Sunday, April 5, 2009 – A Matter of Survival
It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory. ~ W. Edwards Deming
The ability to delude yourself may be an important survival tool. ~ Jane Wagner
Moderation is the secret of survival. ~ Manly Hall
The planet’s survival has become so uncertain that any effort, any thought that presupposes an assured future amounts to a mad gamble. ~ Elias Canetti
One can survive everything nowadays, except death, and live down anything, except a good reputation. ~ Oscar Wilde
On a large enough time line, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero. ~ Chuck Palahniuk
It is not clear that intelligence has any long-term survival value. ~ Stephen Hawking
I was taught that the human brain was the crowning glory of evolution so far, but I think it’s a very poor scheme for survival. ~ Kurt Vonnegut
Aggressiveness is the principal guarantor of survival. ~ Robert Ardrey
Fear is an emotion indispensable for survival. ~ Hannah Arendt
Compassion is not religious business, it is human business, it is not luxury, it is essential for our own peace and mental stability, it is essential for human survival. ~ Dalai Lama
Without civic morality communities perish; without personal morality their survival has no value. ~ Bertrand Russell
Doesn’t the fight for survival also justify swindle and theft? In self-defense, anything goes. ~ Imelda Marcos
The unrestricted competition so commonly advocated does not leave us the survival of the fittest. The unscrupulous succeed best in accumulating wealth. ~ Rutherford B. Hayes
Whoever claims that economic competition represents ’survival of the fittest’ in the sense of the law of the jungle, provides the clearest possible evidence of his lack of knowledge of economics. ~ George Reisman
All that is really necessary for survival of the fittest, it seems, is an interest in life, good, bad or peculiar. ~ Grace Paley
Any nation that can survive what we have lately in the way of government is on the high road to permanent glory. ~ Molly Ivins
When an empire fears for its survival, its prime has passed. ~ Martin Dansky
A declining institution often experiences survival of the unfittest. ~ John McCarthy
The law of the survival of the fittest led inevitably to the survival and predominance of the men who were effective in war and who loved it because they were effective. ~ Elihu Root
Nothing will benefit human health and increase chances for survival of life on Earth as much as the evolution to a vegetarian diet. ~ Albert Einstein
It may be that we shall, by a process of sublime irony, have reached a stage in this story where safety will be the sturdy child of terror, and survival the twin brother of annihilation. ~ Winston Churchill, on the hydrogen bomb, 1955
The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phase, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why and Where phases. For instance, the first phase is characterized by the question How can we eat? the second by the question Why do we eat? and the third by the question Where shall we have lunch? ~ Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, 1980
Not only is there no guarantee of the temporal immortality of the human soul, that is to say of its eternal survival after death; but, in any case, this assumption completely fails to accomplish the purpose for which it has always been intended. Or is some riddle solved by my surviving forever? Is not this eternal life itself as much of a riddle as our present life? ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein
To expect a personality to survive the disintegration of the brain is like expecting a cricket club to survive when all of its members are dead. ~ Bertrand Russell
Our pleasures were simple – they included survival. ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower
Nature is indifferent to the survival of the human species, including Americans. ~ Adlai Stevenson
Look in the mirror, and don’t be tempted to equate transient domination with either intrinsic superiority or prospects for extended survival. ~ Stephen Jay Gould
The human race’s prospects of survival were considerably better when we were defenseless against tigers than they are today when we have become defenseless against ourselves. ~ Arnold J. Toynbee
A population weakened and exhausted by battling against so many obstacles — whose needs are never satisfied and desires never fulfilled — is vulnerable to manipulation and regimentation. The struggle for survival is, above all, an exercise that is hugely time-consuming, absorbing and debilitating. If you create these anti-conditions, your rule is guaranteed for a hundred years. ~ Ryszard Kapuscinski
Survival, with honor, that outmoded and all-important word, is as difficult as ever and as all-important to a writer. Those who do not last are always more beloved since no one has to see them in their long, dull, unrelenting, no-quarter-given-and-no-quarter-received, fights that they make to do something as they believe it should be done before they die. Those who die or quit early and easy and with every good reason are preferred because they are understandable and human. Failure and well-disguised cowardice are more human and more beloved. ~ Ernest Hemingway
Life results from the non-random survival of randomly varying replicators. ~ Richard Dawkins
Every new baby is a blind desperate vote for survival: people who find themselves unable to register an effective political protest against extermination do so by a biological act. ~ Lewis Mumford
The notion that one will not survive a particular catastrophe is, in general terms, a comfort since it is equivalent to abolishing the catastrophe. ~ Iris Murdoch
Just Above Sunset 