“Focus on competition has always been a formula for mediocrity.”

Daniel Burrus
Technology Forecaster, Business Strategist, Author

“It is through cooperation rather than conflict that your greatest successes will be derived.”

Ralph Charrel

“No employer today is independent of those about him. He cannot succeed alone, no matter how great his ability or capital. Business today is more than ever a question of cooperation.”

Orison Swett Marden

“We can get off of the treadmill that keeps us running faster and faster as we get farther and farther behind. We can choose at any time to search for balance and harmony in our lives and in our work rather than continue the blind pursuit of our narrow self interest. We can choose a life of quality -- with enough income to sustain us physically, enough friends and neighbors to sustain us socially, following a code of ethics and morality that will sustain us spiritually. We can choose to pursue our enlightened self interest rather than simply give in to our greed. We can set examples and build models that others may choose to follow. We can develop the foundation of reality upon which new theories for an economics of enlightened self interest can be built. We can help guide humanity toward a sustainable future. And, we can do it at anytime we choose.”

John Ikerd
Economics Professor, Rethinking the Economics of Self-Interests

“The global community is facing a serious ecological problem. Unless we change our way of living, we may be passing on to our children a world with rising sea levels, extreme weather conditions and disrupted ecosystems. . . How can we stop consuming resources and producing carbon at such high levels? Don’t give up hope yet! There exists a solution that could drastically reduce energy consumption and carbon emission of the modern citizen, and it does not require new technology or a drastic reduction in quality of life. It is not anything new or complex; in fact it is something we all learned in Kindergarten. It is called sharing.”

Bucket Von Harmony
Member Twin Oaks Intentional Living Community
Louisa, Virginia

“Sustainability requires cooperation. You have to discard the idea of Adam Smith economics, which says that it's better for society if everyone is working in their own self-interest, and move towards the economics of John Nash, which says we can find a better outcome if we work collectively.”

Thomas Seager
American Ecology Professor and Author

“. . . It . . . is positive to want to go first, provided the intention is to pave the way for others, make their path more easy, help them, or show the way. Competition is negative when we wish to defeat others, to bring them down in order to lift ourselves up.”

The Dalai Lama

“When you are content to be simply yourself and don't compare or compete, everybody will respect you.”

Lao Tzu

“Behold how good it is for brethren to dwell in unity.”

The Bible

“One must marvel at the intellectual quality of a teacher who can't understand why children assault one another in the hallway, playground, and city street, when in the classroom the highest accolades are reserved for those who have beaten their peers. In many subtle and some not so subtle ways, teachers demonstrate that what children learn means much less than that they triumph over their classmates. Is this not assault? . . . Classroom defeat is only the pebble that creates widening ripples of hostility. It is self-perpetuating. It is reinforced by peer censure, parental disapproval, and loss of self-concept. If the classroom is a model, and if that classroom models competition, assault in the hallways should surprise no one.”

Joseph Wax
Educator and Author of “Competition: Educational Incongruity”

“In schools, the learning climate is enhanced when faculty see one another as resources and allies; when there are collaborative relationships between parents, administration, faculty, and volunteers. Recent decades have seen a significant growth in the influence of collaborations and cooperative approaches to learning, a healthy trend in my view. Cooperation cultivates communication and therefore connectedness. Cooperation tends to facilitate learning. Cooperation reinforces a sense of shared purpose, efficacy, and accomplishment.”

Cheryl Charles
Science Educator
Brandewein Lecgture, National Science Teachers Association Annual Meeting

“The zero-sum game: That's the way it is if you're a competitive person and you see capitalism in that way. Zero-sum game implies winners and losers, which I don't agree with. Somebody has to win and somebody has to lose, it all comes back to zero (minus eight, plus eight). But I don't agree with that because all boats can rise on a rising sea. Good films can help other films to be open. There's a different psychology at work. If you're overly competitive, you'll be exclusionary and say it's a zero-sum game (I must get eight and he must lose eight).”

Oliver Stone (adapted)
Film Producer

“The 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics was awarded to Elinor Ostrom for her work on the relationship between human cooperation and environmental sustainability. Ostrom’s research applied concepts from mathematical cooperative game theory to observations of resource management in African and Asian communities. . . . Elinor Ostrom’s Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences, shared with Oliver Williamson, is to be welcomed and celebrated . . . there is much reason to be pleased with the Nobel committee’s decision. The planet urgently needs cooperation, not conflict, in resolving compelling issues such as water shortages and climate change, and in safeguarding our common heritage. Elinor Ostom’s work provides us with the optimism and assurance that this is possible.”

Lyla Mehta and Melissa Leach
Blog, The STEPS Centre (Social, Technological and Environmental Pathways to Sustainability, Institute of Development Studies, UK)

“. . . Vince Lombardi’s comment—“Winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing”—must be understood not merely as the expression of one football coach’s fanaticism, but as a capsule description of our entire culture.”

Alfie Kohn
Author of “No Contest, The Case Against Competition”

“Competition was virtually unknown to the Zuni and Iroquis in North America and the Bathonga in South Africa. The Mixtecans of Mexico regard envy and competitiveness as a kind of minor crime. From kibbutzniks in Israel to farmers in Mexico, cooperation is prized and competition is generally avoided. It doesn’t have to be a “dog-eat-dog” world. We can unlearn that kind of learned behavior. Why not play “King of the Mountain” where everyone stands at the top?”

Jim Deacove
Owner of Family Pastimes Games

“We are essentially cultural animals with the capacity to form many kinds of social structures, but a deep-seated urge toward cooperation, toward working as a group, provides a basic framework for these structures.”

Leaky and Lewin
Contemporary Biologists

“Whenever we find rather similar animals living together in the wild, we do not think of competition by tooth and claw, we ask ourselves, instead, how competition is avoided. When we find many animals apparently sharing a food supply, we do not talk of struggles for survival; we watch to see by what trick the animals manage to be peaceful in their coexistence. Peaceful coexistence, not struggle, is the rule in our Darwinian world. A perfectly fashioned individual of a Darwinian species is programmed for a specialised life to be spent for the most part safe from competition with neighbours of other kinds. Natural selectionis harsh only to the deviant aggressor who seeks to poach on the niche of another. The peaceful coexistence between species, which results from evolution by natural selection, has to be understood as an important fact in the workings of the great ecosystems around us. It is also, surely, one of the most heartening of the lessons of biology.”

Paul A. Colvinaux
Contemporary Environmental Scientist and Author of “Why Big Fierce Animals Are Rare: An Ecologist’s Perspective”

“In the nineteenth century, the Darwinists and Social Darwinists talked about the competition in nature, the fight - "Nature, red in tooth and claw." In the twentieth century, ecologists have discovered that in the self-organization of ecosystems cooperation is actually much more important than competition.”

Fritjof Capra
Physicist, Systems Thinker, and Author

“Do not hold the delusion that your advancement is accomplished by crushing others.”

Cicero
Ancient Roman Philosopher and Statesman

“The only competition worthy of a wise man is with himself.”

Washington Allston
American 19th Century Poet and Painter

“The case for competition is based on . . . four central myths . . . The first myth is that competition is an unavoidable fact of life . . . The second myth is that competition motivates us to do our best . . . Third, it is sometime asserted that contests are the best . . . way to have a good time . . . The last myth is that competition builds character . . . ”

Alfie Kohn
Author of “No Contest, The Case Against Competition”

“Was your child eliminated from the spelling bee and came home in tears? Have you heard of an athlete who took steroids to win? How did you feel when you were chosen last in a game because you were not as “good” as the others? All of these events reflect our preoccupation with competition. This concept is deeply rooted in our nation’s education, sports, politics and even in families. Author Alfiew Kohn, in his well-researched book No Contest, The Case Against Competition writes how we are “encouraged to pit ourselves against one another and taught that competition is a prod to productivity, a builder of character, and an unavoidable part of human nature.... ” It is ironic that we play games to be together yet spend our efforts trying to bankrupt someone, destroy their armies, conquer the world, etc.—all goals which create hostility and separate us...”

Jim Deacove
Owner of Family Pastimes Games

“Everything we want to get done in the world we must do with and through other people.”

Earl Nightingale
American Radio Announcer, 1920s

”Though force can protect in an emergency, only justice, fairness, consideration, and cooperation can finally lead men to the dawn of eternal peace.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower
34th President of the United States

“We may have all come on different ships but we’re in the same boat now.”

Martin Luther King
American Civil Rights Leader

“A hundred times a day I remind myself that my inner and outer life depend on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and am still receiving.”

Albert Einstein
German-American Physicist

“The only thing that will redeem mankind is cooperation.”

Bertrand Russell
British Philosopher

“Union gives strength.” Storyteller, Ancient Greece

Aesop
Storyteller, Ancient Greece

“If you want to be incrementally better, be competitive. If you want to be exponentially better, be cooperative.”

Unknown

“As astronauts and space travelers children puzzle over the future; as dinosaurs and princesses they unearth the past. As weather reporters and restaurant workers they make sense of reality; as monsters and gremlins they make sense of the unreal.”

Gretchen Owock
American Early Childhood Educator

”The playing adult steps sideward into another reality; the playing child advances to new stages of mastery.”

Erik Erikson
American Psychoanalyst

“If you want to be creative, stay in part a child, with the creativity and invention that characterizes children before they are deformed by adult society.”

Jean Piaget
Swiss Educational Philosopher

“The very existence of youth is due in part to the necessity for play; the animal does not play because he is young, he has a period of youth because he must play.” German Evolutionary biologist

Karl Groos
German Evolutionary Biologist

“Just play. Have fun. Enjoy the game.”

Michael Jordan
American Basketball Player

“In every real man a child is hidden that wants to play.”

Frederich Nietzche
German Philosopher

“The opposite of play is not work. It’s depression.”

Brian Sutton-Smith
American Biologist

“Surely all God’s children like to play.”

John Muir
American Naturalist

“Do not keep children to their studies by compulsion but by play.”

Plato
Ancient Greek Philosopher

“Children need freedom and time to play. Play is not a luxury. Play is a necessity.”

Kay Redfield Jamison

“A child loves his play, not because it’s easy but because it’s hard.”

Dr. Benjamin Spock
American Pediatrician and Author

“Play gives children a chance to practice what they are learning.”

Fred Rogers
Television Host, “Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood”

“Life must be lived as play.”

Plato
Ancient Greek Philosopher

“Almost all creativity involves play.”

Abraham Maslow"
American Psychologist

“Frame your mind to mirth and merriment
Which bars a thousand harms
And lengthens life”

William Shakespeare
The Taming of the Shrew