Quotes About Survival

Animal behaviorists have noted again and again that predatory species often kill when they have no desire to eat. They are killing because the instinct to kill is very strong.

The ability to have sex gives leishmania a tremendous evolutionary advantage. It is the main reason it has thrived and spread for a hundred million years, infecting dinosaurs and people, becoming one of the most successful diseases (from its own point of view) in the world.

The Mole People, by Jennifer Toth (Chicago Review Press, 1993).

The survivors are deprived of that vital human connection to their past; they are robbed of their stories, their music and dance, their spiritual practices and beliefs—they are stripped of their very identity.

Vivir causa daños cerebrales.

One biologist told me that what probably saved many indigenous Indian cultures from complete extinction were the mass rapes of native women by European men; many of the babies from those rapes inherited European genetic resistance to disease.

Europeans killed many native people directly without the assistance of disease. In some instances, they intentionally used disease as a biological weapon by, for example, giving Indians smallpox-infected blankets. And millions more Indians died of disease who might have survived, had European brutality not left them weakened and susceptible.

Sometimes, a society can see its end approaching from afar and still not be able to adapt, like the Maya; at other times, the curtain drops without warning and the show is over. No civilization has survived forever. All move toward dissolution, one after the other, like waves of the sea falling upon the shore. None, including ours, is exempt from the universal fate.

Then they drove away, split up a few days later, and Mr. Wilkinson established a new identity. He lay low for several years in a remote part of Utah—although I suppose 'a remote part of Utah' is redundant.

Leishmaniasis has a long and terrible history with human beings, stretching back as far as human records exist and causing suffering and death for thousands of years.

The act of living causes brain damage.

The mail lets fall a Xerox of something written by a man aged 27, a hostage, tortured in prison: My genitals have been the object of such a sadistic display they keep me constantly awake with the pain... Do whatever you can to survive. You know, I think that men love wars... And my incurable anger, my unbendable wounds break open further with ears, I am crying helplessly, and they still control the world, and you are not in my arms.

Re-vision – the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for woman more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival. Until we understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves. And this drive to self-knowledge, for women, is more than a search for identity: it is part of our refusal of the self-destructiveness of male-dominated society.

Exiles feed on hope.

Every man for himself.

The little reed, bending to the force of the wind, soon stood upright again when the storm had passed over.

Though the lion and the antelope happen to live in the same forest, the antelope still has time to grow up. - Cape Coast, Ghana.

Do not try to fight a lion if you are not one yourself.

One little Indian left all alone, he went out and hanged himself and then there were none.

And then there were none.

Life can be very terrible," he said. "One needs much courage." "To kill oneself? yes, I suppose one does." "Also to live," said Poirot, "one needs courage.

He dragged me back - just in time. A tree had crashed down on to the side walk, just missing us. Poirot stared at it, pale and upset. "It was a near thing that! But clumsy, all the same - for I had no suspicion - at least hardly any suspicion. Yes, but for my quick eyes, the eyes of a cat, Hercule Poirot might now be crushed out of existence - a terrible calamity for the world. And you, too, mon ami - though that would not be such a national catastrophe." "Thank you," I said coldly.

In my opinion half the people who spend their lives avoiding being run over by buses had much better be run over and put safely out of the way. They're no good.

People who ought to die of shock and exposure don't die of shock and exposure, et cetera, et cetera. The human frame is tougher than one can imagine possible. Moreover, in my experience, a physical shock is more often fatal than a mental shock.