Quotes About Survival

Real terror – the genuine belief that your life is about to end violently – erases everything but itself from the brain.

I was a runt from birth. Big nosed, black haired, skin scribbled with acne—let's admit I was no girl's idea of a catch. But war made me more attractive. Others dwindled as the ration cards were cut and cut again, halving those who looked like circus strongmen before the invasion. I had no muscle to lose. Like the shrews that kept scavenging while the dinosaurs toppled around them, I was built for deprivation.

Nos pasábamos los minutos sobrantes cazando ratas, que debían de haber pensado que la desaparición de los gatos de la ciudad era la respuesta a todas sus antiguas plegarias, hasta que comprendieron que ya no había nada que comer en la basura.

Death is the enemy. The first enemy. And the last... The enemy always wins. But we still need to fight him. That's all I know. You and I won't find much joy while we're here, but we can keep others alive. We can defend those who can't defend themselves. I am the shield that guards the realms of men. Maybe we don't need to understand any more than that. Maybe that's enough.

Culturally we are taught to disregard our gut instinct. But it is a crucial element of our ability to face and cope with traumatic situations.

Keep the fire in the kitchen to see if it outlasts the storms and rain outside.

The wild places are where we began. When they end, so do we.

Any kid will tell you that, yes, their music is both an escape and a survival mechanism, and that sometimes the music givesbthem hope and inspiration. It doesn't just placate and pacify.

Men have always hated the wolf." "Why?" said the boy indignantly, suddenly looking very unhappy indeed. "Maybe because they see something in the wolf that they hate and fear in themselves. Maybe because wolves take their sheep and goats, as if we shouldn't all share life's bounty.

Freedom is a wild wolf's birth right.

Mamma," whispered Rannoch as he nestled by her side, "what is man?" Bracken looked into her calf's eyes. "Man? Man is something you must always fear." "But why must I fear him?" asked Rannoch. "Because, my little one...man is cruel and cold. He eats up everything he touches. He enslaves Lera and breaks the laws of the forest. Because, Rannoch, he is the only creature that hunts without need.

Fear is an instinct, like hunger or anger. We need it to help us survive, and it is nothing to be ashamed of. It lets us know whether we should fight or flee.

The deer hovered by the trees beyond as the sounds of the ravening wolves came to them across the grass, their own senses almost frozen in impotent horror.

Like clocks, recording devices were everywhere embedded; everything was being recorded at every moment, like a huge, infernal Mac Time Machine backup system that created backups of backups regressing into infinity. Who would play these back? Who would pick among them like the survivor of a hideous bombing looking for the rags once worn by his dead and naked mother?

There is only one way of thinking that is capable of making progress, or of surviving in the long run, and that is the way of seeking good explanations through creativity and criticism. What

The most general way of stating the central assertion of the neo-Darwinian theory of evolution is that a population of replicators subject to variation (for instance by imperfect copying) will be taken over by those variants that are better than their rivals at causing themselves to be replicated. This

a population of replicators subject to variation (for instance by imperfect copying) will be taken over by those variants that are better than their rivals at causing themselves to be replicated.

The very existence of Athens, however peaceful, is a deadly threat to Sparta's stasis. And therefore, in the long run, the condition for the continued stasis of Sparta (which means its continued existence, as they see it) is the destruction of progress in Athens (which from our perspective would constitute the destruction of Athens).

People are significant in the cosmic scheme of things; and The Earth's biosphere is incapable of supporting human life.

History was a series of decisions about what to tell and a series of accidents about what survived after telling. Not truth, but a historian could search for truth, and the search was as worthy as any other human activity.

I just spend my money on the essentials. Just basically food and shelter.

The destruction of the Indians of the Americas was, far and away, the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world. That is why, as one historian aptly has said, far from the heroic and romantic heraldry that customarily is used to symbolize the European settlement of the Americas, the emblem most congruent with reality would be a pyramid of skulls.

The European habit of indiscriminately killing women and children when engaged in hostilities with the natives of the Americas was more than an atrocity. It was flatly and intentionally genocidal. For no population can survive if its women and children are destroyed.

Within no more than a handful of generations following their first encounters with Europeans, the vast majority of the Western Hemisphere's native peoples had been exterminated.