Quotes About Survival

They had seen things no human eyes had looked on before, and they had not turned their gaze away. They were in their own view a formidable group of men. No inferno would now melt them, no storm destroy, because they had seen the worst and they had survived.

The one thing that might be said for societal collapse is that—for a while at least—everyone is equal.

Humans evolved in a world where nothing moved two thousand miles an hour, so there was no reason for the body to be able to counter that threat, but the brain still had to stay ahead of the game. Neurological processes in one of the most primitive parts of the brain, the amygdala, happen so fast that one could say they compete with bullets.

intact communities are far more likely to survive than fragmented ones.

During the Labor Day Hurricane of 1935, winds were past 200 miles per house and people caught outside were sandblasted to death. Rescue workers found nothing but their shoes and belt buckles… In 1938, the hurricane put downtown Providence, Rhode Island, under 10 feet of ocean. The waves generated by that storm were so huge that they literally shook the earth; seismographs in Alaska picked up their impact 5,000 miles away.

On the other hand, Franklin continued, white captives who were liberated from the Indians were almost impossible to keep at home: "Tho' ransomed by their friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a short time they become disgusted with our manner of life… and take the first good opportunity of escaping again into the woods.

The choreography always requires that each man make decisions based not on what's best for him, but on what's best for the group. If everyone does that, most of the group survives. If no one does, most of the group dies. That, in essence, is combat.

The men could only look at each other through the falling snow, from land to sea, from sea to land, and realize how unimportant they all were. —SHIP ON THE ROCKS, NEWBURYPORT, MASSACHUSETTS, 1839, NO SURVIVORS. (SIDNEY PERLEY, Historic Storms of New England, 1891)

You can be passive and not make a decision that may save your life," he says, "or you can accept death as a possibility. That was the crux of the whole thing.

An earthquake achieves what the law promises but does not in practice maintain," one of the survivors wrote. "The equality of all men.

there is no survival outside group survival, and that creates a social bond that many people sorely miss.

The reprieve doesn't last long though; within a couple of hours the waves are back up to 70 feet. A 70 foot wave has an angled face of well over 100 feet. The Seastate has reached levels that no one on the boat, and few people one earth, have ever seen. When the Contship Holland finally limped into port several days later, one of the officers stepped off and swore he would never set foot on another ship again.

It may be unpleasant, but it's preferable to getting killed.

Why do large-scale disasters produce such mentally healthy conditions?

Billy's at 44 north, 56 west and heading straight into meteorological hell.

He had survived two days in his underwear on the North Atlantic. Later, when asked how long it took him to warm up after his ordeal, he said, without a hint of irony, "Oh, three or four months.

Every day Fu-shee, the smaller children, and I fan out in the hills around Green Dragon to strip trees of their bark and leaves, dig up roots and search for wild grass. We'll eat anything, and we have. But you can't eat a leather belt like it's a crisp cucumber. You soak it, boil it, and chew on it for days.

The world in which I found myself was horrifying. In that world, people fought with sharpened rasp files, ate dogs, covered their faces with tattoos and sodomized goats. In that world, people killed for a package of tea.

he must cook and eat the child.

Organize your project, your life, and your organization around the minimum. What's the smallest market you can survive on?

Only wealthy organisms are able to culturally diversify, and as human beings get richer and richer, our instinct is to get ever more weird. As productivity has skyrocketed, so has our ability to do what we'd like instead of merely focusing on survival.

Good marketers tell a story. Choose your customers. Fire the ones that hurt your ability to deliver the right story to others. Living and breathing an authentic story is the best way to survive in a conversation rich world.

By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life.

If you try to steal the giant's lunch, the giant is likely to eat you for lunch.