Quotes About Struggle

They will learn and grow and love and struggle and create, and lift life up one little notch, perhaps, before they die. And when they pass they will cheat death with their children, with parental care that will make their children a little finer than themselves. Life wins.

So the first biological lesson of history is that life is competition.

When Germany defeated Napoleon it was a disastrous to culture as when Luther defeated the Church.

And then, again, the more distinctly a man knows—the more intelligent he is—the more pain he has; the man who is gifted with genius suffers most of all.

The class war had turned democracy into a contest in legislative looting.

life must breed.

communism proved unbiological, a handicap in the struggle for existence; that it gave insufficient stimulus to inventiveness, industry and thrift; and that the failure to reward the more able, and punish the less able, made for a leveling of capacity which was hostile to growth or to successful competition with other groups.

If the human brood is too numerous for the food supply, Nature has three agents for restoring the balance: famine, pestilence, and war.

No civilization has found life tolerable without narcotics

Slowly the increasing complexity of tools and trades subjected the unskilled or weak to the skilled or strong; every invention was a new weapon in the hands of the strong, and further strengthened them in their mastery and use of the weak.

Then democracy comes: the poor overcome their opponents, slaughtering some and banishing the rest; and give to the people an equal share of freedom and power" (557).

Barbarism, like the jungle, does not die out, but only retreats behind the barriers that civilization has thrown up against it, and waits there always to reclaim that to which civilization has temporarily laid claim.

Religion does not prosper under prosperity;

The principle of the family was mutual aid; but the principle of society is competition, the struggle for existence, the elimination of the weak and the survival of the strong.

There can be no victory over the ills of life until the will has been utterly subordinated to knowledge and intelligence.

believed that communism proved unbiological, a handicap in the struggle for existence; that it gave insufficient stimulus to inventiveness, industry and thrift; and that the failure to reward the more able, and punish the less able, made for a leveling of capacity which was hostile to growth or to successful competition with other groups.

It is clear that as our walking is admittedly nothing but a constantly-prevented falling, so the life of our bodies is nothing but a constantly-prevented dying, an ever-postponed death."86

I've never subscribed to the notion that poverty is quaint or that isolation is somehow ennobling. And anyway, this is Rwanda. There is very little innocence left to lose.

Thomas had once watched a dog in a park, tethered to a tree, turning in slowly constricting circles until it had to be rescued and unwound. At which point it started winding itself anew. Heartbreak is a dog in a park on a tree.

We have inherited an easy life in Canada. A life of calm. It is freedom of a lazy sort, a freedom so pervasive we barely notice it, and one that we claim by virtue of our citizenship. But it is also worth remembering that people -- in the words of Bulgarian-born Canadian philanthropist Ignat Kaneff -- 'crawl across minefields to get here.

Some people float through life while the rest of us pull the barge.

Suddenly it didn't look like the home I loved. It looked like an enemy.

Another friend of mine defines writing as: Torturing your characters for fun and profit.

My mother groaned, my father wept, into the dangerous world I leapt.