Quotes About Survival

How do I explain a life that has lasted for billions of years? It is almost as if I must start with an apology for being alive when everyone I once knew is dead.

Survival, though, means more than going on. It means understanding the past and finding a way to subdue it, to reconcile it, to overcome it.

I need to live like that crooked tree--... that knelt down in the hardest winds but could not be blasted away.

for their own self-protection, great figures like Socrates, Spinoza, or Galileo in every generation and culture must somehow learn to camouflage their superiority or suffer the painful consequences.

They do horrible, unchildish things because they they have had very horrible, unchildish lives.

Half the oxygen we breathe emanates from microscopic phytoplankton sloshing around the surface of the ocean. After literally billions of years of performing that essential, priceless service, those vital organisms now must swim and feed and survive in a sea of plastic soup. Figuring out what's up with those organisms is, Goldstein suggests, a pretty vital matter. If we are inadvertently killing them off, the result could be far less visible, but even more devastating, than deforestation.

In politics, you either eat the baby or you are the baby.

I was drafted into the Army when I was 19 and came out at age 22. Most people that I knew didn't think they'd come home alive. I didn't think I would either, so I was happy when I did.

Melanie and Douglas are now both doing well.

I shudder to tell that many of our people, harassed by the madness of excessive hunger, cut pieces from the buttocks of the Saracens already dead there, which they cooked, but when it was not yet roasted enough by the fire, they devoured it with savage mouth

probability calculations needed to figure out gambling games or to solve problems in everyday life. We didn't need that skill to survive as a species in the forests and jungles.

The creation myth is a Darwinian device for survival.

Nature is the birthright of everyone on Earth. The millions of species we have allowed to survive are our phylogenetic kin. Their long-term history is our long-term history. Despite all our fantasies and pretensions, we always have been and will remain a biological species tied to this particular biological world.

Competing is intense among humans, and within a group, selfish individuals always win. But in contests between groups, groups of altruists always beat groups of selfish individuals.

When an individual is cooperative and altruistic, this reduces his advantage in competition to a comparable degree with other members but increases the survival and reproduction rate of the group as a whole. In a nutshell, individual selection favors what we call sin and group selection favors virtue. The result is the internal conflict of conscience that afflicts all but psychopaths, estimated fortunately to make up only 1 to 4 percent of the population.

Out of the warlike peoples arose civilization, while the peaceful collectors and hunters were driven to the ends of the earth, where they are gradually being exterminated or absorbed, with only the dubious satisfaction of observing the nations which had wielded war so effectively to destroy them and to become great, now victimized by their own instrument.

The creation myth is a Darwinian device for survival. Tribal conflict, where believers on the inside were pitted against infidels on the outside, was a principal driving force that shaped biological human nature.

Traditional religious beliefs have been eroded, not so much by humiliating disproofs of their mythologies as by the growing awareness that beliefs are really enabling mechanisms for survival. Religions

The human species is, in a word, an environmental hazard. It is possible that intelligence in the wrong kind of species was foreordained to be a fatal combination for the biosphere.

A] new idea will, like mother earth, take some serious hits. If good it will survive, probably in modified form. If bad it will die, usually at the time of death or retirement of the last original proponent. As Paul Samuelson once said of the science of economics: funeral by funeral, theory advances.

S]elfish members win within groups, but groups of altruists best groups of selfish members. (63)

Who are we to destroy the planet's Creation? Each species around us is a masterpiece of evolution, exquisitely adapted to its environment. Species existing today are thousands to millions of years old. Their genes, having been tested by adversity over countless generations, engineer a staggeringly complex mix of biochemical devices that promote the survival and reproduction of the organisms carrying them.

these species have evolved only rarely in evolution.

Human existence may be simpler than we thought. There is no predestination, no unfathomed mystery of life. Demons and gods do not vie for our allegiance. Instead, we are self-made, independent, alone, and fragile, a biological species adapted to live in a biological world. What counts for long-term survival is intelligent self-understanding, based upon a greater independence of thought than that tolerated today even in our most advanced democratic societies.