logo

Quotes About Survival

The Selfish Gene—he set off decades of debate by declaring: "We are survival machines—robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.
~ James Gleick
In conditions of uncertainty, humans, like other animals, herd together for protection.
~ James Surowiecki
Very few species have survived unchanged. There's one called lingula, which is a little shellfish, a little brachiopod about the size of my fingernail, that has survived for 500 million years, but it's survived by being unobtrusive and doing nothing, and you can't accuse human beings of that.
~ David Attenborough
My uncle's house burned down when I was 6 years old. We got out safely. But ever since, I've had a nightmare of dying in a fire.
~ David Copperfield
My mom is from New Orleans. And all of my maternal relatives were there during Katrina. We couldn't even find my uncle for four months. We literally didn't know where he was. I had been there just four days before the storm hit.
~ Jurnee Smollett-Bell
My grandfather and my uncle both died from colorectal cancer, my dad almost died from it and I have the gene for it.
~ Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
I have bitten down or swallowed a few pellets through the years. My uncle had his appendix removed and there were over 100 lead pellets in it. He might have died of lead poisoning. Now that is eating a lot of game!
~ Phil Robertson
My mother and father had been through the Holocaust. The family was wiped out. I grew up never knowing aunts, uncles, or grandparents.
~ Elizabeth Diller
I grew up in Georgia where my parents, little brother Zurab and I shared a flat with my paternal grandparents and two uncles in the capital, Tbilisi. Times were hard and the country was racked by civil war.
~ Katie Melua
I always have this image of a woman running across a desert carrying children, trying to find water and food, not knowing when they'll get that. And her feet are slashed up from the dry, hard earth... Even when I'm uncomfortable, sometimes in pain, or just cold... I think, 'Thank God for what I've got.'
~ Sue Townsend
Being out on the water, you're very exposed. In the Amazon, one cause of death that's not uncommon is getting caught out in a storm. What people sometimes do is, they're out in the middle of the river, and the storm comes, so they go into the side of the river and a tree falls on top of them.
~ Jeremy Wade
At one stage, I didn't have any money, so I slept on the streets for a few nights. It wasn't uncommon in the 1950s, and it wasn't uncommon to be out of money. There wasn't anywhere to go to get money.
~ Kerry Stokes
A border collie saved me once when I was pinned under a horse in Colorado. And once when I went through the ice, one of my sled dogs saw me go under, and she got the rest of the team, and they pulled me out of 12 feet of water. I think that dogs offer the only form of unconditional love that's available to humans.
~ Gary Paulsen
I would love to do Tammi Terrell's story. I love stories of the underdog coming out on top and stories of survival.
~ Wendy Raquel Robinson
I was born into the most amazing family an underdog could be born into, and I was born into the LGBTQ community. And what a beautiful community we are. The art, the music, the fashion, the brains, the fight, the survival skills, the diversity, male, female, non-binary, Gender Non Conforming, cis, trans, femme, and all races.
~ Justin Tranter
From dead plant matter to nematodes to bacteria, never underestimate the cleverness of mushrooms to find new food!
~ Paul Stamets
People think actresses have fame and money, but they are not aware of the difficulties we undergo. People should understand that we are sacrificing so much for our survival.
~ Tamannaah
For years, I survived as an artist on grants and touring as a dancer with dance companies, and I was living underground like so many artists, hand-to-mouth and so forth. And I never had the power to make decisions.
~ Ron Ben-Israel
The story of the Underground Railroad is a thriller. These are people who are basically in a heist movie, and it's the most precious cargo ever, your life. You're fighting for your freedom.
~ Misha Green
When I was born, I was effectively dead. Weird, I know. The doctors couldn't get any reaction from me, so I had to be brought round, and although it seemed like I was okay, there were underlying problems.
~ Liam Payne
Heart's always been sort of like a cockroach. You can set off a bomb, and it'll still be alive underneath.
~ Ann Wilson
'How to Survive a Plague' is history-telling at its best. It's a film I'll show my two children, now toddlers, when they are old enough to understand. It's a movie that I cannot forget.
~ Ira Sachs
I understand people who say, 'There is no Queen without Freddie. Just leave it be.' Because that's what we felt, following his death. All three of us said, 'Right, that's the end of the band.' But the band just didn't seem to die.
~ Roger Taylor
We are either going to dissolve as a human race or we are going to break through into a new understanding of what it is to be a human being.
~ Terry Riley