Quotes About Survival

Man's mind is his basic tool of survival. Life is given to him, survival is not. His body is given to him, its sustenance is not. His mind is given to him, its content is not. To remain alive, he must act, and before he can act he must know the nature and purpose of his action...To remain alive, he must think.

He thought of all the living species that train their young in the art of survival, the cats who teach their kittens to hunt, the birds who spend such strident effort on teaching their fledglings to fly—yet man, whose tool of survival is the mind, does not merely fail to teach a child to think, but devotes the child's education to the purpose of destroying his brain, of convincing him that thought is futile and evil, before he has started to think.

Man's unique reward, however, is that while animals survive by adjusting themselves to their background, man survives by adjusting his background to himself.

In any hour and issue of your life, you are free to think or to evade that effort. But you are not free to escape from your nature, from the fact that reason is your means of survival—so that for you, who are a human being, the question 'to be or not to be' is the question 'to think or not to think.' "A

The prisoners liked to talk about their past. Their memories were the only future they had.

Child labor was not ended by legislative fiat; child labor ended when it became economically unnecessary for children to earn wages in order to survive—when the income of their parents became sufficient to support them. The emancipators and benefactors of those children were not legislators or factory inspectors, but manufacturers and financiers.

In the normal conditions of existence, man has to choose his goals, project them in time, pursue them and achieve them by his own effort. He cannot do it if his goals are at the mercy of and must be sacrificed to any misfortune happening to others. He cannot live his life by the guidance of rules applicable only to conditions under which human survival is impossible.

Si algunos hombres eligen no pensar o no trabajar, sólo pueden sobrevivir (temporalmente) saqueando los bienes producidos por otros; pero esos otros tuvieron que producirlos, o nadie habría sobrevivido.

Puesto que el conocimiento, el pensamiento y la acción racional son propiedades del individuo, y puesto que la elección de ejercer o no su facultad racional depende de él, la supervivencia del hombre requiere que quienes piensan no sufran las injerencias de quienes no piensan.

En la medida en que un hombre se guía por su juicio racional, actúa en concordancia con los requisitos de su naturaleza y, en esa medida, consigue una forma humana de supervivencia y bienestar; en la medida en que actúa de forma irracional, actúa como su propio destructor.

In any event he had to sleep in the tube that night

If the rest of them can survive only by destroying us, then why should we wish them to survive?

Man's mind is his basic tool of survival. Life is given to him, survival is not." stated by John Galt in Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged

the problem of survival is solved, by recognizing that survival demands constant growth and creativeness

Since nature does not provide man with an automatic form of survival, since he has to support his life by his own effort, the doctrine that concern with one's own interests is evil means that man's desire to live is evil—that man's life, as such, is evil. No doctrine could be more evil than that.

Man's mind is his basic tool of survival. Life is given to him, survival is not." stated by John Galt

A man's method of using his consciousness determines his method of survival. The three contestants are Attila, the Witch Doctor and the Producer—or the man of force, the man of feelings, the man of reason—or the brute, the mystic, the thinker. The rest of mankind calls it expedient to be tossed by the current of events from one of those roles to another, not choosing to identify the fact that those three are the source which determines the current's direction.

For every living species, growth is a necessity of survival. Life is motion, a process of self-sustaining action that an organism must carry on in order to remain in existence. This principle is equally evident in the simple energy-conversions of a plant and in the long-range, complex activities of man. Biologically, inactivity is death.

Since everything man needs has to be discovered by his own mind and produced by his own effort, the two essentials of the method of survival proper to a rational being are: thinking and productive work.

But there were hundreds of thousands of families who were already barely surviving, or who were making it within the strictest of margins, who felt they had little choice but to stay. Taken together there would be 6.2 million Syrians displaced within their own country—the largest displaced population anywhere in the world.

She knew at that moment that she was done. She knew it instinctively and also spiritually: she could not remain in Raqqa to become a permanent temporary wife, passed from fighter to fighter.

If I turned towards books, it was because they were the only sanctuary I knew, one I needed in order to survive, to protect some aspect of myself that was now in constant retreat.

Well, it's like this: if you're forced into having sex with someone you dislike, you make your mind blank—you pretend to be somewhere else, you tend to forget your body, you hate your body. That's what we do here. We are constantly pretending to be somewhere else—we either plan it or dream it.

I don't worry about the survival of the novel. We're a storytelling species.