Quotes About Survival

No matter who won this battle, a race would be wiped out.

in combat, a pilot had to yank on his control stick with all his strength if he wanted to survive, and stamp his heavy, thick-soled flying boots mercilessly on the rudder pedals with his full weight as if he were kicking somebody on the floor in a life-or-death barroom brawl. In any case, hands and feet were too cold and cramped for gentle movement. The temperature at 25,000 feet was thirty degrees below zero, and the cockpits of the fighters weren't heated

It was all about size now: the big ran the world on the sweat of the small, and if the big faltered for any reason, the small were the first to go.

Survivors, Ethan had told this last group of boys while his wife listened from the stable, do not quit. Ever. They STOP. They sit, think, observe, and plan. That, boys, is a stop. Anything else is quitting, and quitting is dying. Are you the surviving kind, or the dying kind?

When a little voice inside of you tells you to duck, you should duck first, and then worry about where the voice is coming from.

For those familiar with the work, it is no surprise that the testimony includes that of Pelagia Lewinska, from her memoir Twenty Months in Auschwitz, when she describes her first awareness of the Nazi intent and remarked that she "felt under orders to live" (Lewinska, 41ff., 50).

what that post-Holocaust life ought to be.23

Lewinska is one of three examples he describes; the others are of Jewish mothers at Auschwitz and Rabbi Zvi Hirsch Meisels and his Hasidim in Buchenwald; see To Mend the World, 216–219.

You stay alive, no matter what occurs! I will find you. No matter how long it takes, no matter how far, I will find you.

But Life, being Life, can never die at all. —FREDERICK TENNYSON

Our brains are wired in such a way that we can forget, so we don't all end up eating the barrel of a gun.

She couldn't breathe, couldn't think. Her primal instincts eliminated all extraneous functions not related to her immediate survival.

Living myth is about the experience of the waters parting again in the here and now. As a critical moment opens before us the spirit of life and genius of the soul speaks to us and through us. What was about to crush us suddenly parts before us and we shoot forward with the sudden vitality of life, fueled by the living imagination needed to survive.

Fear is an old word that derives from the same roots that give us "fare," as in "thoroughfare." Although it often causes people to run away from troubling situations, at a deeper level, fear means "to go through it." The hidden purpose of fear involves bringing us closer to natural instincts for survival, but also for awakening inner resources and sharpening our intelligence when faced with true danger and the basic need to change.

The ability to be tough-minded remains useful; but by now, the fact that we are all in trouble in terms of both nature and culture can only be denied by those who become overly conservative and blindly reactionary. The more tender-hearted imagination that suggests we are all in this together and that there must be an underlying unity in life may be the only way to survive.

I must survive. I have promises to keep.

If it is possible to be happy in the middle of a nightmare, then Topthorn and I were happy that summer.

I could believe only in the hell I was living in, a hell on earth, and it was man-made, not God-made.

Vichy officials and collaborationists imprisoned 135,000 people (many for little more than their political beliefs), sent 650,000 more to Germany as "guest workers" under an obligatory labor scheme, and, most notoriously, sent 76,000 Jews to Nazi death camps. Less than 3 percent of those Jews survived.

Suddenly, out of the mist came a parachute with a fresh Hershey chocolate bar from America. It took me a week to eat that candy bar. I hid it day and night. The chocolate was wonderful, but it wasn't the chocolate that was most important. What it meant was that someone in America cared. That parachute was something more important than candy. It represented hope. Hope that someday we would be free. Without hope the soul dies.

I can live on thin rations but not without hope

Are you ready for nuclear Armageddon?

Harry Marsham, who was known as Marsh to his friends, should have died that night.

Though no law was written, there was a crude rule of law, adherence to a covenant that transcended their selfish interests. It was biblical in its depth, and its importance grew with each step into wilderness. When the need arose, a man extended a helping hand to his friends, to his partners, to strangers. In so doing, each knew that his own survival might one day depend upon the reaching grasp of another.