Quotes About Survival

Hobbes's Leviathan. Life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

The charge took less than forty seconds but Kassad discovered that this was ample time for his mouth to go absolutely dry, his breathing to begin to have problems, and for his testicles to retreat completely into his body. If the rest of Kassad could have found a comparable hiding place, he would have seriously considered crawling into it.

It is hard to die. Harder to live.

People scream and run for coyer.

that evolution is not progress, that there is no 'goal' or direction to evolution. Evolution is change. Evolution 'succeeds' if that change best adapts some leaf or branch of its tree of life to conditions of the universe.

I've never been in a place that seemed as mean or shitty, and I've spent time in some of the great sewer cities of the world.

We've been stuck in one species since our Cro-Magnon ancestors helped to wipe out the smarter Neanderthals

God Almighty, I love life. Even this vile place, where the trees are shattered stubs and where nothing grows but craters, even the sights, scents, sounds, and stirrings of this place are preferable to the unchanging nothingness of the Great Darkness.

But what if he makes it to civilization … back to England? Alone. He will always be the captain who let all his men die. The courtmartial will be inevitable, its outcome predetermined. Whatever the court's punishment might be, the shame will be a lifelong sentence.

Despite the near-death of science. Despite our fatal addiction to the toys granted us by our own creations.

I was getting used to the caustic voice in my head. It and I had made a peace when I realized that it wasn't urging me to lie down and die, just critiquing my inadequate efforts to stay alive.

If a man in a smoking jacket in a coal-fire-heated library in his manor house in London can understand that life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, then how can it be denied by a man pulling a sledge stacked with frozen meat and furs across an unnamed island, through the Arctic night under a sky gone mad, towards a frozen sea a thousand miles and more from any civilised hearth?

What do you think of the war, M. Severn? [...] What can one think of war? I said, tasting the wine again. It was quite good, though nothing in the Web could match my memories of French Bordeaux. War does not call for judgment, I said, merely survival.

Strange," said Natalie. "What?" "Two gunshot wounds, pneumonia, a concussion, three broken ribs, and enough cuts and bruises to keep a football team happy for a full season." "Jews are hard to kill.

The Consul gripped the edges of the mat with fingers gone white. He had tied the strap of his duffel bag around his belt, otherwise the bag would have tumbled off to a glacier far below.

What she doesn't realize is that I have survived for her as well -- and only now am I beginning to survive for myself.

Conflict can become genocidal when powerful groups think that the most efficient means to get what they want is to eliminate those in the way. It can become equally or more murderous when the motive is revenge, and descend to the worst levels of slaughter when there is great fear that the survival of the enemy group might endanger the survival of one's own group.

Struggle is not an option: it's a biological requirement.

How mercifully can our Creator treat His creatures, even in those conditions in which they seemed to be overwhelmed in destruction! How can He sweeten the bitterest providences, and give us cause to praise Him for dungeons and prisons! What a table was here spread for me in a wilderness where I saw nothing at first but to perish for hunger!

All this labour I was at the expence of, purely from my apprehension on the account of the print of a man's foot which I had seen; for as yet I never saw any human creature come near the island, and I had now lived two years under these uneasinesses, which indeed made my life much less comfortable than it was before;

I have saved your life on no other terms than I would be glad to be saved myself: and it may, one time or other, be my lot to be taken up in the same condition. Besides, said he, when I carry you to the Brazils, so great a way from your own country, if I should take from you what you have, you will be starved there, and then I only take away that life I have given.

This is a world of corpses strewn in streets and pits, yet in the deadcart itself a drunken piper wakes up to cry, 'But I an't dead tho', am I?' (p. 89).

How mercifully can our Creator treat His creatures, even in those conditions in which they seemed to be overwhelmed in destruction!

It is incredible, if their account is to be depended upon, what a prodigious number of those creatures were destroyed. I think they talked of forty thousand dogs and five times as many cats; few houses being without a cat, some having several, sometimes five or six in a house.