Quotes About Survival

Poland lost about 20 percent of its population, compared to 11 percent for the Soviet Union, 7 percent for Germany, and less than 1 percent for both the United States and Britain.

For [people] who have never experienced sudden, total defeat and the almost overnight disappearance of their political elites; who have never lived under foreign occupation; who do not know what Nazi pressure meant; who have never had to worry first and last about food and physical survival…the warning must be heeded: do not judge too harshly.

Those who thought of collaboration in simplistic terms could not comprehend the reality of trying to survive in an uncivilized, unstable environment in which the norms of society had broke down.

In the late 1960s, Marie-Madeleine Fourcade pulled back the veil cloaking her wartime activities in her gripping memoir, Noah's Ark, which was rightly described by MI6's Kenneth Cohen as "a Homeric saga" of her and Alliance's daily life under German occupation. But like Fourcade herself, the memoir is little known today.

Elizabeth liked commercials. They were anti-death. You had to be alive to buy things.

You will hear human answers that try to tie bows around the big blows of life. These sound good in a sermon but never hold up in real life. And that's when you will see what a gift it is that you've been entrusted with enough hurt to keep you humane. You'll offer the only real answer available: 'The Lord helped me survive and He'll help you too. I'll hold your hand while you find your way to Him.

I let my soul be cradled by God's divine assurance. His Son. Who completely understands. And who will walk me through every step of this if I keep my focus on Him. That's how I survive the 86,400 seconds called today.

I may not like all the circumstances from my past, but I can see I survived. God was with me. God has used parts of what I walked through for good. God used some of it to protect me. God has certainly used it to teach me lessons and make me more empathetic for others walking through hard things. And God has used some of it to position me for where I needed to be next.

We've survived what we feared. But can we survive the remembering? Memories are both our greatest treasures and our greatest sorrows.

In a regime where words are watched, lies are rewarded, and silence is survival, there is no truth. - Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad

Out in the palace gardens, groundskeepers buried statues in the dirt. As Justice and Peace were entombed together, a workman wrote on one flank "We'll come back for you." The grave was covered with leaves to conceal it. - Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad

And so the Red Army, squeezed between two of the most brutal dictators in human history, fought on. - Symphony for the City of the Dead: Dmitri Shostakovich and the Siege of Leningrad

Revelation was one of the relatively few documents from among the vast literary output of early Christianity that survived the canonical process and became Holy Scripture for the Christian community.

carnivores,

An adaptive agent is constantly playing a game with its environment. What exactly does that mean? Distilled to the essence, what actually has to happen for game-playing agents to survive and prosper? Two things, Holland decided: prediction and feedback.

You can go extinct, or broke. But here we are on the edge of chaos because that's where, on average, we all do the best.

Being human in our modern civilization is being forced into a boxing ring with Nature. And we're bloodied every time.

We can trust no one. In a regime where words are watched, lies are rewarded, and silence is survival, there is no truth.

Would you rather be hungry or dead?

Titanic as it sank into the icy sea? Would you prefer that the men leap ahead of you into the lifeboats, leave you and your children to die?" Alva answered without pause. "If a woman had designed the ship in the first place, there would have been enough lifeboats for everyone.

When I remember my despair now, and I do remember it, what surprises me still is that I survived it. That is the mystery of our lives. That we do survive the unthinkable. We overcome the unimaginable.

UNDERLYING NEED "COPING" MECHANISM

What was the human animal in the midst of the siege? An herbivore that crawled on all fours, browsing on dirty grasses. A predator that hunted alone or in packs. A social animal that spoke of noble art and wound violin strings from the guts of dead sheep and pigs. A creature with canine teeth for tearing, but with a tongue for speaking. A mouth that could devour or sing.

Just within the limits of besieged Leningrad, there where days when more than ten thousand people died. Over the course of January and February alone, there were roughly two hundred thousand deaths. We cannot know the numbers exactly. All authority in the city had broken down. No one recorded deaths anymore. No one removed the bodies from the streets.