One Upmanship Quotes

How You Doing, Little Lucy?” His bright tone and mild expression indicates we’re playing a game we almost never play. It’s a game called How You Doing? and it basically starts off like we don’t hate each other. We act like normal colleagues who don’t want to swirl their hands in each other’s blood. It’s disturbing. “Great, thanks, Big Josh. How You Doing?” “Super. Gonna go get coffee. Can I get you some tea?” He has his heavy black mug in his hand. I hate his mug. I look down; my hand is already holding my red polka-dot mug. He’d spit in anything he made me. Does he think I’m crazy? “I think I’ll join you.” We march purposefully toward the kitchen with identical footfalls, left, right, left, right, like prosecutors walking toward the camera in the opening credits of Law & Order. It requires me to almost double my stride. Colleagues break off conversations and look at us with speculative expressions. Joshua and I look at each other and bare our teeth. Time to act civil. Like executives. “Ah-ha-ha,” we say to each other genially at some pretend joke. “Ah-ha-ha.” We sweep around a corner. Annabelle turns from the photocopier and almost drops her papers. “What’s happening?” Joshua and I nod at her and continue striding, unified in our endless game of one-upmanship. My short striped dress flaps from the g-force. “Mommy and Daddy love you very much, kids,” Joshua says quietly so only I can hear him. To the casual onlooker he is politely chatting. A few meerkat heads have popped up over cubicle walls. It seems we’re the stuff of legend. “Sometimes we get excited and argue. But don’t be scared. Even when we’re arguing, it’s not your fault.” “It’s just grown-up stuff,” I softly explain to the apprehensive faces we pass. “Sometimes Daddy sleeps on the couch, but it’s okay. We still love you.

It was a kind of one-upmanship, where nobody knows what's going on, and they'd put the other one down as if they did know. They all fake that they know, and if one student admits for a moment that something is confusing by asking a question, the others take a high-handed attitude, acting as if it's not confusing at all, telling him that he's wasting their time... All the work they did, intelligent people, but they got themselves into this funny state of mind, this strange kind of self-propagating "education" which is meaningless, utterly meaningless.

I know where the Iberian Peninsula is, Iris.” “I know, I know, you probably built the first road or furrowed the first wheat field ever sown there.” “Brat.” “Cradle robber.” “Grave robber.

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

I’d always hated cocktail parties. And this one was worse than most. Overdressed pseudo–people smiled plastic smiles, told one–upmanship stories with phony self–deprecation, then half–listened with painted–on sincerity to the one–upmanship rebuttals. Mannequins. Robots. Androids. Pseudo–people laboring in the vineyards of pseudo–intellectualism to gather the bitter grapes of self–aggrandizement.

But I live here, in this place. And I don’t know how to tell you that. I don’t want you to squirm, or take my hand and say it’s tragic. I don’t want you to roll your eyes as though I’m playing a macho game of one-upmanship: My pain can beat up everyone else’s adolescent pain, so I’ll just be over here in the corner, savoring the depths of my stoic suffering and shedding no more than a single tear when I listen to every single cover of “Hurt” and “Hallelujah” on repeat. No, you can’t help me. Don’t try to help me. Please try to help me.

The forces at work in healthy party politics are centripetal; they encourage factions and interests to come together to work out common goals and strategies. They oblige everyone to think, or at least speak, about the common good. In movement politics, the forces are all centrifugal, encouraging splits into smaller and smaller factions obsessed with single issues and practicing rituals of ideological one-upmanship.

Brains were being lured to California by mere money. Mere money and space, and sun, and steak, and Hollywood, and more money and opportunity and optimism and openness. All the Os but without one-upmanship. And there was ownership, and friendship, and a future. All inconsequential fripperies, according to the Old World: beads and mirrors. People who took the dollar in exchange for their brains were unpatriotic in much the same way that tax exiles were.

UN-Impressives of the Poor Listener • Thinking about what you should have done, could have done, or need to do. • Allowing your emotional reactions to take over. • Interrupting the person talking. • Replying before you hear all the facts. • Jumping to conclusions and making assumptions. • Being preoccupied with what you're going to say next. • Getting defensive or being over-eager. • One-upmanship—feeling the urge to compete and add something bigger, better, or more significant than what the speaker has to share. • Imposing an unsolicited opinion. • Ignoring and changing the subject altogether.

Saying to oneself that one should ask more and tell less does not solve the problem of building a relationship of mutual trust. The underlying attitude of competitive one-upmanship will leak out if it is there. Humble Inquiry starts with the attitude and is then supported by our choice of questions. The more we remain curious about the other person rather than letting our own expectations and preconceptions creep in, the better our chances are of staying in the right questioning mode. We have to learn that diagnostic and confrontational questions come very naturally and easily, just as telling comes naturally and easily. It takes some discipline and practice to access one’s ignorance, to stay focused on the other person.

For too long we have been the playthings of massive corporations, whose sole aim is to convert our world into a gargantuan shopping 'mall'. Pleasantry and civility are being discarded as the worthless ephemera of a bygone age; an age where men doffed their hats at ladies, and children could be counted on to mind your Jack Russell while you took a mild and bitter in the pub. The twinkly-eyed tobacconist, the ruddy-cheeked landlord and the bewhiskered teashop lady are being trampled under the mighty blandness of 'drive-thru' hamburger chains. Customers are herded in and out of such places with an alarming similarity to the way the cattle used to produce the burgers are herded to the slaughterhouse. The principal victim of this blandification is Youth, whose natural propensity to shun work, peacock around the town and aggravate the constabulary has been drummed out of them. Youth is left with a sad deficiency of joie de vivre, imagination and elegance. Instead, their lives are ruled by territorial one-upmanship based on brands of plimsoll, and Youth has become little more than a walking, barely talking advertising hoarding for global conglomerates. ... But now, a spectre is beginning to haunt the reigning vulgarioisie: the spectre of Chappism. A new breed of insurgent has begun to appear on the streets, in the taverns and in the offices of Britain: The Anarcho-Dandyist. Recognisable by his immaculate clothes, the rakish angle of his hat and his subtle rallying cry of "Good day to you sir/ madam!

The transformationist leaders are not men, but they are white, they are “European,” they are middle-class. Minority women have begun to deny that the leaders of the women’s movement have any right to speak for them. Most members of the women of color caucus boycotted the 1992 Austin National Women’s Studies Conference I attended for its failure to recognize and respect their political identity. The slighted group sent the conferees an African-American women’s quilt made from dashiki fabrics, as both a reprimand and a “healing gesture.” The assembled white feminists sat before it in resentful but guilty silence. In the game of moral one-upmanship that gender feminists are so good at, they had been outquilted, as it were, by a more marginalized constituency.

I listed some of these in chapter 2, when I described the five basic types of bullshit jobs and how they came about. Flunky positions are created because those in powerful positions in an organization see underlings as badges of prestige; goons are hired due to a dynamic of one-upmanship (if our rivals employ a top law firm, then so, too, must we); duct-taper positions are created because sometimes organizations find it more difficult to fix a problem than to deal with its consequences; box-ticker positions exist because, within large organizations, paperwork attesting to the fact that certain actions have been taken often comes to be seen as more important than the actions themselves; taskmasters exist largely as side effects of various forms of impersonal authority. If large organizations are conceived as a complex play of gravitational forces, pulling in many contradictory directions, one could say there will always be a certain pull in any of these five.

The days turned slowly, somewhat with the rhythm of a gently swirling merry-go-round from which one simply cannot get off. They seemed for everybody to be suffused with hate and its variants. One detested, for example—and without quite wanting to—other cars in the morning rush-hour traffic. Later in the day, one felt envious of, or contempt for, one’s office colleagues and the relish with which they played—over their teacups and through their coffee breaks—their games of one-upmanship that would be disrupted only when the acid in their tongues descended to gnaw at their stomach linings or they felt the first paralysing jabs of their hearts going on the blink. Even when, during the day, to relieve stress—except that, paradoxically, it seemed instead to sharpen the desolation, illumine more pitilessly the bleakness, the vanity of their futures—even when one of them throbbed to touch some proximate human, that lust too seemed destructive and replete with hate, a form of battering rancour.

... intellectuals seemed to think that their life - the life of the mind, the endless self examination, the continuous autobiography afflicted upon all comers-was somehow higher than the repetitive, meaningless lives of the common people. Virlomi knew the opposite to be true. The intellectuals in the university were all the same. They had precisely the same deep thoughts about exactly the same shallow emotions and trivial dilemmas. They knew this, unconsciously, themselves. When a real event happened, something that shook them to the heart, they withdraw from the game of university life, for reality had to be played out on a different stage. In the villages, life was about life, not about one-upmanship and display. Smart people were valued because they could solve problems, not because they could speak pleasantly about them.

No wonder we sense that the precipice is ubiquitous and perennial, encircling each of us individually. A related precariousness marks our entire culture. More than ever, the “free market” turns neighbors into rivals and neighborhoods into covert battlegrounds. Here, often under a veneer of cocktail-party manners, consumerist gladiators contend in chronic one-upmanship, each desperate to escape the pit of loserdom by pushing down the others. TV reality shows are so popular for all too good a reason: their “you’re fired!” mercilessness reflects the take-no-prisoners zeitgeist of our society as a whole. Can we, finally, one hundred years after those fatal shots in Sarajevo, learn from anthropologists and live socially, as a social species should? Can we narrow the chasm not just between nations, but between the citizen and citizen within each nation? This, I grant, is a much harder thing to accomplish in life than to advocate on paper. But it is easier than domesticating the abyss.

In my view, Euler's tranquil temperament, fairness, and generosity were integral to his greatness as a mathematician and scientist- he was never inclined to waste time and energy engaging in petty one-upmanship (like his mentor, Johann Bernoulli, who was known for getting into the eighteenth-century version of flame wars with his older brother, mathematician Jakob Bernoulli, and even with his own son, Daniel, over technical disputes), brooding about challenges to his authority (like Newton), or refusing to publish important findings because of the fear that they might be disputed (like Gauss).

SILVERLESS, DE-MAGICKED, AND VOWING NEVER TO PLAY word one-upmanship—or even Scrabble for that matter—with either Adam or Asil (What exactly was a quicquidlibet, anyway?),

The forces at work in healthy party politics are centripetal; they encourage factions and interests to come together to work out common goals and strategies. They oblige everyone to think, or at least speak, about the common good. In movement politics, the forces are all centrifugal, encouraging splits into smaller and smaller factions obsessed with single issues and practicing rituals of ideological one-upmanship. So the New Left's legacy to liberalism was a double one. It spawned issue-based movements that helped to bring about progressive change in a number of areas, most notably the environment and human rights abroad. And it spawned identity-based social movements -- for affirmative action and diversity, feminism, gay liberation -- that have made this country a more tolerant, more just, and more inclusive place than it was fifty years ago. What the New Left did not do was contribute to the unification of the Democratic Party and the development of a liberal vision of Americans' shared future. And as interest slowly shifted from issue-based ones, the focus of American liberalism also shifted from commonality to difference. And what replaced a broad political vision was a pseudo-political and distinctly American rhetoric of the feeling self and its struggle for recognition. Which turned out to be not all that different from Reagan's anti-political rhetoric of the producing self and its struggle for profit. Just less sentimental and more sanctimonious.

To guard against the intolerable feeling of shame, we may fold ourselves up and hide in the darkest corner. We may apologize for taking up too much space or for using up too much of the valuable oxygen in the room. Or we may do the opposite and flip shame into contempt, arrogance, a need to control, and displays of one-upmanship, dominance, and superiority. In the latter case the person may be hell-bent on not apologizing to anybody.

Yet any statement that starts with “Well, at least…” diminishes the distress and comes across as a lack of caring—or even as a kind of one-upmanship. When I first meet people who are adjusting to a terminal diagnosis, I never try to diminish their emotions. “Yes, this is terrible news and it’s very, very sad,” I say. “You don’t need to make excuses for the way you feel. You have a right to feel this way.” These words identify and recognize the struggle the dying person and family are going through. Validation is one of the first and most important tools for opening a different door.

And that was the strangest thing of all – to talk to him again, brother to brother, just for a moment before it had to end. For so long, his every thought had been of the kill that had been denied him, but now it was just the old fraternal one upmanship again, the kind of relentless needle all of them had given one another since the start. Because you could forget, if you were not careful, how alone they were; that no one, not the gods, not even their own father, perceived the universe just as they did. They were unique, the primarchs, bespoke blends of the physical and the divine, irreplaceable one-offs amid a galaxy of dreary mass production. In a fundamental sense, Jaghatai knew more of Mortarion’s essential character than most of the Death Guard, and he knew more of the Khan’s than the peoples of Chogoris. That had always been the paradox of them – they had been strangers in their own homelands, cut off by fate from those who should have been their blood brothers. Now they were all back on Terra, the place of origin, and all that seemed to have been forgotten amid the heedless hurry to murder one another.

Twenty years ago, the habanero pepper was listed by Guinness World Records as the hottest. It’s now several spots down from the top, but no one has discovered any new peppers. Instead, peppers are engineered in labs to have a heat far beyond nature. Ghost peppers and other hotter-than-hot chilis are little more than a series of never-ending one-upmanship, as scientists and hobbyists genetically engineer and crossbreed peppers to ever higher Scoville units. The Carolina Reaper, for example, was created by a hybrid of the a ghost pepper and a Red Savina Habanero. But to what end? At an insufferable 2.2 million SHU, the Carolina Reaper is too hot to use in the kitchen. These monsters seem to exist solely for hyperbolically labeled hot sauces and competitions at chicken wings restaurants looking to lure in the most susceptible type of person looking to prove himself by consuming hot wings. If you want hot, a habanero will do you just fine.

Why, of all possible worlds, this colossal and apparently unnecessary multitude of galaxies in a mysteriously curved space-time continuum, these myriads of differing tube-species playing frantic games of one-upmanship, these numberless ways of “doing it” from the elegant architecture of the snow crystal or the diatom to the startling magnificence of the lyrebird or the peacock?

That parochial one-upmanship New Yorkers think their own, special remit, but everyone is possessive of the places they inhabit. You recount the disasters to demonstrate your fidelity. You’ve seen the old girl at her worst.

Rivalistic desires are all the more overwhelming since they reinforce one another. The principle of reciprocal escalation and one-upmanship governs this type of conflict. This phenomenon is so common, so well known to us, and so contrary to our concept of ourselves, thus so humiliating, that we prefer to remove it from consciousness and act as if it did not exist. But all the while we know it does exist. This indifference to the threat of runaway conflict is a luxury that small ancient societies could not afford.

Many people believe they are faithful to Jesus, and yet they address superficial reproaches to the Gospels. This shows that they remain subject to mimetic rivalries and their violent one-upmanship. If we don't see that the choice is inevitable between the two supreme models, God and the devil, then we have already chosen the devil and his mimetic violence. Our

Would there be that subtle one-upmanship like there was between mothers? “It’s so stressful having a gifted child.” What would be the equivalent for a prison wife? “It’s such a strain when your husband is a model prisoner! The others are constantly beating him up!

Traditional angling is to escape the noise and one-upmanship of modern angling in favour of something simple and beautiful.

The human tendency to find their sense of accomplishment within their family, caste, community, region, nation, language and religion will only lead to anarchy for others. In their particular reference framework, this whole quest is about finding one's identity, not eternal peace. The ongoing popular discourse in the world is guided by populist slogans for religion, country and community. It's selfish, misleading and is about one-upmanship. Most often, support is sought for the so called fight for identity in the name of religion and justice. Do

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.

All this seems marvelously futile, and yet, when you begin to think about it, it begins to be more marvelous than futile. Indeed, it seems extremely odd. It is a special kind of enlightenment to have this feeling that the usual, the way things normally are, is odd - uncanny and highly improbable. G. K. Chesterton once said that it is one thing to be amazed at a gorgon or a griffin, creatures which do not exist; but it is quite another and much higher thing to be amazed at a rhinoceros or a giraffe, creatures which do exist and look as if they don’t. This feeling of universal oddity includes a basic and intense wondering about the sense of things. Why, of all possible worlds, this colossal and apparently unnecessary multitude of galaxies in a mysteriously curved space-time continuum, these myriads of differing [...] species playing frantic games of one-upmanship, these numberless ways of “doing it” from the elegant architecture of the snow crystal or the diatom to the startling magnificence of the lyrebird or the peacock?

Parental one-upmanship. Nobody but you gives a fuck about what AMAZING programs your child’s school offers (Robotics! Mandarin! Trapeze!), or how many hours of homework the teachers assign, or the intricacies of your chauffeur schedule. Nonparents especially don’t give a fuck, but other parents only want to know this stuff if they are considering sending their own kids to that school, or carpooling with you. Parents!

The beauty of an auction is that surreptitious things happen when the right players are involved and money is of no object. It’s all about competitiveness and one-upmanship.“ Bernard Tristan Foong

Foodism has taken on the sociological characteristics of what used to be known… as culture. It is costly. It requires knowledge and connoisseurship…. It is a badge of membership in the higher classes…. It is a vehicle of status aspiration and competition, an ever-present occasion for snobbery, one-upmanship and social aggression. (My farmers’ market has bigger, better, fresher tomatoes than yours.) Nobody cares if you know about Mozart or Leonardo anymore, but you had better be able to discuss the difference between ganache and couverture.

We live in an age where competition, domination and one-upmanship are portrayed as the crucial elements for survival. Where power and influence both subtle and glaring, are thought primarily necessary for one’s deepest fulfillment and gratification. But the ant and the caterpillar, like the Honey guide and the Badger or the Hermit crab and the Sea anemone, are beacons for a different kind of community. A community where relating and relationship, synergy and symbiosis and being there for one another, are regarded above everything else.

Reese's Pieces. Way to undersell your casual drawing habit to me," he says, giving me an assessing once-over. "That's some secret weapon to whip out without warning." I widen my eyes, feigning innocence, "Oh, was I supposed to give written notice? 'Dear Benny, I'm about to make an effort at my job'?" Teagan covers a giggle with her hand. "I mean, he's not wrong to be worried. You delivered Margie a whole-ass branding package, while he's been cleaning kitchens and waiting for Aiden to tell him when to start cooking again." I bite my lip, trying to hide the gratification I get at Benny feeling any of the self-consciousness I'm so accustomed to.

That is one big yacht. Real big. The sucker has to be at least a hundred and fifty feet long. It’s a shining white, polished chrome, ginormous ode to penile one-upmanship.

The best bet when dealing with kings was to make a reasonable effort to play the game, but one that is still bound to fail. The fourteenth-century Arab traveler Ibn Battuta tells of the customs of the King of Sind, a terrifying monarch who took a particular delight in displays of arbitrary power.33 It was customary for foreign worthies visiting the king to present him with magnificent presents; whatever the gift was, he would invariably respond by presenting the bearer with something many times its value. As a result, a substantial business developed where local bankers would lend money to such visitors to finance particularly spectacular gifts, knowing they could be well repaid from the proceeds of royal one-upmanship. The king must have known about this. He didn’t object—since the whole point was to show that his wealth exceeded all possible equivalence—anyway he knew if he really needed to, he could always expropriate the bankers. Kings knew that the really important game was not economic, but one of status, and theirs was absolute.

Too many people got distracted by one-upmanship, the urge to be the alpha in any encounter, social or business. Joe wanted only to get out with what he wanted.

A nice piece of one-upmanship is to festoon your bins with rings – bird rings that is, not diamond rings or earrings (I think that would be considered dude). The rings are supposed to have come from corpses of rare birds found along the tide line, but if necessary, you can nick them from bird observatory ringing rooms – but you really shouldn’t.

The reason so many people are unfulfilled and miserable in life is that they take the well-trodden road of shallow materialism, one-upmanship and empty goals for self-aggrandisement. They spend their time investing in self-serving ambitions with the intention of either bettering themselves or impressing other people.

Neither of them could just let the other have their grief, their moment, I know it wasn't the intention―they're opening up! Sharing the tragedies that made them who they are! The regrets and fears they can't share with anyone but each other!―but Christ, it seemed like one-upmanship to me. Where is the fic where Mickey says, I lost the only family I had when I was a kid and James just says, I'm so so sorry. And they sit in silence, and maybe they hold hands, or maybe they don't, maybe that's all there is. One of them says what they need to say, and the other one just listens, absorbs, acknowledges it. Lets their sadness have a place to land.

You should just make stuff up like everyone else. It’s all make-believe, all those status updates about how amazing their kids and husbands are, when in actual fact most of them are miserable, their kids are underachieving brats and their partners are having affairs. It’s all about one-upmanship, another way for us all to feel inadequate

Clearly the Corinthians adopted their own form of this over-realized eschatology. It was tied to their pride, their endless one-upmanship.

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.

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.

She loved the ornate gravestones - a last show of one-upmanship. I'll see your marble slab with its fancy biblical quotation and raise you a life-size Jesus on the cross.