Rat Race - Quotes

Quotes

• "No matter what you do in the rat race, success is not certain but if you do nothing, failure is." Paul Ulasien, Author - The Corporate Rat Race: The Rats Are Winning. (2006). Baltimore, MD: Publish America.

• The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you're still a rat. — commonly attributed to Lily Tomlin in People magazine (26 Dec 1977), but according to The Yale Book of Quotations (Shapiro & Epstein, p. 767), Rosalie Maggio in The New Beacon Book of Quotations by Women states that William Sloane Coffin said "Even if you win the rat race, you're still a rat" as chaplain of Williams College or Yale University in the 1950s or 1960s.

• "That is real freedom. That is being educated, and understanding how to think. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing." David Foster Wallace in his Commencement Address at Kenyon College. Gambier, Ohio. May 21, 2005.

• "A rat race is for rats. We are not rats. We are human beings. Reject the insidious pressures of society that would blunt your critical faculties to all the happenings around you that would caution silence in the face of injustices lest you jeopardize your changes of promotions and self advancement. This is how it starts and before you know where you are you are a fully-paid up member of the rat pack. The price is too high. It entails a loss of your dignity and human spirit." Jimmy Reid, Glasgow University rectoral address, 1972.

• Often, people work long hard hours at jobs they hate to earn money to buy things they don't need, to impress people they don't like. Nigel Marsh