Quotes About Survival

two billion years bacterial organisms were the only forms of life. They lived, they reproduced, they swarmed, but they didn't show any particular inclination to move on to another, more challenging level of existence.

And yet in Britain, despite the constant buffetings of history, English survived. It is a cherishable irony that a language that succeeded almost by stealth, treated for centuries as the inadequate and second-rate tongue of peasants, should one day become the most important and successful language in the world.

Nobody knows quite how destructive human beings are, but it is a fact that over the last fifty thousand years or so, wherever we have gone animals have tended to vanish, often in astonishingly large numbers. In

In Australia and the Americas," says Tim Flannery, "the animals probably didn't know enough to run away.

If I were told that I had to spend decades being a furry growth on a rock in the woods, I believe I would lose the will to go on. Lichens don't. Like virtually all living things, they will suffer any hardship, endure any insult, for a moment's additional existence. Life, in short, just wants to be. But - and here's an interesting point - for the most part it doesn't want to be much.

Bipedalism is a demanding and risky strategy.

When even camels can't manage a desert, you know you've found a tough part of the world.

Homo erectus was the first to hunt, the first to use fire, the first to fashion complex tools, the first to leave evidence of campsites, the first to look after the weak and frail.

It occurred to me that Australians are so surrounded with danger that they have evolved an entirely new vocabulary to deal with it.

Last Breath: Cautionary Tales from the Limits of Human Endurance

You are the product of three billion years of evolutionary tweaks.

That is the most extraordinary fact about Britain. It wants to be a garden. Flowers bloom in the unlikeliest places–on railway sidings and waste grounds where there is nothing beneath them but rubble and grit. You even see clumps of flowery life growing on the sides of abandoned warehouses and old viaducts. If all the humans in the UK vanished tomorrow, Britain would still be in flower.

What it comes down to really is cancer is, appallingly, your own body doing its best to kill you. It is suicide without permission.

In the autumn of 1920, he entered the University of Wisconsin, hoping to become an engineer. Charles survived in large part by having his mother write his papers for him, but ultimately even that wasn't enough.

Kisumu has the distinction of being the poorest city in Kenya. Almost half the people live on fifty cents a day or less.

There are thousands of things that can kill us—slightly more than eight thousand, according to the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems compiled by the World Health Organization—and we escape every one of them but one.

Miraculously, Pitka survived. "I don't know why I set that durn gun against the tree," he said later. (Actually, what he said was, "Mrffff mmmpg nnnmmm mffffffn," on account of having no lips, teeth, nose, tongue, or other vocal apparatus.)

Of the billions and billions of species of living things that have existed since the dawn of time, most—99.99 percent, it has been suggested—are no longer around. Life on Earth, you see, is not only brief but dismayingly tenuous. It is a curious feature of our existence that we come from a planet that is very good at promoting life but even better at extinguishing it.

Cancer is the price we pay for evolution.

but it is a fact that men who have been castrated live about as long as women do.

In a sense William Shakespeare's greatest achievement in life wasn't writing Hamlet or the sonnets but just surviving his first year.

85 percent of the 30,000 Anglo-Saxon words died out under the influence of the Danes and Normans. That means that only about 4,500 Old English words survived—about 1 percent of the total number of words in the Oxford English Dictionary. And yet those surviving words are among the most fundamental words in English: man, wife, child, brother, sister, live, fight, love, drink, sleep, eat, house, and so on.

I would sooner have bowel surgery in the woods with a stick.

Between December 1606 and February 1625, Virginia received 7,289 immigrants and buried 6,040 of them. Most barely had time to settle in. All but 500 of the 3,500 immigrants who arrived in the three years 1619–1621 were dead by the end of the period. To go to Virginia was effectively to commit suicide.