Quotes About Survival

To fight upward out of that chaos to this form requires a compulsion: one must be faced with the choice of perishing or prevailing. A dominating race can grow up only out of terrible and violent beginnings.

The poison from which the weaker nature perishes strengthens the strong man - and he does not call it poison.

Hunger attacks me, said Zarathustra, like a robber. Among forests and swamps my hunger attacks me, and late in the night.

There is no beast without cruelty

I do indeed find the cruelty of Nature which is so often referred to; but in a different place: Nature is cruel, but against her lucky and well-constituted children; she protects and shelters and loves the lowly.

Truth is the kind of error without which a certain species of life could not live. The value for life is ultimately decisive.

What is sustained in a sustainable community is not economic growth but the entire web of life on which our longterm survival depends.

In the 20th century, ecologists discovered that in the self-organization of ecosystems, cooperation is actually much more important than competition. We constantly observe partnerships, linkages, associations—species living inside one another, depending on one another for survival. Partnership is a key characteristic of life. Self-organization is a collective enterprise.

Lankhmar City would feed me, aye, feed me well—and be paid only with lumps and perhaps a deep scratch or two. So to Lankhmar I went. Falling in there with a clever girl of the same turn of mind and some experience, I did well for two full rounds of moons and a few more. We worked only in black garb, and called ourselves to ourselves the Dark Duo.

You find yourself going by the book instead of by your head. You're covered, if you go by the book—no matter what happens. And you might just as well be dead!

When you think of the condition the world is in now you sometimes wish that Noah had missed the boat.

People everywhere were being told that this war was no continuation of politics by other means, no traditional struggle for limited objectives. It was a fight to the death with the forces of evil, and the stakes were survival and civilization itself. It is no simple thing to make people believe such things and later persuade them to accept a settlement based on compromise.

The troops were cracking because they could not absorb what was happening to them, because they knew themselves to be utterly powerless (bravery had little survival value when one was on the receiving end of a bombardment), and because they had no confidence that the generals who had put them in danger knew what they were doing. Men whose courage was beyond challenge could and did break down if subjected to enough strain of this kind.

a petri dish in the ocean of life.

Admat, don't kill me! Don't be wrathful. Don't exist!

How did I make a living? I haven't. I have eked out an existence. - Ella Baker

it may be time to stop worrying about what we are making extinct and start nurturing what will outlast us.

Violence destroyed families. Violence destroyed lives. ... He'd never been a violent man, but he'd seen it. It killed the spirit and left families fearful and hopeless.

People commit thousands of small suicides every day that go unnoticed

It is now widely believed (and, I think, correctly believed) that the survival of a nation under modern competitive conditions depends on broadening the electorate's competency in numerate matters. Numeracy

Evolutionary science kind of bears that out: When species are rivals and competing for space and resources, the superior one wins. Nature has no compunction about that; it just is.

Everyone kept saying, 'The terrorists didn't win. You won! We won! You survived!' That's just weird to me. Nobody wins in these situations. I don't see winners and losers in tragic events.

I don't recommend this, but my dad - to help us get through the winter, he bought a kerosene heater, and he had it in the kitchen so that the furnace wouldn't have to kick off.

There's something about the Pacific Northwest, the scale of it, and the fact that not so long ago people came here and died getting here, and then died the first winter they were here. There's this breathtaking beauty, just a little bit of moss on the tree, just this little thread of danger, and the sinister. And I really like that.