her children to hope, to believe in the perhaps-absurd possibility that they might win. Pachinko was a foolish game, but life was not.
Min Jin Lee (Pachinko)
That's what war was. A great motion and then a great stillness in which the winner crouches and the loser lies facing the sky.
Kathy Hepinstall (Blue Asylum)
Those reasons are much more basic: it is flagrantly unjust to keep women out, by whatever unconscious means we do so; and we simply cannot afford to do without women’s expertise, whether it is in technology, the economy or social care. If that means fewer men get into the legislature, as it must do – social change always has its losers as well as its winners – I am happy to look those men in the eye.
Mary Beard (Women & Power: A Manifesto)
Missing once is an accident. Missing twice is the start of a new habit. This is a distinguishing feature between winners and losers. Anyone can have a bad performance, a bad workout, or a bad day at work. But when successful people fail, they rebound quickly. The breaking of a habit doesn’t matter if the reclaiming of it is fast. I think this principle is so important that I’ll stick to it even if I can’t do a habit as well or as completely as I would like. Too often, we fall into an all-or-nothing cycle with our habits. The problem is not slipping up; the problem is thinking that if you can’t do something perfectly, then you shouldn’t do it at all.
James Clear (Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones)
You can perhaps, in a number of circumstances, tell yourself that you can't have more than you have until you do better than you're doing, but by all means steer clear of its reverse, the creed of defeat, in saying that you can't do better than you're doing until you can have more than you have.
Criss Jami (Healology)
I've come to realize that life is neither a battle nor a game to be won, it is a game nonetheless, but to be played... enjoyed. There are neither winners nor losers... just players--and what's great is that you can choose who to play with
Val Uchendu
Every morning, Mozasu and his men tinkered with the machines to fix the outcomes-there could only be a few winners and a lot of losers. And yet we played on, because we had hope that we might be the lucky ones. How could you get angry at the ones who wanted to be in the game?
Min Jin Lee (Pachinko)
If I had to name my disability, I would call it an unwillingness to fall. On the one hand, this is perfectly normal. I do not know anyone who likes to fall. But, on the other hand, this reluctance signals mistrust of the central truth of the Christian gospel: life springs from death, not only at the last but also in the many little deaths along the way. When everything you count on for protection has failed, the Divine Presence does not fail. The hands are still there – not promising to rescue, not promising to intervene – promising only to hold you no matter how far you fall. Ironically, those who try hardest not to fall learn this later than those who topple more easily. The ones who find their lives are the losers, while the winners come in last.
Barbara Brown Taylor (Leaving Church: A Memoir of Faith)
So, if I'm no cheerleader of sports, why write a chapter about it? Sports do have some positive impact on society. They solve problems, such as how to get inner-city kids to spend $175 on shoes. They serve as a backdrop for some of our most memorable commercials. And they remain the one and only relevant application of math. Not only that, but we have sports to thank for most of the last century's advances in manliness. The system starts in school, where gym class separates the men from the boys. Then those men are taught to be winners, or at least, losers that hate themselves.
Stephen Colbert (I Am America (And So Can You!))
So what does the winner get in the end?" Tate asked. "They get to sit around with the losers and say, 'I am King Xavier of the world.' Repeat after me." "And me?" Tate asked. "You get to be my queen." "How come you're the leader of the community?" Narnie asked, almost smiling. "Why can't Tate be?" Webb looked at his sister, grinning. "Why can't you, Narnie?" Fitz leaned his head on Narnie's shoulder. "And I'll be your queen?" "You can be the eunuch," Jude said, shoving him out of the way, "and I'll be her prince." He bowed and took Narnie's hand, kissing it, and their eyes met. It was awkward for a moment until Narnie looked away.
Melina Marchetta (On the Jellicoe Road)
No man will love you, though you gave your life for him, unless you have a pretty face. So (might it not be?), the gods will not love you (however you try to pleasure them, and whatever you suffer) unless you have that beauty of soul. In either race. for the love of men or the love of a god, the winners and losers are marked out from birth. We bring our ugliness, in both kinds, with us into the world, with it our destiny.
C.S. Lewis (Till We Have Faces)
What is life? Life is living in this moment, experiencing and experimenting but experience isn’t life. Life is reflecting and meditating but reflection isn’t life. Life is helping and guiding but philanthropy isn’t life. Life is eating and drinking but food isn’t life. Life is reading and dancing but art isn’t life. Life is kissing and pleasuring but sex isn’t life. Life is winning and losing but competition isn’t life. Life is loving and caring but love isn’t life. Life is birthing and nurturing but children aren’t life. Life is letting go and surrendering but death isn’t life. Life is all these things but all these things aren’t life. Life is always more.
Kamand Kojouri
In the wake of the Neoliberal proclamation of the end of class struggle, the only social categories remaining are winner and loser. No more capitalists and workers; no more exploiters and exploited. Either you are strong and smart, or you deserve your misery. The establishment of capitalist absolutism is based on the mass adhesion...to the philosophy of natural selection. The mass murderer is someone who believes in the right of the fittest and the strongest to win in the social game, but he also knows or senses that he is not the fittest or the strongest. So he opts for the only possible act of retaliation and self assertion: to kill and be killed.
Franco "Bifo" Berardi (Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide (Futures))
When the fight ends you can afford to relax. That’s the worst part. Winner or loser you have again eyes to see around you. Blood, butchered bodies, bodies pierced by arrows. You stir inside, your heart tightens, the feeling of loss wells up. The sense of smell is the next thing to revive, adding a new dimension of pain. I closed the eyes of the last cadet, blue eyes, unseeing, his body, so small, almost a child, the youngest cadets were all gone, their faces surprised in death. Cold lips never able again to kiss a girl. It’s then that the emptiness swallows you and you mourn inside. Damn you, Scharon. No! Damn you, Travellers.
Florian Armas (Io Deceneus: Journal of a Time Traveler (The Living Universe, #1))
Here we are on top of the world. We have arrived at this peak to stay there forever. There is, of course, this thing called history. But history is something unpleasant that happens to other people. —Arnold Toynbee, recalling the 1897 diamond jubilee celebration of Queen Victoria   Like other practicing historians, I am often asked what the “lessons of history” are. I answer that the only lesson I have learnt from studying the past is that there are no permanent winners and losers. —Ramachandra Guha
Graham Allison (Destined For War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides's Trap?)
This is the explanation I used to have on the site before my page got turned into an author's page. Don't get butt hurt if I give you a 2 or 3 star rating. That means your book was good. I give very few 4 star ratings cause that means your book is gonna be a reread for me. I don't reread a lot of books. I think I gave less than a handful of 5 stars. 5 stars means that I think the book is a GREAT GREAT. Like a classic that will still be read in a 100 years, at least if I were alive it would be. As you can see I don't buy into the hoopla that everybody is great. It's not true. Most are average. Some suck. Some are great. If you want a visual go google bell curve. Life has winners and losers. Not everyone deserves a gold star. Suck it up.
D.R. Slaten
I would like to see you. But: I would only like to see you with your feeling space, and desire, the parents of bravery, and curiosity. I would like you to want to see me without you feeling seduced or pressured. I would like to see you without our playing games: for games are for winners and losers and I do not ever want to win against you, or for you to lose against me, and I do not want to lose against you or for you to win against me. For we are part of the whole, the main, as Donne said—and your gain is mine and my loss is yours. Love is about finding one’s match, which means we shall touch our minds and hearts together at once, and never condescend or aim for any goal between us but the truth.
Waylon H. Lewis (Things I Would Like To Do With You)
Live in the world without any idea of what is going to happen. Whether you are going to be a winner or a loser, it doesn’t matter. Death takes everything away. Whether you lose or win is immaterial. The only thing that matters, and it has always been so, is how you played the game. Did you enjoy it?—the game itself? Then each moment is a moment of joy. ALSO BY OSHO INSIGHTS FOR A NEW WAY OF LIVING SERIES Awareness: The Key to Living in Balance Courage: The Joy of Living Dangerously Creativity: Unleashing the Forces Within Intimacy: Trusting Oneself and the Other Intuition: Knowing Beyond Logic Maturity: The Responsibility of Being Oneself OTHER BOOKS Autobiography of a Spiritually Incorrect Mystic The Book of Secrets India My Love: A Spiritual Journey Love, Freedom, and Aloneness Meditation: The First and Last Freedom
Osho (Joy: The Happiness That Comes from Within)
There was nothing worse, Veppers thought, than a loser who’d made it. It was just part of the way things worked – part of the complexity of life, he supposed – that sometimes somebody who absolutely deserved nothing more than to be one of the down-trodden, the oppressed, the dregs of society, lucked out into a position of wealth, power and admiration. At least people who were natural winners knew how to carry themselves in their pomp, whether their ascendancy had come through the luck of being born rich and powerful or the luck of being born ambitious and capable. Losers who’d made it always let the side down. Veppers was all for arrogance – he possessed the quality in full measure himself, as he’d often been informed – but it had to be deserved, you had to have worked for it. Or at the very least, an ancestor had to have worked for it. Arrogance without cause, arrogance without achievement – or that mistook sheer luck for true achievement – was an abomination. Losers made everybody look bad. Worse, they made the whole thing – the great game that was life – appear arbitrary, almost meaningless. Their only use, Veppers had long since decided, was as examples to be held up to those who complained about their lack of status or money or control over their lives: look, if this idiot can achieve something, so can anybody, so can you. So stop whining about being exploited and work harder. Still, at least individual losers were quite obviously statistical freaks. You could allow for that, you could tolerate that, albeit with gritted teeth. What he would not have believed was that you could find an entire society – an entire civilization– of losers who’d made it.
Iain Banks (Surface Detail (Culture, #9))
What, after all this time, is the purpose of mass schooling supposed to be? Reading, writing, and arithmetic can’t be the answer, because properly approached those things take less than a hundred hours to transmit — and we have abundant evidence that each is readily self-taught in the right setting and time. Why, then, are we locking kids up in an involuntary network with strangers for twelve years? Surely not so a few of them can get rich? Even if it worked that way, and I doubt that it does, why wouldn’t any sane community look on such an education as positively wrong? It divides and classifies people, demanding that they compulsively compete with each other, and publicly labels the losers by literally de-grading them, identifying them as “low-class” material. And the bottom line for the winners is that they can buy more stuff! I don’t believe that anyone who thinks about that feels comfortable with such a silly conclusion. I can’t help feeling that if we could only answer the question of what it is that we want from these kids we lock up, we would suddenly see where we took a wrong turn. I have enough faith in American imagination and resourcefulness to believe that at that point we’d come up with a better way — in fact, a whole supermarket of better ways.
John Taylor Gatto (Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling)
I don't know that you'll understand this, but once upon a time, long ago, I was a scholar and a marathon man, but that fella's gone now, dead I suppose, but I remember something he thought, which was that if you don't learn the mistakes of the past, you'll be doomed to repeat them. Well we've been making a mistake with people like you, because public trials are bullshit and executions are games for winners - all this time we should have been giving back pain. That's the real lesson. That's the loser's share, just pain, pure and simple, pain and torture, no hotshot lawyers running around trying to see that justice is done. I think we'd have a nice peaceful place here if all you warmakers knew you better not start something because if you lost, agony was just around the bend. That's what I'd like to give you. Agony. Not what you're suffering now. I mean a lifetime of it, 'cause that's the only degree of justice I think we're ready for down here yet, and I know any humanist might disagree with me too, but I don't think you will, because you had a lot to do with educating me, I'm like you now, except I'm better at it, because you're going to die and I've still got a long way to go.
William Goldman (Marathon Man)
You were born a giver, don't die a taker. You were born an earner, don't die a begger. You were born a sharer, don't die a hoader. You were born a lover, don't die a hater. You were born a builder, don't die a destroyer. You were born a creator, don't die an immitator. You were born a leader, don't die a follower. You were born a learner, don't die a teacher. You were born a doer, don't die a talker. You were born a dreamer, don't die a doubter. You were born a winner, don't die a loser. You were born an encourager, don't die a shamer. You were born a defender, don't die an aggressor. You were born a liberator, don't die an executioner. You were born a soldier, don't die a murderer. You were born an angel, don't die a monster. You were born a protecter, don't die an attacker. You were born an originator, don't die a repeater. You were born an achiever, don't die a quitter. You were born a victor, don't die a failure. You were born a conqueror, don't die a warrior. You were born a contender, don't die a joker. You were born a producer, don't die a user. You were born a motivator, don't die a discourager. You were born a master, don't die an amateur. You were born an intessessor, don't die an accusor. You were born an emancipator, don't die a backstabber. You were born a sympathizer, don't die a provoker. You were born a healer, don't die a killer. You were born a peacemaker, don't die an instigater. You were born a deliverer, don't die a collaborator. You were born a savior, don't die a plunderer. You were born a believer, don't die a sinner.
Matshona Dhliwayo
Speaking truth to bullshit and practicing civility start with knowing ourselves and knowing the behaviors and issues that both push into our own BS or get in the way of being civil. If we go back to BRAVING and our trust checklist, these situations require a keen eye on: 1. Boundaries. What’s okay in a discussion and what’s not? How do you set a boundary when you realize you’re knee-deep in BS? 2. Reliability. Bullshitting is the abandonment of reliability. It’s hard to trust or be trusted when we BS too often. 3. Accountability. How do we hold ourself and others accountable for less BS and more honest debate? Less off-loading of emotion and more civility? 4. Vault. Civility honors confidentiality. BS ignores truth and opens the door to violations of confidentiality. 5. Integrity. How do we stay in our integrity when confronted with BS, and how do we stop in the midst of our own emotional moment to say, “You know what, I’m not sure this conversation is productive” or “I need to learn more about this issue”? 6. Nonjudgment. How do we stay out of judgment toward ourselves when the right thing to do is say, “I actually don’t know much about this. Tell me what you know and why it’s important to you.” How do we not go into “winner/loser” mode and instead see an opportunity for connection when someone says to us, “I don’t know anything about that issue”? 7. Generosity. What’s the most generous assumption we can make about the people around us? What boundaries have to be in place for us to be kinder and more tolerant? I know that the practice of speaking truth to bullshit while being civil feels like a paradox, but both are profoundly important parts of true belonging.
Brené Brown (Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone)