Quotes About Survival

To hang on from day to day and from week to week, spinning out a present that had no future, seemed an unconquerable instinct, just as one's lungs will always draw the next breath so long as there is air available.

How could you make appeal to the future when not a trace of you, not even an anonymous word scribbled on a piece of paper, could physically survive?

Now he had recognized himself as a dead man it became important to stay alive as long as possible.

We are living in a world in which nobody is free, in which hardly anybody is secure, in which it is almost impossible to be honest and to remain alive.

the consciousness of being at war, and therefore in danger, makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival.

As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.

If you are a man, Winston, you are the last man.

In trench warfare five things are important: firewood, food, tobacco, candles, and the enemy. In winter on the Zaragoza front they were important in that order, with the enemy a bad last

Political or military commentators, like astrologers, can survive almost any mistake, because their more devoted followers do not look to them for an appraisal of the facts but for the stimulation of nationalistic loyalties

It was more natural to exist from moment to moment, accepting another ten minutes' life even with the certainty that there was torture at the end of it.

The first effect of poverty is that it kills thought.

Perhaps it is only when people are somewhere near the starvation level that they have anything to sing about.

Any kind of organized revolt against the party, which was bound to be a failure, struck her as stupid. The clever thing to do was to break the rules and stay alive all the same.

Like the crocodile, he strikes always at the weakest spot.

At the time I could not see beyond the moral dilemma that is presented to the weak in a world governed by the strong: Break the rules, or perish.

No one I met at this time -- doctors, nurses, practicantes, or fellow-patients-- failed to assure me that a man who is hit through the neck and survives it is the luckiest creature alive. I could not help thinking that it would be even luckier not to be hit at all.

In reality there is no kind of evidence or argument by which one can show that Shakespeare, or any other writer, is good. Nor is there any way of definitely proving that--for instance--Warwick Beeping is bad. Ultimately there is no test of literary merit except survival, which is itself an index to majority opinion.

You discover that a man who has gone even a week on bread and margarine is not a man any longer, only a belly with a few accessory organs.

To hang on from day to day and from week to week, spinning out a present that had no future, seemed an unconquerable instinct, just as one's lungs will always draw the next breath so long as there is air available.

The clever thing was to break the rules and stay alive all the same.

Na bojnom polju, u mu?ilištu, na brodu koji tone, razlozi zbog kojih se boriš uvijek se zaborave jer se tijelo nadimlje sve dok ne ispuni cijeli tvoj svemir, pa ?ak i onda kad te nije paralizirao strah ili ne vrištiš od boli, život je od trenutka do trenutka, samo borba protiv gladi ili hladno?e ili sna, protiv pokvarena želuca ili zuba koji boli.

And at the same time the consciousness of being at war, and therefore in danger, makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival.

Å»y? nawet tak, z dnia na dzieÅ" i z tygodnia na tydzieÅ", wci?? w tera?niejszoÅ›ci i bez ?adnych widoków na przyszÅ'o??, nakazywaÅ' im instynkt równie niemo?liwy do przezwyci??enia jak ten, który wprawia w ruch pÅ'uca, dopóki w powietrzu jest cho? odrobina tlenu.

And perhaps you might pretend, afterwards, that it was only a trick and that you just said it to make them stop and didn't really mean it. But that isn't true. At the time when it happens you do mean it. You think there's no other way of saving yourself and you're quite ready to save yourself that way. You want it to happen to the other person. You don't give a damn what they suffer. All you care about is yourself.