Quotes and passages on cooperation

The small, brave act of cooperating with
another person, of choosing trust over
cynicism, generosity over selfishness, makes
the brain light up with quiet joy.

unattributed

Cooperation is an intelligent functioning of the concept of laissez-faire--a thorough conviction that nobody can get there unless everybody gets there. Virginia Burden Tower

Life is not a game of Solitaire; people depend on one another. When one does well, others are lifted. When one stumbles, others also are impacted. There are no one-person teams—either by definition or natural law. Success is a cooperative effort; it’s dependent upon those who stand beside you. Jon M. Huntsman Sr. Essential Lessons on Leadership

If you want to be incrementally better: Be competitive. If you want to be exponentially better: Be cooperative. unattributed There are no problems we cannot solve together, and very few we can solve by ourselves. Lyndon B. Johnson

No employer today is independent of those about him or her. That person cannot succeed alone, no matter how great his or her ability or capital. Business today is more than ever a question of cooperation. Orison Swett Marden

What we need to do is learn to work in the system, by which I mean
that everybody, every team, every platform, every division, every
component is there not for competitive profit or recognition, but for
contribution to the system as a whole on a win-win basis.

W. Edwards Deming

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Who among us is willing to pay the real cost of a right
and beautiful world? The real cost is unselfishness; real caring;
true cooperation and self-sacrifice--in short, less ego.

unattributed

Competition has been shown to be useful up to a certain point
and no further, but cooperation, which is the thing we must
strive for today, begins where competition leaves off.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

Competing against each other leaves little space for reciprocity and
the growth of social capital. Running against another in a race may
benefit our speed, but jointly organizing the sports day produces
cooperation and trust. There are many situations where cooperation
and reciprocity are more effective than competition. Civic virtues come
from building on what we have in common rather than by using our
differences to create in-groups, out-groups and fear-driven competition.

Eva Cox

Every step by which an individual substitutes concerted action for
isolated action results in an immediate and recognizable
improvement in his or her conditions. The advantages derived from
peaceful cooperation and division of labor are universal.

Ludwig von Mises

The only thing that will redeem humankind is cooperation.

Bertrand Russell

Efforts to reach out and engage others in dialogue with the aim
of fostering mutual understanding and bringing people closer
together may seem ordinary and unexciting, but they in fact
constitute a bold and daring challenge to create
a new era of human civilization.

Daisaku Ikeda
Buddhism Day by Day

Great discoveries and improvements invariably involve the
cooperation of many minds. I may be given credit for having
blazed the trail, but when I look at the subsequent developments
I feel the credit is due to others rather than to myself.

Alexander Graham Bell

Every kind of peaceful cooperation among people is primarily based
on mutual trust and only secondarily on institutions
such as courts of justice and police.

Albert Einstein

I have been told that one of the reasons the astronomers of the world cooperate
is the fact that there is no one nation from which the entire sphere of the sky
can be seen. Perhaps there is in that fact a parable for national statesmen,
whose political horizons are all too often limited by national horizons.

Adlai Stevenson

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Alone we can do so little. Together we can do so much.

Helen Keller

No one can whistle a symphony.
It takes a whole orchestra to play it.

H.E. Luccock

Leadership is based on inspiration, not
domination; on cooperation, not intimidation.

William Arthur Ward

Willingness to compromise with others’ ways of living and cooperation
in common tasks, these make living happy and fruitful.

Sri Sathya Sai Baba

Getting along with others is the essence of getting ahead,
success being linked with cooperation.

William Feather

If you come at me with your fists doubled, I think I can
promise you that mine will double as fast as yours; but if
you come to me and say, "Let us sit down and take counsel
together, and if we differ from each other, understand why
it is that we differ, just what the points at issue are," we will
presently find that we are not so far apart after all, that the
points on which we agree are many, and that if we only have
the patience and the candor and the desire to get together,
we will get together.

Woodrow Wilson

Society is joint action and cooperation in which each participant sees
the other partner’s success as a means for the attainment of his own.

Ludwig von Mises

The issues that confront us may seem so huge, so complicated, so difficult
to deal with that it's hard to believe that anything we can do will have a
meaningful impact. But there are a lot of us in the world. A lot of people
doing a lot of little things could have a huge impact. And by doing something,
we are also demonstrating that lots of people really do care.

Michael Norton
365 Ways to Change the World

A hundred thousand people, coming one after another,
cannot move a Ton weight; but the united strength
of fifty would transport it with ease.

George Washington

Most great learning happens in groups. Collaboration is the stuff of growth.

Ken Robinson

In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned
to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.

Charles Darwin

Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together
is progress. Working together is success.

Henry Ford

Teamwork is the ability to work together toward a common vision. The
ability to direct individual accomplishment toward organizational objectives.
It is the fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results.

Andrew Carnegie

I love to hear a choir. I love the humanity…to see the faces of real people
devoting themselves to a piece of music. I like the teamwork. It makes me
feel optimistic about the human race when I see them cooperating like that.

Paul McCartney