Quotes About Survival

“They knew this-survival came at a price. Over the past few weeks they'd all survived a Bagger attack. Or two. Or three. They knew the consequences. Not everyone got out alive. They'd seen loved ones die. Even worse, some had watched the people they cared about turn on them. But as long as they stuck together in a group, they were still human. As long as they were human they were still alive.”

— Jeyn Roberts

“Nearly all of these successful folks have made it in the business world by sticking with the free market ideal of survival of the fittest over everything else. They believe in giving no quarter, and consequently they are antiunion, pro-death penalty, and pro-war- that is, until they actually feel the war's cost in their own wallets and a big voice coming out of the sky says: You could grab more money if we did not have this war to pay for! This is America, where greed is christened "drive" and is deemed a virtue.”

— Joe Bageant

“Nothing is better for self-esteem than survival.”

— Martha Gellhorn

“All men lie. That's how they operate. if you want a longterm relationship with a man you've got to understand it's going to be with a liar. It's in their nature - it's genetic, it's a bloody Darwinian acquired characteristic for survival, OK? They tell you what they want you to hear.”

— Peter James

“Compassion is the key to the ultimate survival of our species.”

— Doug Dillon

“We mistakenly assume that bodily survival has a higher precedence than ego survival. This is simply not generally true. Ego will happily destroy the body for its own sake. Look at overweight executives headed for heart attacks on the way to getting their pictures in Fortune or anorexic models suffering slow starvation on their way to getting their pictures in Vogue. Protecting ego is the general case.”

— Karl Marlantes

“I didn't mean to go after him, but no one was doing anything, and I'm probably the only one here who's actually been in the woods for real."
"Besides-he's British. What do they know about camping and wilderness survival and all that?" ...
There too busy drinking tea and playing cricket. He would have been lost without me”

— Heather Davis

“As I became a creature of the empty tunnels, survival became easier and more difficult all at once. I gained in the physical skills and experience necessary to live on. I could defeat almost anything that wandered into my chosen domain. It did not take me long, however, to discover one nemesis that I could neither defeat nor flee. It followed me wherever I went - indeed, the farther I ran, the more it closed in around me. My enemy was solitude, the interminable, incessant silence of hushed corridors.”

— R.A. Salvatore

“He may be deaf and a little hard of thinking, but elderly wizards have very well-trained survival instincts, and they know that when a tall figure in a black robe and the latest in agricultural handtools starts looking thoughtfully at you it is time to act fast.”

— Terry Pratchett

“Funny how easily we forget the good times while the nightmares haunt us. Guess that's a survival mechanism. We're not here to be happy; we're just here to be here. I”

— Hugh Howey

“This generation has given up on growth. They're just hoping for survival.”

— Penelope Spheeris

“'Hard Hit,' a YA collection of poems, explores the country of grief and survival. Mark, a 16-year-old boy and skilled pitcher, must confront the coming death of his beloved father with the help of his friends, family, baseball, and an idiosyncratic belief in God. I used my own experience of my parents' deaths to inform this journey.”

— Ann Turner

“Nanotechnology in medicine is going to have a major impact on the survival of the human race.”

— Bernard Marcus

“Doesn't the fight for survival also justify swindle and theft? In self defence, anything goes.”

— Imelda Marcos

“I decided that my initial survival strategy would involve declaring my complete ignorance of what was going on. This would not,naturally, be terribly hard to do.”

— Lia Habel

“There was a time in my demented youth
When somehow I suspected that the truth
About survival after death was known
To every human being: I alone
Knew nothing, and a great conspiracy
Of books and people hid the truth from me.”

— Vladimir Nabokov

“Israel is now sustaining a war for its own existence. A nation defending its citizens against terrorist bombings and a military and diplomatic onslaught by an array of Arab foes is practicing survival, not genocide.”

— Jack Schwartz

“My great-grandfather, Sam Aykroyd, was a dentist in Kingston, Ontario, and he was also an Edwardian spiritualist researcher who was very interested in what was going on in the invisible world, the survival of the consciousness, precipitated paintings, mediumship, and trans-channeling.”

— Dan Aykroyd

“From this irritating reality comes The First Law of Corporate Survival for ambitious CEOs who pile on leverage and run large and unfathomable derivatives books: Modest incompetence simply won't do; it's mindboggling screw-ups that are required.”

— Warren Buffett

“Once handed the money, Paulson abandoned his promised strategy and instead essentially began giving away billions of dollars to Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and a few others unnaturally selected for survival.”

— Michael Lewis

“Reason. The first law of reason is this: what exists, exists; what is, is. From this irreducible, bedrock principle, all knowledge is built. This is the foundation from which life is embraced. Reason is a choice. Wishes and whims are not facts, nor are they a means to discovering them. Reason is our only way of grasping reality-it's our basic tool of survival. We are free to evade the effort of thinking, to reject reason, but we are not free to avoid the penalty of the abyss we refuse to see.”

— Terry Goodkind

“From the age of 11, I was cleaning floors, washing dishes, making sandwiches and being a cashier. Survival was the name of the game. Life was so hard that I had to struggle to keep up my standards. Under these conditions, I didn't think about science too much.”

— Ada Yonath

“The ability to sympathize with those around us seems crucial to our survival, and it's connected to the mirroring functions of the brain.”

— Jay Parini

“My view of writing "Coldest Girl in Coldtown" was to take every single thing that I loved from every vampire book I had ever read and dump it into one book
everything I like
trying to evoke some of the decadence ... Vampires are a high-class monster: They want to dress up. They want to drink a lot of absinthe, or force their victims to drink a lot of absinthe. They have big parties and have elegant rituals. I think that's a thing we associate with vampires
they are the royalty of our monsters. We expect them to be rich, we expect them to be well-dressed. I wanted to have some of that be true because I like it, and have some of it not be true because it's kind of weird.
I wanted to put in the idea of infection, which I was really interested in and which was a big feature of the vampire books I read growing up. And, the fear and desire for infection
the way in which our urge towards loving vampires is nihilistic. Our fear of them is our survival instincts kicking in.”

— Holly Black

“In the greater part of humankind there resides an instinct for survival. It is this which can clutch at straws and effect a rescue from them. It is this which can, now and then, outwit fate.”

— Tanith Lee

“If a man is a man and not a sheep in the flock, he has a survival instinct in him that leads him to fight even if he realizes he's fighting in vain, even if he knows he will lose..”

— Oriana Fallaci

“So afterward, while I was getting eviscerated by chemo, for some reason I decided to feel really hopeful. Not about survival but I felt like Anna does in the book, that feeling of excitement and gratitude about just being able to marvel at it all.”

— John Green

“Knowledge is the key to survival, the real beauty of that is that it doesn't weigh anything.”

— Ray Mears

“Dr. Phil never talked about Smyrna and left the room if anyone did. He never mentioned his murdered sons and daughters. Maybe this was the reason for his survival.”

— Jeffrey Eugenides

“A husband, a wife and some kids is not a family. It's a terribly vulnerable survival unit.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

“Besides, morality is not about whether the human race survives, but about what kind of survival it gets. We marry; guppies don't. We don't eat our young; they do. Yet neither species is in danger of extinction.”

— J. Budziszewski

“Living is not merely a matter of staying alive, is it? It is what you do with your life and the fact of your survival that counts.”

— Mary Balogh

“Clinging to any form of conservatism can be dangerous. Become too conservative and you are unprepared for surprises. You cannot depend on luck. Logic is blind and often knows only its own past. Logic is good for playing chess but is often too slow for the needs of survival.”

— Frank Herbert

“As for business, we agree that it is a hard, cold-blooded game. Survival of the fittest. Dog eat dog. The fact that about eighty-five per cent of the dogs have recently been eaten by the other dogs perhaps explains what long ago we noticed about business: that it had a strong smell of boloney. If dog continues to eat dog, there will be only one dog left, and he will be sick to his stomach.”

— E.B. White

“The fight for survival is the fight”

— Rocky Graziano

“For eight years I was an inmate in a state asylum for the insane. During those years I passed through such unbearable terror that I deteriorated into a wild, frightened creature intent only on survival. And I survived. I was raped by orderlies, gnawed on by rats and poisoned by tainted food. I was chained in padded cells, strapped into strait-jackets and half-drowned in ice baths. And I survived. The asylum itself was a steel trap, and I was not released from its jaws alive and victorious. I crawled out mutilated, whimpering and terribly alone. But I did survive.”

— Frances Farmer

“I always say artists must broaden their research. I go to casinos, fly fishing, to show apartments in new residential buildings, watch fairs, the football, ikebana courses, survival expeditions, Dungeons & Dragons nights, and it doesn't matter which of these I personally want to do - that is my job. That's true research; otherwise, it would be a bit like masturbating.”

— Ryan Gander

“Solving problems is at the foundation of our survival.”

— Michael McMillian

“The essence of all religion is to be willing to risk your life for a belief - not for survival.”

— Helen Foster Snow

“Otter is the most brilliant mix of facts ancient and modern about the otter species and its vulnerability to man's seemingly insatiable need to hunt the poor animal for reasons other than survival. I am sure the book will help to ensure that the hunting of otters will never return to this country-and I hope other lands will follow this example ... A fascinating and illuminating book.”

— Virginia McKenna

“Once one has been to these challenging terrible places they're always strangely drawn back ... because there's nothing that can compare to seeing the raw reality of the basic human need for survival. It disgusts and inspires”

— Dan Eldon

“If survival calls for the bearing of arms, bear them you must. But the most important part of the challenge is for you to find another means that does not come with the killing of your fellow man.”

— Rod Serling

“Perhaps it's worth saying again: One reader's discomfort should never stand in the way of another reader's survival.”

— Scott Westerfeld

“I've always been a student of different ways of looking at the world, different religions. That's been part of my survival mechanism, and also part of my curiosity as a person.”

— Assata Shakur

“According to the law of nature, wherever there is an awakening of a new and stronger life, there it tries to conquer and take the place of the old and the decaying. Nature favours the dying out of the unfit and the survival of the fittest. The final result of such conflict between the priestly and the other classes has been mentioned already.”

— Swami Vivekananda

“Each of us has a purpose for living beyond our own survival and pleasure. Every individual is like a thread in a beautiful tapestry with a vital contribution to make, not only to the sustenance of life as we know it, but in the creation and development of more beneficial expressions of life.”

— John Templeton

“It seems to rise again when the crisis times come, and this is a time of most severe crisis, as we all know, not just for the history of the United States and the survival indeed of our democracy, but for the future peace of the world. And never before probably has the need for interfaith commitment been nearly as great as it is at this very moment.”

— Walter Cronkite

“The body is a survival machine programmed to propagate the genes that reside inside it.”

— Richard Dawkins

“Over-population is a phenomenon connected with the survival of the unfit, and it is a mechanism which has created conditions favourable to the survival of the unfit and the elimination of the fit.”

— William Ralph Inge

“Society never progresses because the majority one day wakes up and says, "Let's do things differently." The majority didn't wake up and say, "Oh, let's just free the slaves." Society always progressed because a relatively small group of people usually considered outrageous radicals by the status quo of their time had a better idea and articulated another way. That's simply how evolution works; it's the mutation. The member of the species who does things differently - that points the way to the future because they're better adapted for survival.”

— Marianne Williamson