Quotes About Survival

viriditas were no more than a cancer that the rock must suffer.

We were on our own; and so we became fundamentally different beings.

Survival of the fittest, which Sax had always considered a useless tautology. But if social Darwinists were taking over, then maybe the concept gained importance, as a religious dogma of the ruling order....

even Deinococcus radiodurans perishes in it.

As a species they were therefore probably doomed. And so the only real adaptive strategy, for the individual, was to do one's best to secure one's own position. And sometimes that meant a little strategic defection.

so we shot him up with antibiotics and glued shut a slashed vein in the groin that was sure to kill him.

He turned off the phone, returned it to the safe. He checked the particulate meter on the wall: 1300 ppm. This for fine particulates, 25 nanometers and smaller. He went out onto the street again, staying in the shade of buildings. Everyone was doing that; no one stood in the sun now. Gray air lay on the town like smoke. It was too hot to have a smell, there was just a scorched sensation, a smell like heat itself, like flame.

Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, alive

The thirties were zombie years. Civilization had been killed but it kept walking the Earth, staggering toward some fate even worse than death.

Maybe the proper response to standing on the side of a planet, in the open air of its atmosphere, very near to the local star, is always terror. Maybe everything humans ever did or planned to do was designed to dodge that terror. Maybe their plan to go to the stars was just one more expression of that terror.

no extinctions from this point onward are inevitable (this has always been true, however) 19,340

The Americans lost all the battles but won the war. Because when they lost they were still here. It was their home. They would go off and regroup, and the British would follow them and beat on them again somewhere else. There were a couple American victories along the way, but mostly not. Mostly the British won, but even so they eventually wore down, and in the end the Americans surrounded them and kicked them out. The Brits were going to run out of food, so they left.

For that world out there we just saw. For humanity. What's it been, about fifteen thousand people, and a couple hundred years? In the big scheme of things it's not that many. And then we have a new world to live on." "If

This is why tigers have ranges of hundreds of square kilometers, Vlad said. Robber barons are not really very efficient.

If we avoid a mass extinction event in the next 20 years, that's a utopian future.

But that was life on Mars. They could be dead within minutes of any number of untoward events, as always.

Senescence is not a simple matter. Staying alive when senescence should have kicked in—it's a wonder we've done as much as we have. There's probably a purpose in senescence. Avoiding overpopulation, perhaps. Making room for new genetic material.

There is no life raft' you're just freaking swimming all the time.

I am like the salmon- i have to swim against the current- i have to.

En mand kan være brødløs, har han potet så er han ikke matløs.

Edevart var alene mand om alt om bord og på land... han skulde nok ha hat nogen til å koke mat for sig; men også det fik gå som det kunde, han levet på tørmat og kaffe og klaget ikke over kostholdet.

I am like the salmon- i have to go against the stream- i have to.

Human beings push against each other and trample on each other; some sink exhausted to the ground and serve as a bridge for others, some perish—they are the ones least fitted for coping with the push, and they perish. That can't be helped. But the others flourish and blossom. Such is life's immortality. All this, mind you, they knew at the pump.

I had noticed very clearly that every time I went hungry a little too long it was as though my brains simply ran quietly out of my head and left me empty. My head became light and floating. I could no longer feel its weight on my shoulders, and I had the sense that my eyes were remaining far too open when I looked at anything.