Quotes About Survival

Mothers began to bet on their sickly children's lives

In June 1996 she published a book Out of the Shadows: Fred West's Daughter Tells Her Harrowing Story of Survival.

Most people seem to think that organisms develop adaptive traits in response to environmental change. This is bullshit. The environment changes and those who already happen to have newly adaptive traits don't get wiped out.

Psychopathy's no disorder in those shoes, eh? Just a survival strategy.

If you have to go up unarmed against an angry T rex with a four-digit IQ, it can't hurt to have a trained combat specialist at your side. At the very least, she might be able to fashion a pointy stick from the branch of some convenient tree.

We were all in it together, of course, desperate to regain some hypothetical upper hand by any means necessary.

Humans didn't really fight over skin tone or ideology; those were just handy cues for kin-selection purposes. Ultimately it always came down to bloodlines and limited resources.

I don't understand how meat like you survived to adulthood.

we learned to see faces in the clouds and portents in the stars, to see agency in randomness, because natural selection favors the paranoid.

You know what happens when you keep a dog locked away from every living thing, except you visit once a day and kick the shit out of him?" Perreault laughed nervously. "Someone actually tried that?" "What happens is, the dog's a social animal, and it gets so lonely it actually looks forward to the shit-kicking. It asks to be kicked. It begs.

Imagine you have intellect but no insight, agendas but no awareness. Your circuitry hums with strategies for survival and persistence, flexible, intelligent, even technological—but no other circuitry monitors it. You can think of anything, yet are conscious of nothing. You can't imagine such a being, can you? The term being doesn't even seem to apply, in some fundamental way you can't quite put your finger on.

But when the flash flood crosses your path, when the lion leaps at you from the grasses, advanced self-awareness is an unaffordable indulgence. The brain stem does its best.

Pack animals always tear apart the weaklings in their midst. Every child knows that much instinctively.

There's no such thing as survival of the fittest. Survival of the most adequate, maybe. It doesn't matter whether a solution's optimal. All that matters is whether it beats the alternatives.

So much anger in here. So much hate. So much to take out on someone. This time it's going to count. She's adrift in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, three hundred kilometers from land. She's alone. She has nothing to eat. It doesn't matter. None of it matters. She's alive; that alone gives her the upper hand.

PREDATORS RUN FOR THEIR DINNER. PREY RUN FOR THEIR LIVES. —OLD ECOLOGIST'S PROVERB

I've told you before, Daniel: roach isn't an insult. We're the ones still standing after the mammals build their nukes, we're the ones with the stripped-down OS's so damned simple they work under almost any circumstances. We're the goddamned Kalashnikovs of thinking meat.

ALL ANIMALS ARE UNDER STRINGENT SELECTION PRESSURE TO BE AS STUPID AS THEY CAN GET AWAY WITH. —PETE RICHERSON AND ROBERT BOYD

You have a naïve understanding of evolutionary processes. There's no such thing as survival of the fittest. Survival of the most adequate, maybe.

Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors. If self-deception promotes fitness, the brain lies. Stops noticing— irrelevant things. Truth never matters. Only fitness.

Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors. If self-deception promotes fitness, the brain lies. Stops noticing—irrelevant things. Truth never matters. Only fitness. By now you don't experience the world as it exists at all. You experience a simulation built from assumptions.

Brains are survival engines, not truth detectors. If self-deception promotes fitness, the brain lies.

I don't know what parts of me the Ceph have blown away and I don't know how much else has been broken down to keep the rest of me going, but I know that at least my balls are still intact. I know this because I can feel them crawling back up into my abdomen.

The water's too deep to stand in now— ...feebly treading water although her limbs must be frozen almost to paralysis. It's a pointless effort, a brainstem effort; last duties discharged, last options exhausted, still the body grabs for those last few seconds, brief suffering still somehow better than endless nonexistence.