Quotes & Sayings About Defeating Yourself

Defeating racism, tribalism, intolerance and all forms of discrimination will liberate us all, victim and perpetrator alike. — Ban Ki-moon

You can't talk about defeating insurgencies in the same way that you can with a conventional army. — Des Browne

One quick sidebar on this topic - don't waste any more time trying to make your web pages work for browsers that don't support HTML5 - it's self-defeating and can, in many instances actually harm your position in SERP's. — Michalis Kotzakolios

Young people were once considered relatively safe from HIV/AIDS. Today, their lives and futures are at risk throughout the world because of this disease. I believe it is young people throughout the world who offer us the greatest hope for defeating this deadly pandemic. — Liam Neeson

I won't back down. I get a satisfaction from being tested and defeating the test. — Ashton Eaton

The closest he comes to explaining why he found it gay is to say that like "Virginia Woolf", it showed a woman defeating a man. Presumably a straight man could never imagine such a thing. — Christopher Bram

Excuses are the explanations we use for hanging on to behaviors we don't like about ourselves; they are self-defeating behaviors we don't know how to change. InExcuses Begone! I review 18 of the most common excuses people use, such as "I'm too busy, too old, too fat, too scared or it's going to take too long or be too difficult." — Wayne Dyer

The administration needs to speak honestly with the American people. Exaggerating our progress in defeating the insurgency or in creating an Iraqi army paints a dangerous picture. — Sherrod Brown

Some of us have been playing the same self-defeating records over and over again in our heads for so long that we don't know how to think any differently about ourselves. — Steve Harvey

When somebody says that all statements are false, the obvious problem is that as an assertion it's self-defeating. — Henry Flynt

When you obsess about the customer, you end up defeating your competition as a byproduct. When you are just obsessed about the competition, you end up killing yourself, because you are not focused on the customer. — KR Sridhar

Striving for excellence is a positive quality. Striving for perfection is self-defeating. — Melody Beattie

All s, like all human beings, get many things wrong. Ronald Reagan's extraordinary achievement as of the U.S. was to succeed in getting the two biggest challenges of his time right: defeating the Soviet Union and reviving the American economy and spirit. Neither of those achievements was inevitable. Both were fiercely opposed at the time. But he persisted; his visionary focus matched only by a gentleness of character and a brilliance of rhetoric. — Andrew Sullivan

Few travelled in these days, for, thanks to the advance of science, the earth was exactly alike all over. Rapid intercourse, from which the previous civilization had hoped so much, had ended by defeating itself. What was the good of going to Peking when it was just like Shrewsbury? Why return to Shrewsbury when it would all be like Peking? Men seldom moved their bodies; all unrest was concentrated in the soul. — E. M. Forster

Cheating is Defeating! — Elda M. Lopez

Failure isn't defeating; failure is motivating. Failure provides a healthy dose of perspective, makes us more tolerant and patient, and makes us realize we're a lot like the people around us. When you realize you aren't so different or special after all, it's a lot easier to be happy with the people around you - and with yourself. — Jeff Haden

But man by his nature is an unnatural animal. If any creature stands a chance of defeating death, it is man. — Tom Robbins

Atreyu was fighting not for himself, but for his friend, whom he was trying to save by defeating him. — Michael Ende

Although we had no hope of defeating the enemy in the battlefield, nevertheless, we fought back to keep the idea of liberation alive. From a conversation with Richard Stengel, January 13, 1993 — Nelson Mandela

We are not saved by a compromise, by mercy defeating justice, or law suspending its operations; no, we defy the eagle's eye to detect a flaw in the groundwork of our confidence. — Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Labeling yourself is not only self-defeating, it is irrational. Your self cannot be equated with any one thing you do. Your life is a complex and ever-changing flow of thoughts, emotions, and actions. To put it another way, you are more like a river than a statue. Stop trying to define yourself with negative labels - they — David D. Burns

Life is never boring but some people choose to be bored. The concept of boredom entails an inability to use up present moments in a personally fulfilling way. Boredom is a choice; something you visit upon yourself, and it is another of those self-defeating items that you can eliminate from your life. — Wayne Dyer

At a certain point, an eating disorder ceases to be "about" any one thing. It stops being about your family, or your culture. Very simply, it becomes an addiction not only emotionally but also chemically. And it becomes a crusade. If you are honest with yourself, you stop believing that anyone could "make" you do such a thing - who, your parents? They want you to starve to death? Not likely. Your environment? It couldn't careless. You are also doing it for yourself. It is a shortcut to something many women without an eating disorder have gotten: respect and power. It is a visual temper tantrum. You are making an ineffective statement about this and that, a grotesque, self-defeating mockery of cultural standards of beauty, societal misogyny. It is a blow to your parents, at whom you are pissed.
And it is so very seductive. It is so reassuring, so all-consuming, so entertaining.
At first. — Marya Hornbacher

Blame is such a self-defeating choice. It renders one helpless, putting any solution well out of reach, for we rarely can change others. Consider this, a solution well within your reach, someone you can surely change: Yourself. — Russell Kyle

The point of acting is to hide yourself and get lost in character. To play the same character in eighteen movies would be defeating the purpose I believe so I try to keep a little bit of diversity. — Columbus Short

Hinduism - indeed, most eastern religions - tells us that striving, even striving for happiness, is self-defeating. The moment you try to improve yourself, you've failed. Game over. Yet just lie there like a zombie and you lose, too. What to do? — Eric Weiner

Sometimes when we're feeling sad, it's important just to feel the sadness. Like a snake shedding its skin, old feelings of remorse and regret and hurt and anger often have to come up in order to be released. On the other side we're a better person, capable of a happier life ... who we are when we're no longer burdened by the buried feelings that weighed us down, or the self - defeating patterns that the pain produced. — Marianne Williamson

Our imagination is so limited, our arsenal of potential responses so narrow, that the only thing anyone can think to do with an inappropriate shamer like Adria is to punish her with a shaming. All of the shamers had themselves come from a place of shame, and it really felt parochial and self-defeating to instinctively slap shame onto shame like a clumsy builder covering cracks. — Jon Ronson

Everybody knows full well my passion about defeating Barack Obama. Over my dead body would I vote for Barack Obama. — Rick Santorum

In the budget I will present to you, we will try to do more to speed the deportation of illegal aliens who are arrested for crimes, to better identify illegal aliens in the workplace as recommended by the commission headed by former congresswoman Barbara Jordan. We are a nation of immigrants, but we are also a nation of laws. It is wrong and ultimately self-defeating for a nation of immigrants to permit the kind of abuse of our immigration laws we have seen in recent years, and we must do more to stop it. — William J. Clinton

We have to learn to stand up for our interests. To seek purity is self-defeating and a stereotype in itself: women have to be pure, women are not concerned about money. — Gloria Steinem

Ultimate excellence lies not in winning every battle, but in defeating the enemy without ever fighting. — Sun Tzu

Dedicating some time to meditation is a meaningful expression of caring for yourself that can help you move through the mire of feeling unworthy of recovery. As your mind grows quieter and more spacious, you can begin to see self-defeating thought patterns for what they are, and open up to other, more positive options. — Sharon Salzberg

Diversion is pernicious to depressives. Our lives are like waking dreams
correction, nightmares
where monsters chase us, never breaking off pursuit in order to rest or to eat or to look for easier prey. Diversion prevents us from confronting those monsters. If we never confront them, we have no hope of ever defeating them. Diversion does NOT work. — Northern Adams

At the turn of the [21st] century it was really Sergey Brin at Google who just had the thought of, well, if we give away all the information services, but we make money from advertising, we can make information free and still have capitalism. But the problem with that is it reneges on the social contract where people still participate in the formal economy. And it's a kind of capitalism that's totally self-defeating because it's so narrow. It's a winner-take-all capitalism that's not sustaining. — Jaron Lanier

Fear is the enemy of logic. There is no more debilitating, crushing, self-defeating, sickening thing in the world
to an individual or to a nation. — Frank Sinatra

Whenever we feel the absence of peace - whenever our unmet longing for joy expresses itself as anxiety, or depression, or fear, or anger, or enslavement to any number of defeating sin patterns or addictions - the emptiness we're feeling and trying to fill is for what our relationship with God, by His loving choice, was always meant to be. Our angst comes from the underlying implications of Ecclesiastes 3:11, where the Scripture says God has put eternity into man's heart. — Matt Chandler

The wisdom of the chess player is displayed more in winning over a capable opponent than a novice. The wisdom of the general is displayed more in defeating a superior army than in subduing an inferior one. Even more so, the wisdom of God is displayed when He brings good to us and glory to Himself out of confusion and calamity rather than out of pleasant times. — Jerry Bridges

The good fighter is able to secure himself against defeat, but cannot make certain of defeating the enemy. — Sun Tzu

I knew from experience of the past that this butchering of people was done for the express purpose of defeating the eight-hour movement. — August Spies

The good fighters of old first put themselves beyond the possibility of defeat, and then waited for an opportunity of defeating the enemy. — Sun Tzu

By using your heart as your compass, you can see more clearly which direction to go to stop self-defeating behavior. If you take just one mental or emotional habit that really bothers or drains you and apply heart intelligence to it, you'll see a noticeable difference in your life. — Doc Childre

The injury which may possibly be done by defeating a few good laws, will be amply compensated by the advantage of preventing a number of bad ones. — Alexander Hamilton

No more self-defeating device could be discovered than the one society has developed in dealing with the criminal. It proclaims his career in such loud and dramatic forms that both he and the community accept the judgment as a fixed description. He becomes conscious of himself as a criminal, and the community expects him to live up to his reputation, and will not credit him if he does not live up to it. — Frank Tannenbaum

There are few joys in life more utterly satisfying than defeating your adversary, and together sharing in the incontrovertible truth that you have bested him. — Brad Murray

There is something that can happen to every athlete and every human being; the instinct to slack off, to give in to pain, to give less than your best; the instinct to hope you can win through luck or through your opponent not doing his best, instead of going to the limit and past your limit where victory is always found. Defeating those negative instincts that are out to defeat us, is the difference between winning and losing - and we all face that battle every day. — Jesse Owens

In 2004, I ran for Congress and lost. In 2006, I ran again and won - defeating Richard Pombo, a seven-term Republican incumbent. — Jerry McNerney

Is Russia worried that defeating Daesh will open the door for defeating Bashar Assad? That would be a different story. But I don't think World War III is going to happen in Syria. — Adel Al-Jubeir