Quotes About Survival

Races improve the race, and all these games lead fortunately to the death of the best, allowing mankind to continue its existence serenely with normal protagonists, of average achievement.

This was in truth not living; it was scarcely even existing, and they felt that it was too little for the price they paid. They were willing to work all the time; and when people did their best, ought they not to be able to keep alive?

Here was a population, low-class and mostly foreign, hanging always on the verge of starvation, and dependent for its opportunities of life upon the whim of men every bit as brutal and unscrupulous as the old-time slave drivers; under such circumstances immorality was exactly as inevitable, and as prevalent, as it was under the system of chattel slavery.

In the evening I came home and read about the Messina earthquake, and how the relief ships arrived, and the wretched survivors crowded down to the water's edge and tore each other like wild beasts in their rage of hunger. The paper set forth, in horrified language, that some of them had been seventy-two hours without food. I, as I read, had also been seventy-two hours without food; and the difference was simply that they thought they were starving.

In the face of all his handicaps, Jurgis was obliged to make the price of a lodging, and of a drink every hour or two, under penalty of freezing to death.

but he had been round the world enough to know that a man has to shift for himself in it, and that if he gets the worst of it, there is nobody to listen to him holler.

Lanny had seen much poverty here and elsewhere, but never more gaunt and haggard humans than he found in this lonely valley in the naked hills of Aragon, bitter cold in winter and blazing hot in summer.

Such were the cruel terms upon which their life was possible, that they might never have nor expect a single instant's respite from worry, a single instant in which they were not haunted by the thought of money.

The plane was tiny; it had to be, because, as the pilot said, it must be able to come down on a half dollar. It flew as low as possible in order to escape detection by enemy radar. To be sure, that made a danger of church steeples and tall trees in the darkness; but then, as Frederick the Great had said to his troops, "Do you want to live forever?

a sort of Frankenstein creation known as "the economic man," and a deity known as "laissez faire," which meant in cruder language "each for himself and the devil take the hindmost.

The French word for underbrush, maquis, had come to be the name for the men who hid in it and came out to carry on sabotage against the enemy. "Monsieur," said Baritone, "we have the enemy's own figures that more than forty thousand Frenchmen have been executed during the occupation, and a hundred thousand are in concentration camps in Germany. This in addition to the quarter million who have been deported.

We had become what the world outside had made us; we had to live in the world as it existed.

We heard of ambushes on roads we knew, of villages attacked, of headmen and officials killed. It was at this time that Mahesh said something which I remembered. It wasn't the kind of thing I was expecting from him - so careful of his looks and clothes, so spoiled, so obsessed with his lovely wife. Mahesh said to me: What do you do? You live here, and you ask that? You do what we all do. You carry on.

Neanderthals

A human being survives by his ability to forget. Memory is always ready to blot out the bad and retain only the good.

Trees in the north die lying down – like people.

Kolyma is Auschwitz without the ovens.

In spite of everything, life would go on, the life of a nation making its way through a land of stone.

he was dimly aware that if you wish to remain a human being under Fascism, there is an easier option than survival -- death.

These camps – with their streets and squares, their hospitals and flea markets, their crematoria and their stadiums – were the expanding cities of a new Europe.

Os campos de concentração tornaram-se cidades da Nova Europa. Cresciam e alargavam-se, com o seu traçado próprio, com as suas ruelas e praças, os seus hospitais, com as suas feiras da ladra, os seus crematórios e estádios.

È stupefacente come quelle bestie riutilizzassero ogni cosa - cuoio, carta, stoffa, tutto ciò che era servito agli esseri umani serviva, tornava utile anche alle bestie. Solo la cosa più preziosa al mondo - la vita - veniva calpestata.

In those days, leaving the old behind in times of starvation was not an unknown act, although in this band it was happening for the first time.

Finding the women alive would give The People a second chance and that, perhaps, was what he hoped for most.