Armor Against Superlatives

Howard Fast, Being Red: A Memoir (Houghton Mifflin, 1990), pp.  98-99:

As we circled over Casablanca for landing, I saw below an enormous
swimming pool or reservoir. I turned to the man sitting next to me,
a grizzled old army colonel, and said to him, "That has to be the
biggest swimming pool in the world."

"The second biggest," he said.

"And where's the biggest?"

"Sonny," he said to me, "whatever it is, wherever it is, there's
something bigger or something better."

That stayed with me -- one of several observations that cut into me
and stayed -- and I passed it on to my children as armor against
superlatives.