Quotes About Survival

When I was very young, I remember my mother telling me about a friend of hers in Germany, a pianist who played a symphony that wasn't permitted, and the Germans came up on stage and broke every finger on her hands. I grew up with stories of Nazis breaking the fingers of Jews.

Had I not went to jail I may not be alive. My temper was really awful.

Besides being a slum kid with no great education in anything except how to fight and stay alive and steal, I also had this temper.

In our lifetime, we're going to see fifty percent of the world's species go extinct. We're already seeing this radical rise in the world's temperature that was predicted.

The primitive fight-or-flight regions of our mammalian brains react to immediate danger. We instinctively run from an avalanche but the gradual retreat of a glacier, the portent of the far greater danger of rising temperatures and rising oceans, just doesn't get through to us in the same way.

We need myths to get by. We need story; otherwise the tremendous randomness of experience overwhelms us. Story is what penetrates.

Generating a rapidly changing environment--that is, engaging in actively that is so quick it is disorienting and appears uncertain or ambiguous to the enemy--inhibits the adversary's ability to adapt and causes confusion and disorder that, in turn, causes an adversary to overreact or underreact. Boyd closed the briefing by saying the message is that whoever can handle the quickest rate of change is the one who survives.

pain reaches a certain point and does not get worse but remains in all its intensity and you can survive it.

That poetry survived in its formal agencies finally, and that prose survived to get something said.

Subsidizing inactivity is a bad practice. Yes, people have to survive. But they will not thrive if they are induced by charity (public or private, government or religious) to be unproductive. Purposeful work is what establishes one's place in society. In addition to providing legitimate income, work is what gives one purpose, enables one to develop a skill, earns one a positive reputation.

JFK to RFK: To survive in politics, you sometimes have to be willing to make fun of yourself.

the walls of the cabin burst outwards in a sheet of flame. Logs were thrown high into the sky, spinning end over end before they crashed back down to earth

Old guns are better than no guns.

like cornered rats, the people of Hellion would not go down without a fight.

Dying is hardest on the living.

It's been twenty years, Lieutenant. I've gone through it every day for twenty years. I'll get through these days the same way I got through those, one bad day at a time.

his corporal, Victor Cruz, advised him not to make friends in Vietnam, that it was easier that way when those soldiers were killed.

It could be so cruel, hope. But for twenty years it was all she'd had to hold on to, the only thing to push back the darkness that lingered on the periphery, searching for every opportunity to enshroud her.

Tracy knew prisoners often said the most difficult thing to get used to wasn't being locked behind bars or doors, but learning to deal with the constant noise, the lack of any peace or privacy.

That's what our minds do. They protect us. They bury those memories that would cripple us, so that we can live with ourselves.

our memory is enhanced by the emotion attending the event. The more intense the feelings the more accessible to the memory is the event. Few of us live lives so emotionally charged that we can truly, accurately retrieve all of it. ...Often only our crisis events are preserved with strong emotions. For our own survival we can't forget them, and then we too easily forget the good stuff.

where did these people their food? i'm hungry.

Someday, when all your civilization and science are likewise swept away, your kind will pray for a man with a sword.

Conan, grim, blood-stained, naked but for a loin-cloth, shackles on his mighty limbs, his blue eyes blazing beneath the tangled black mane which fell over his low broad forehead.