Quotes About Survival

After the capsize, it takes them an extraordinarily long time to learn how to become a survival team, and it never works flawlessly. They are not varnished heros. At times they are fearful, weak, defeatist, petty, jealous, self-interested. Frankly, I believe how Jim reveals all the lesser but very normal human qualities that are impediments to grace makes this crew more believable than the characters found in many tales.

De modo que es posible que acudir al hospital aumente ligeramente sus probabilidades de sobrevivir si tiene un problema grave, pero aumenta sus probabilidades de morir si no lo tiene.

Those who survived the San Francisco earthquake said, Thank God, I'm still alive. But of course, those who died-their lives will never be the same again. -Barbara Boxer, representative from California

They say life is tenacious. They say given half a chance, or less, life will grow and exist and evolve anywhere, even in the most inhospitable and unlikely of places. Life will always find a way, they say.

Most of us in the developed world don't pause to think how amazing it is that we drink water from a tap and never once worry about dying forty-eight hours later from cholera. —Steven Johnson, How We Got to Now

Even in the best of times, life aboard a seventeenth-century privateering ship was a challenging and claustrophobic experience. The fact that a community of a hundred or more people could survive on the open seas for months at a time, in a vessel with dimensions not much larger than a tennis court, should go down as one of the great achievements in our long history of creating life-sustaining habitats in fundamentally inhospitable environments.

plague years of the 1600s

He's a carnivore, thinks Lion, always remember he's a carnivore.

To get around these things, Maus lived at the back of a closet. The door was

La motivación es un mensaje. Es el cerebro diciendo: Oye, levántate del sofá, haz esta cosa, es superimportante para tu supervivencia. Para enviar este mensaje, el cerebro se apoya en cuatro componentes básicos: la neuroquímica y la neuroelectricidad, que son los mensajes propiamente dichos, y la neuroanatomía y las redes, que son los lugares donde se envían y reciben esos mensajes.

And after the sack of Constantinople in 1204, we have few examples of any literary activity except by religious writers (who, like cockroaches, seem capable of surviving any catastrophe).

Evolutionarily speaking, there is seldom any mystery in why we seek the goals we seek — why, for example, people would rather make love with an attractive partner than get a slap on the belly with a wet fish.

A...reason we are so-so scientists is that our brains were shaped for fitness, not for truth. Sometimes truth is adaptive, but sometimes it is not.

Reality is a powerful selection pressure. A hominid that soothed itself by believing that a lion was a turtle or that eating sand would nourish its body would be outreproduced by its reality-based rivals.

Existen buenas razones evolutivas para que los miembros de una especie inteligente intenten vivir en paz.

Human vice is proof that biological adaption is, speaking literally, a thing of the past. Our minds are adapted to the small foraging bands in which our family spent ninety-nine percent of its existence, not the topsy-turvy contingencies we have created since the agricultural and industrial revolutions. [...] People do not divine what is adaptive for them or their genes; their genes give them thoughts and feelings that were adaptive in the environment in which the genes were selected.

It has become commonplace to conclude that humans are simply irrational—more Homer Simpson than Mr. Spock, more Alfred E. Neuman than John von Neumann. And, the cynics continue, what else would you expect from descendants of hunter-gatherers whose minds were selected to avoid becoming lunch for leopards?

If the tailor goes to war against the baker, he must henceforth bake his own bread

That's a quarter of the number of children who did not die last year alone who would have died had they been born fifteen years earlier.

Life expectancy in Kenya increased by almost ten years between 2003 and 2013," Norberg writes. "After having lived, loved and struggled for a whole decade, the average person in Kenya had not lost a single year of their remaining lifetime. Everyone got ten years older, yet death had not come a step closer.

Yes, well into the 19th century, in Sweden, one of the world's wealthiest countries, between a quarter and a third of all children died before their fifth birthday, and in some years the death toll was close to half.

People hold many beliefs that are at odds with their experience but were true in the environment in which we evolved, and they pursue goals that subvert their own well-being but were adaptive in that environment

Los sans del desierto del Kalahari

Most hunter-gatherer tribes have plenty of people in their seventies and even some in their eighties. Though a Hadza woman's life expectancy at birth is 32.5 years, if she makes it to 45 she can expect to live another 21 years.