Quotes About Survival

'The 5th Wave' is sci-fi, but I tried very hard to ground the story in very human terms and in those universal themes that transcend genre. How do we define ourselves? What, exactly, does it mean to be human? What remains after everything we trust, everything we believe in and rely upon, has been stripped away?

Here on Earth, we're exposed to asteroids hitting the Earth, eventual changes in the Sun, changes in the Earth's climate, things we're doing to the Earth's climate. If we want to survive, we need to become a multi-planet species. That's further down the road, but the first wave is going to be the explorers.

I'd always surfed with my ego - I had to get the biggest, best wave - and a lot of it was for survival.

Big waves are a whole different ball game. You're riding a wave with an immense amount of speed and power, generally over 10 meters. On the face of the wave, obviously life and death thoughts start to happen.

When the ship goes down, the waves very quickly roll over the top of it, and attention shifts elsewhere. It's just the natural order of things in TV - in life - and is as it should be.

Blue Peter' scarred me for life. I was kayak-surfing in Cornwall and the waves were so strong it was more like white-water rafting. I had to hang on for dear life. At one point I let go and my hand was crushed on a rock.

In my 20s, I was body surfing in Spain and the current dragged me out. I was waving at my friends who thought I was messing about, but I was drowning. I managed to swim in on my back but it scarred me.

I know that when you are experiencing failure, it's pretty damn painful. It is easy in retrospect to wax poetic about it. But in the moment, you don't think you will survive, let alone have the time to reflect on how valuable those lessons will be for you in the future.

Some people are contriving ways and means of making us collapse.

Bedouin ways were hard even for those brought up to them, and for strangers, terrible: a death in life.

My childhood was bittersweet in many ways. We moved around a lot. By the time I was 10, I had travelled thousands of miles, often on my own. My parents were like my friends, so it felt like I didn't really have parents at all. But in a crazy way that was very liberating. It forced me to be independent, maybe a leader, and certainly a survivor.

Selective memory is surely one of nature's most effective ways of ensuring the survival of our species.

If I'd been doing the cabaret circuit or the club circuit or the Saturday night telly that was around in the 80s, I wouldn't be around any more, because those shows have fallen by the wayside. So I have had to keep changing.

You need to be very adaptable to have a long career. If you're not taught by somebody who knows different styles you'll be left by the wayside very quickly.

I think you just have to look after yourself, you know, when you're doing long tours; you just have to. I think bands learn that pretty soon, really. And if they don't, I think they tend to fall by the wayside.

We want to live at any price; so we cannot burden ourselves with feelings which, though they might be ornamental enough in peace-time, would be out of place here.

We cannot survive if we give corruption any chance. Corruption can only exist with an umbrella from the top.

We cannot calculate the numbers of people who left, fled or were fished out of Europe just ahead of the Holocaust.

Yom HaShoah is a vital day in the Jewish calendar, providing us with a focal point for our remembrance. We cannot bring the dead back to life, but we can bring their memory back to life and ensure they are not forgotten. We can undertake in our lives to do what they were so cruelly prevented from doing in theirs.

I have to laugh because despite the destruction, we cannot let 'them' steal our pleasure. That is always the theme of my performances: I'm here to thrive, not just to survive.

Many people say that this is not an easy issue, we cannot just say that this is how it is, it's not black and white. But I say that this is black and white. Either we stop the emissions or we don't. There are no gray areas when it comes to survival.

It is true that we are weak and sick and ugly and quarrelsome but if that is all we ever were, we would millenniums ago have disappeared from the face of the earth.

I have not survived 50 years in showbusiness by being Mr. Nice. If you are weak, this business eats you up.

In the harsh and violent Middle East surrounding us, there is no mercy for the weak. Only the strong survive!