Quotes About Survival

I could easily believe that religion could enhance health and hence survival, and that therefore there could be indeed be literally Darwinian survival value, Darwinian selection in favor of religion. None of that of course bears at all upon the truth value of the claims made by religions.

Humans are a great survivor species but our survival will be pretty grim if all of the plants and animals we depend on die out. That's why any human survival strategy has to include a plan to maintain our environment roughly in the state that it's in now.

To preserve the integrity of the tradition, we have to distinguish between what is central to that integrity and what is peripheral. We have to discern between what elements are vital for the survival of dharma practice and what are alien cultural artefacts that might obstruct that survival.

However great a man's fear of life, suicide remains the courageous act, the clear-headed act of a mathematician. The suicide has judged by the laws of chance - so many odds against one that to live will be more miserable than to die. His sense of mathematics is greater than his sense of survival. But think how a sense of survival must clamor to be heard at the last moment, what excuses it must present of a totally unscientific nature.

It not only is a complete undermining of the principles of family and marriage and the hope of future generations, but it completely begins to see our society break down to the extent that that foundational unit of the family that is the hope of survival of this country is diminished to the extent that it literally is a threat to the nation's survival in the long run.

The tools of science and technology amplified the effects of the madness of the egoic mind. So the survival of the planet began to be threatened, and with it the survival of humanity.

Death is natural and necessary, but not just. It is a random force of nature; survival is equally accidental. Each loss is an occasion to remember that survival is a gift.

Survival is both an exalted privilege and a painful burden.

In dire times of survival it's not uncommon for people to turn to their faith and that was also true for the men on the oil tanker Pendleton, which was cut in half by 60-foot waves during the hurricane.

People are aware that they cannot continue in the same old way but are immobilized because they cannot imagine an alternative. We need a vision that recognizes that we are at one of the great turning points in human history when the survival of our planet and the restoration of our humanity require a great sea change in our ecological, economic, political, and spiritual values.

Prison life taught him how little one can get along with, and what extraordinary spiritual freedom and peace such simplification can bring. I remember again, ironically, that today more of us in the world have the luxury of choice between simplicity and complication of life. And for the most part, we, who could choose simplicity, choose complication. War, prison, survival periods, enforce a form of simplicity on us. The monk and the nun choose it of their own free will. But if one accidentally finds it, as I have for a few days, one finds also the serenity it brings.

Fear is about survival. When you drop under that and experience the fear without trying to change it, just letting it be, then it becomes still. When you open your heart to fear, rather than trying to fight it or deny it or even overcome it, then you find it is just energy.

To his sister-in-law: What a contrast between us! You live a warm and glowing life, surrounded by loved ones whom you care for and who care for you; you are anchored in contentment. I drift about without rudder or compass, a wreck on the sea of life; I have no memories to cheer me, no pleasant illusions of the future to comfort me, or about me to satisfy my vanity. I have no family to furnish the only kind of survival that concerns us, no friends for the wholesome development of my affections, or enemies for my malice.

I used to murder people for money, but these days it’s more of a survival technique.

Access to natural resources can become a question of survival for many states.

A person who has been seduced by the consumer value system, whose identity is dissolved in an amalgam of the accouterments trappings of mass civilization, and who has no roots in the order of being, no sense of responsibility for anything higher than his own personal survival, is a demoralized person. The system depends on this demoralization, deepens it, is in fact a projection of it into society.

Man's survival, from the time of Adam and Eve until the invention of agriculture, must have been precarious because of his inability to ensure his food supply.

Cultivating and conserving diversity is no luxury in our times: it is a survival imperative.

As Spengler observed, all urbanized societies seem to develop a subconscious death wish, making individuals indifferent to the survival of their families and their race.

At a meta level, design connects the dots between mere survival and humanism.

Faced with a new mutation in an organism, or a fundamental change in its living conditions, the biologist is frequently in no position whatever to predict its future prospects. He has to wait and see. For instance, the hairy mammoth seems to have been an admirable animal, intelligent and well-accoutered. Now that it is extinct, we try to understand why it failed. I doubt that any biologist thinks he could have predicted that failure. Fitness and survival are by nature estimates of past performance.

It is now highly feasible to take care of everybody on Earth at a 'higher standard of living than any have ever known.' It no longer has to be you or me. Selfishness is unnecessary and henceforth unrationalizable as mandated by survival.

The first rule of survival is clear: Nothing is more dangerous than yesterday's success.

Organizations aren't loyal; they can't be. They have to be nimble, they have to change. That means everybody in every organization will have one eye on his or her own brand, and the other eye on the organization of which he or she is a part. And the first loyalty - self-loyalty - is becoming more and more dominant, simply as a survival strategy. I'm in no way blaming anyone here; this is just simply a fact of life.

I train like I'm training for the Olympics or for a Mr. America contest, the way I've always trained my whole life. You see, life is a battlefield. Life is survival of the fittest... How many healthy people do you know? How many happy people do you know? Think about it. People work at dying, they don't work at living. My workout is my obligation to life. It's my tranquilizer. It's part of the way I tell the truth--and telling the truth is what's kept me going all these years.

Liberals, it has been said, are generous with other peoples' money, except when it comes to questions of national survival when they prefer to be generous with other people's freedom and security.

Always retain the ability to walk away, without sentimentality, from a situation that felt unmanageable. That was a basic rule of survival. Don't lift a finger for a lost cause.

If we can avoid disaster for the next two centuries, our species should be safe as we spread into space. If we are the only intellegent beings in the galaxy we should make sure we survive and continue. . . . Our only chance of long-term survival is not to remain inward looking on planet Earth but to spread out into space. We have made remarkable progress in the last hundred years. But if we want to continue beyond the next hundred years, our future is in space.

Other-cheekism is not only a way of purifying the soul, it is also part of every weak person's survival kit.

We must realize that nature is absolutely essential for our survival, and we must act on that premise now.

In fact, one of the arguments for searching for intelligent life in space, elsewhere, is that we have no evidence that intelligence has any survival value. The most successful creatures on this planet are the cockroaches. They've been around, what is it, 100 million years or so and I suspect they'll still be there 100 million years in the future. Maybe intelligence is an evolutionary aberration which dooms its possessors in the way armor may have doomed some of the dinosaurs.

When it comes to mentors, you can't beat survival.

Wave after wave has brought to our shores beautiful and mysterious treasures from unknown worlds: figurines, animals, fetishes, masks, ceremonial or useful objects. They are called Primitive for want of a better name...What could never have been written is there, all the dreams and anguishes of man. The hunger for food and sex and security, the terrors of night and death, the thirst for life and the hope for survival.

In a world where change is inevitable and continuous, the need to achieve that change without violence is essential for survival.

I guess I consider myself a cartoonist first, though I was "trained" as a painter/printmaker/sculptor. If there's still any resistance to cartooning in the nuts-and-bolts world of acquiring the means of survival, it's probably mostly on the pay scale. If graphic novels are selling really well and are "growing the book market" or whatever it is a businessman would say about them, I don't see it in the remuneration offered by some of the publishers.

If the age of the Earth were a calendar year and today were a breath before midnight on New Year's Eve, we showed up a scant fifteen minutes ago, and all of recorded history has blinked by in the last sixty seconds. Luckily for us, our planet-mates--the fantastic meshwork of plants, animals, and microbes--have been patiently perfecting their wares since March, an incredible 3.8 billion years since the first bacteria. ...After 3.8 billion years of research and development, failures are fossils, and what surrounds us is the secret to survival.

Capitalism is the key to survival.

For me, dance is a nutrient, you know, it's something that I need, it's something like, you know, the air we breath, the food we eat. These are things that we need for survival. For me, dance is a nutrient. It's my nourishment.

The Body thinks it has an agenda that is important. And the Mind imagines that its agenda is vital to your survival. But the older you get the more you realize that it is the Soul's agenda, and only the Soul's agenda, that matters.

Another werewolf thing. Like most animals, we spent a large part of our lives engaged in the three Fs of basic survival. Feeding, fighting and... reproduction.

When you are a beginning film maker you are desperate to survive. The most important thing in the end is survival and being able to get to your next picture.

I find it extraordinary that a straightforward if inelegant device for ensuring the survival of the species should involve human beings in such emotional turmoil. Does sex have to be taken so seriously?

For me, survival is the ability to cope with difficulties, with circumstances, and to overcome them.

Because our choices are largely based on survival. But if life is eternal, life is not a question.

Survival activates miracles when a person relies on the graces of hope and faith.

I think comedy is so much easier to do on the page than it is in real life. When I'm writing, comedy is an easy way to win over the reader. You're automatically more disposed to keep reading, thinking maybe, "I'll get another laugh or two." I think it's a survival instinct in me. I mean, you don't want to lose these guys within five or ten pages. You want them to keep going. I think to some extent it's a desperate measure that I throw out there, because a novel isn't a complete waste of time if it made you laugh.

Intelligence is a valuable thing, but it is not usually the key to survival. Sheer fecundity ... usually counts. The intelligent gorilla doesn't do as well as the less intelligent but more-fecund rat, which doesn't do as well as the still-less-intelligent but still-more-fecund cockroach, which doesn't do as well as the minimally-intelligent but maximally-fecund bacterium.

We shall pay any price, bear any burden, to assure the survival and the success of liberty.