Quotes about Survival

Poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change... —Audre Lorde, born #otd

If the rest of them can survive only by destroying us, then why should we wish them to survive? . . . Nothing can make it moral to destroy the best. One can't be punished for being good. One can't be penalized for ability.

Man has no automatic code of survival. His particular distinction from all other living species is the necessity to act in the face of alternatives by means of volitional choice. He has no automatic knowledge of what is good for him or evil, what values his life depends on, what course of action it requires...Man must obtain his knowledge and choose his actions by a process of thinking, which nature will not force him to perform.

It's a law of survival, isn't it?—to seek the best. I didn't come for your sake. I came for mine.

I shall remind you thatrights are a moral principle defining and sanctioning a man's freedom of action in a social context, that are derived from man's nature as a rational being and represent a necessary condition of his particular mode of survival. I shall remind you also that the right to life is the source of all rights, including the right to property.

Rabbits have white tails in order that it be easy for us to shoot them.

One way or another, I regard it as almost inevitable that either a nuclear confrontation or environmental catastrophe will cripple the Earth at some point in the next 1,000 years which, as geological time goes, is the mere blink of an eye. By then I hope and believe that our ingenious race will have found a way to slip the surly bonds of Earth and will therefore survive the disaster.

I am convinced that humans need to leave Earth. If we stay, we risk being annihilated.

You don't develop courage by being happy in your relationships everyday. You develop it by surviving difficult times and challenging adversity.

I had been afraid of the primitive, had wanted it broken gently, but here it came on us in a breath, as we stumbled up through the dung and the cramped and stinking huts to our lampless sleeping place among the rats. It was the worst one need fear, and it was bearable because it was inescapable.

If I eliminate everything, how will I exist?

That survival instinct, that will to live, that need to get back to life again, is more powerful than any consideration of taste, decency, politeness, manners, civility. Anything. It's such a powerful force.