Quotes About Survival

Our retinas and brains have been wired by a hundred million years of evolution to find outlines in a visually complex landscape. This helps us to recognize prey and predators.

I have a lot of brothers. It's easy for me to do physical stuff. I had to survive. I really love it, and I'd love to do more of it. I want to do action films. I want to go and hang off of wires, and jump off of bridges, and hang on bungee cords. I've always really loved it.

'The Others' books take place in an alternate Earth where the Earth natives have been the dominant predators throughout the world's history, and humans are nowhere near the top of the food chain. But humans are clever and resilient, if not always wise, and have made some bargains with the Others in order to survive.

Every man is wise when attacked by a mad dog; fewer when pursued by a mad woman; only the wisest survive when attacked by a mad notion.

We all wish to live. We all seek a world in which men are freed of the burdens of ignorance, poverty, hunger and disease. And we shall all be hard-pressed to escape the deadly rain of nuclear fall-out should catastrophe overtake us.

I'm not resigned, but I'm realistic too. The statistics in my case are very poor. Not many people come through esophageal cancer and live to talk about it, or not for long. And the other wager is, the part of the wager, it's a certainty you'll have a terrible time and you may wish you were dying because it's an awful process.

A phoenix, Beirut seems to always pull itself out its ashes, reinvents itself, has been conquered numerous times in its 7,000-year history, yet it survives by both becoming whatever its conquerors wished it to be and retaining its idiosyncratic persona.

I've taken regular gigs, I've worked in grocery stores, worked as a dishwasher, a porter in different places, all for survival. I don't feel bad about doing it. I wished I could have done better. And still do.

Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.

Since the time of the witch burnings, the grandmothers and the healers and the midwives have been systematically targeted. And burned at the stake for hundreds of years, decimating whole communities.

I'm like a witch! You can't kill me!

I am living against all predictions. The doctors say I am a sort of witch.

Our problem right now is that we're so specialized that if the lights go out, there are a huge number of people who are not going to know what to do. But within every dystopia there's a little utopia.

As Darwin himself was at pains to point out, natural selection is all about differential survival within species, not between them.

'Dirtbag' is just the term we use, like a 'gnarly dude' in surfing. Within the climbing culture, it means being a committed lifer: someone who has embraced a minimalist ethic in order to rock climb. It basically means you're a homeless person by choice.

I don't concentrate on any one period of history; I like to locate my stories in wildly different eras and places. I seem to be drawn to large, sprawling, uncomfortable swaths of American history, finding embedded within them a tight narrative that involves strife, heroism, and survival under difficult circumstances.

I carry the voices of all my family within me, and they were with me there in the jungle.

Without rain, there is no life.

After a natural disaster, safe drinking water is a priority. Humans can live longer without food than water, so communication about clean water is essential to help avoid the risk of cholera, dysentery, malnutrition, famine, and death.

More and more, as civilization develops, we find the primitive to be essential to us. We root into the primitive as a tree roots into the earth. If we cut off the roots, we lose the sap without which we can't progress or even survive. I don't believe our civilization can continue very long out of contact with the primitive.

If current technological processes continue without change, the environment will change, and we, the human species, will either have to mutate or even die, to disappear, as many species have disappeared.

Most animals are built to withstand one bad year.

It was a matter of survival for the local people, but it was the most violent scene I have ever witnessed. The people in my group, feeling helpless, were all spellbound and aghast at the same time. I became a vegetarian shortly after that.

Certainly, anyone whom I've witnessed, who has gone through something horrible and life-changing, has a sense of ironic humor, or an ability to look at the peculiarities of the world and find humor in it.