Business Quotes Regarding Competition

Don’t knock your competitors. By boosting others you will boost yourself. A little competition is a good thing and severe competition is a blessing. Thank God for competition. Jacob Kindleberger

In business, the competition will bite you if you keep running; if you stand still, they will swallow you. Semon Knudsen

Whenever I may be tempted to slack up and let the business run for awhile on its own impetus, I picture my competitor sitting at a desk in his opposition house, thinking and thinking with the most devilish intensity and clearness, and I ask myself what I can do to be prepared for his next brilliant move. H. Gordon Selfridge

The idea of imposing restrictions on a free economy to assure freedom of competition is like breaking a man’s leg to make him run faster. Morris R. Sayre

There is a tendency among some businesses to criticize and belittle their competitors. This is a bad procedure. Praise them. Learn from them. There are times when you can co-operate with them to their advantage and to yours! Speak well of them and they will speak well of you. You can’t destroy good ideas. Take advantage of them. George Matthew Adams

A man comes to measure his greatness by the regrets, envies and hatreds of his competitors. Ralph Waldo Emerson

Competition is the keen cutting edge of business, always shaving away at costs. Henry Ford

The ability to learn faster than your competitors may be only sustainable competitive advantage. Arie de Geus

If you're not making mistakes, you're not taking risks, and that means you're not going anywhere. The key is to make mistakes faster than the competition, so you have more changes to learn and win. John W. Holt, Jr. quotes

Our partnership with associates is the reason our Company has been able to consistently outperform the competition-and even our own expectations. Sam Walton

Our Creator has put in us hungers that this earth cannot satisfy. We cannot be completely self-contained on earth. Physical sense cannot give us a full life, nor can knowledge alone. No life is full unless it is linked to something that goes on after we are dead . . . If we have nothing more to live for than just to get ahead in a competitive system, then democracy will go down before other philosophies. Ralph W. Sockman

By competition the total amount of supply is increased, and by increase of the supply a competition in the sale ensues, and this enables the consumer to buy at lower rates. Of all human powers operating on the affairs of mankind, none is greater than that of competition. Henry Clay

No amount of artificial protection can permanently maintain an obsolete product, an inferior process or a moribund organization against competitors which are based on scientifically improved products or methods. Karl T. Compton

Nobody talks more of free enterprise and competition and the best man winning than the man who inherited his father’s store or farm. C. Wright Mills

We find the instinct to shut out competition deep-rooted even among banks and corporations, among corner grocers and haberdasheries, among peanut vendors and shoeshine boys—and even among young ladies in search of a husband. James A. Farley

Without the spur of competition we’d loaf out our life. Arnold Glasow

Today’s competitiveness, so much imposed from without, is exhausting not exhilarating; is unending—a part of one’s social life, one’s solitude, one’s sleep, one’s sleeplessness.

Save possibly in education effects, cooperation can produce no general results that competition will not produce. Henry George

Striving to outdo one’s companions on the golf course and tennis court or in the swimming pool constitutes several socially acceptable forms of suicide. George Griffith

You cannot do away with the competitive system so long as trademarks remain to distinguish one product from another. You cannot cut out large-scale manufacture so long as there are established brands which breed consumer confidence and thus make mass production not only possible and profitable, but also economical. Philip Salisbury