Quotes About Survival

If someone starts talking about pride today I'm going to vomit... The Apache nation had pride and look where they are. The bushmen of Kalahari have pride and look where they are.

All of us humans have myriad other species to thank. Without them, we couldn't exist. It's that simple, and we can't afford to ignore them, anymore than I can afford to neglect my precious wife--nor the sweet mother Earth that births and holds us all. Without us, Earth will abide and endure; without her, however, we could not even be.

We may be undermined by our survival instincts, honed over eons to help us deny, defy, or ignore catastrophic portents lest they paralyze us with fright.

Missing, however, are nearly all fauna adapted to us. The seemingly invincible cockroach, a tropical import, long ago froze in unheated apartment buildings. Without garbage, rats starved or became lunch for the raptors nesting in burnt-out skyscrapers.

Nature gives children great emotional resilience to help them survive the oppressions of being small, but these oppressions still make them into slightly insane adults, either mad to seize all the power they once lacked or (more usually) mad to avoid it.

I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation, whose purposes are modeled after our own -- a God, in short, who is but a reflection of human frailty. Neither can I believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotisms.

I do not believe that civilization will be wiped out in a war fought with the atomic bomb. Perhaps two-thirds of the people of the Earth might be killed, but enough men capable of thinking, and enough books, would be left to start again, and civilization could be restored.

We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if mankind is to survive.

In times of crisis people are generally blind to everything outside their immediate necessities.

HUMANITY IS GOING TO REQUIRE A SUBSTANTIALLY NEW WAY OF THINKING IF IT IS TO SURVIVE.

Non so con quali armi si combatterà la Terza guerra mondiale, ma la Quarta sì: con bastoni e pietre

Mankind invented the atomic bomb, but no mouse would ever construct a moustrap.

I do not know with what weapons World War 3 will be fought, but World War 4 will be fought with sticks and stones.

Nulla darà la possibilità di sopravvivenza sulla terra quanto l'evoluzione verso una dieta vegetariana

Evolution is arranged so that a species survives, not so that it will be happy while it survives.

It hardly matters why a library is destroyed: every banning, curtailment, shredding, plunder or loot gives rise (at least as a ghostly presence) to a louder, clearer, more durable library of the banned, looted, plundered, shredded or curtailed.

From fire, water, the passage of time, neglectful readers, and the hand of the censor, each of my books has escaped to tell me its story.

It is likely that libraries will carry on and survive, as long as we persist in lending words to the world that surrounds us, and storing them for future readers.

any library, by its very existence, conjures up its forbidden or forgotten double: an invisible but formidable library of the books that, for conventional reasons of quality, subject matter or even volume, have been deemed unfit for survival under this specific roof.

German surgeon Johann Paul Kremer warned in his Auschwitz diary, By comparison, Dante's inferno seems almost a comedy') but as metaphor.

To be enlightened is to be aware, always, of total reality in its immanent otherness - to be aware of it and yet remain in a condition to survive as an animal. Our goal is to discover that we have always been where we ought to be. Unhappily we make the task exceedingly difficult for ourselves.

What's the point of truth or beauty or knowledge when anthrax bombs are popping all around you?

Our civilisation being what it is, you've got to spent eight hours out of every twenty-four as a mixture between an imbecile and a sewing machine. It's very disagreeable, I know. It's humiliating and disgusting. But there you are. You've got to do it, otherwise the whole fabric of our world will fall to bits and we'll starve. Do the job then, idiotically and mechanically; and spend your leisure hours in being a real complete man or woman.

Our vanity makes us exaggerate the importance of human life; the individual is nothing; Nature cares only for the species.