Quotes About Self-preservation

Before you sign my death-warrant, be sure that you are yourself safe.

Which was precisely what I had to do. Go away. Get out of this house and his life while I still had a shred of dignity left.

would rather eat bees than share her tender inner being with anyone else—she didn't even want to share it with herself.

The first right on earth is the right of the ego. Man's first duty is to himself. His moral law is never to place his prime goal within the persons of others. His moral obligation is to do what he wishes, provided his wish does not depend primarily upon other men.

If the rest of them can survive only by destroying us, then why should we wish them to survive?

If I turned towards books, it was because they were the only sanctuary I knew, one I needed in order to survive, to protect some aspect of myself that was now in constant retreat.

I had stumbled upon one of the well-kept secrets about black people: that most of us weren't interested in revolt; that most of us were tired of thinking about race all the time; that if we preferred to keep to ourselves it was mainly because that was the easiest way to stop thinking about it, easier than spending all your time mad or trying to guess whatever it was that white folks were thinking about you.

If you have something, then everyone will want a piece of it. So you have to draw the line somewhere. If everyone is family, no one is family. Your father, he never understood this, I think.

if Abbas had been a younger man, more intent on making his mark than protecting himself from criticism.

People love to believe in danger, as long as it's you in harm's way, and them saying bless your heart.

People love to believe in danger, as long as it's you in harm's way, and them saying bless your heart.

In our darkest hours we may find comfort in the age-old slogan from the resistance movement, declaring that we shall not be moved. But we need to finish that sentence. Moved from where? Are we anchoring to the best of what we've believed in, throughout our history, or merely to an angry new mode of self-preservation? The American moral high ground can't possibly be an isolated mountaintop from which we refuse to learn anything at all to protect ourselves from monstrous losses.

It's not that I wanted to be mean. But any time I started feeling sorry for her, something in my brain said Don't go there, it's a trap. I'd tried all the options with Mom and had only one place left to go on her. Cold.

of people: if the shark comes, they will all escape, and leave you to be eaten.

People love to believe in danger, as long as it's you in harm's way

It's not that I wanted to be mean. But any time I started feeling sorry for her, something in my brain said Don't go there, it's a trap. I'd tried all the options with Mom and had only one place left to go on her. Cold.

Emma moved around the circular table quietly, gathering the used silver and the plates with as little fuss and noise as possible. This was protection in itself, for she believed the less people noticed your existence, the easier it was to get along without trouble.

Meglio che tutti sappiano, posso finalmente essere me stessa, meglio anche per me sapere, mo sarebbe rimasto un padre di traverso giù per la gola, tutta la vita, meglio che sia crepato, meglio adesso. Un giorno capirò se l'ho ucciso io, adesso sono troppo giovane, devo badare a non uccidere me

Seriously protecting yourself calls for the annihilation of ties with society, ties that most people need the way they need oxygen. You give up friends, family, romance. You walk through the world like a ghost, detached from the living around you. If you were to die in, say, a bus accident, you'd wind up buried in an obscure municipal graveyard, just another John Doe, no flowers, no mourners, hell, no mourning. It's natural, probably even desirable, to be afraid of all this.

When your enemy is in the process of destroying himself, stay out of the way.

If a gene could build a brain that could tell when copies of itself were sitting in another animal's gonads, it would make the brain enjoy the other animal's well-being, and make it act in ways that increased that other animal's well-being.

If you begin by sacrificing yourself to those you love, you will end by hating those to whom you have sacrificed yourself.

Selfishness can be a virtue. Selfishness is essential to survival, and without survival we cannot protect those whom we love more than ourselves.

Our anxiety systems are very practical. They assume that anything you run away from is dangerous. The proof of that is, of course, the fact you ran away.