“When you fear a foe, fear crushes your strength; and this weakness gives strength to your opponents.”
“How can they beat me? I've been struck by lightning, had two back operations, and been divorced twice.”
“What counts is not necessarily the size of the dog in the fight; it's the size of the fight in the dog.”
“This is a tough game. There are times when you've got to play hurt, when you've got to block out the pain.”
“Surely the best way to meet the enemy is head on in the field and not wait till they plunder our very homes.”
“If you make every game a life and death proposition, you're going to have problems. For one thing, you'll be dead a lot.”
“There is nothing noble in being superior to some other person. The true nobility is in being superior to your previous self.”
“To free the mind from the habit of competition, we must see in detail the process by which the mind is ensnared by competition.”
“The person who figures out how to harness the collective genius of his or her organization is going to blow the competition away.”
“Men often compete with one another until the day they die; comradeship consists of rubbing shoulders jocularly with a competitor.”
“I ski to win. When the day comes that I can't get myself into a fighting mood anymore, I won't be able to win and I'll stop racing.”
“For when the One Great Scorer comes to mark against your name, He writes -- not that you won or lost -- but how you played the Game.”
“Our life is not really a mutual helpfulness; but rather, it's fair competition cloaked under due laws of war; it's a mutual hostility.”
“How you respond to the challenge in the second half will determine what you become after the game, whether you are a winner or a loser.”
“Thank God for competition. When our competitors upset our plans or outdo our designs, they open infinite possibilities of our own work to us.”
“I don't care how good you play, you can find somebody who can beat you, and I don't care how bad you play, you can find somebody you can beat.”
“You have to be able to center yourself, to let all of your emotions go... Don't ever forget that you play with your soul as well as your body.”
“What it comes down to is that anybody can win with the best horse. What makes you good is if you can take the second or third-best horse and win.”
“There are two kinds of people: Those who do the work and those who take the credit. Try to be in the first group because there is less competition there.”
“You must sacrifice, train, do everything possible to put yourself in a position to win. But if you consider second or third a failure, I feel sorry for you.”
“Enjoy the successes that you have, and don't be too hard on yourself when you don't do well. Too many times we beat up on ourselves. Just relax and enjoy it.”
“Every time you go out on the ice, there are slight flaws. You can always think of something you should have done better. These are the things you must work on.”
“The difference of great players is at a certain point in a match they raise their level of play and maintain it. Lesser players play great for a set, but then less.”
“You find that you have peace of mind and can enjoy yourself, get more sleep, and rest when you know that it was a one hundred percent effort that you gave -- win or lose.”
“The medals don't mean anything and the glory doesn't last. It's all about your happiness. The rewards are going to come, but my happiness is just loving the sport and having fun performing.”
“It has meant a lot to me to challenge the best players in the world and to beat them. And it means a lot to me to be out here and fighting for the title and, you know, it hurts not to win it.”
“The general fact is that the most effective way of utilizing human energy is through an organized rivalry, which by specialization and social control is, at the same time, organized co-operation.”
“A competitor will find a way to win. Competitors take bad breaks and use them to drive themselves just that much harder. Quitters take bad breaks and use them as reasons to give up. It's all a matter of pride.”
“World trade means competition from anywhere; advancing technology encourages cross-industry competition. Consequently, strategic planning must consider who our future competitors will be, not only who is here today.”
“It's amazing how much of this is mental. Everybody's in good shape. Everybody knows how to ski. Everybody has good equipment. When it really boils down to it, it's who wants it the most, and who's the most confident on his skis.”