Survival

Survival is act of surviving; to stay living.

Quotes

• Real survivalists don’t run off into the woods; they stay and work to prevent disaster.
  • Lois McMaster Bujold, “Free Associating about Falling Free” in Nebula Awards 24, edited by Michael Bishop, p. 29

• After all, it has yet to be proved that intelligence has real survival value.
  • Arthur C. Clarke, The Lost Worlds of 2001

• There walked a lonely man, silent, mute, the only man

Not knowing how, not knowing why was he the sole survivor

Why should he be alive, breathing still while others died

And the only question, why was he the sole survivor?

* Blue Oyster Cult, Sole Survivor, Fire of unknown origin, lyrics by Erik Bloom, John Trivers, and Liz Myers

• Most people, it seems, think that Robinson Crusoe, when he landed on his Island, had nothing to keep him from starvation or anything else. As a matter of fact, he had twelve raft loads of supplies that he took off the wrecked ship. He had as much food and furniture as if he had had a delicatessen store and Fifth Avenue outside his hut.
  • Will Cuppy (comic interview by Jo Ranson) (November 24, 1929) . "Living from Can to Mouth". Brooklyn Eagle Magazine: 5.

• Learning is not compulsory; it's voluntary. Improvement is not compulsory; it's voluntary. But to survive, we must learn.
  • W. Edwards Deming, Deming: The Way We Knew Him (1995)
  • Note: This quote is often cited as “Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival.

• The entire modern deification of survival per se, survival returning to itself, survival naked and abstract, with the denial of any substantive excellence in what survives, except the capacity for more survival still, is surely the strangest intellectual stopping-place ever proposed by one man to another.
  • William James, review of Clifford's Lectures and Essays, Collected Essays and Reviews (1920), p. 143 (1879)

• Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.
  • John F. Kennedy. This is one of seven quotes inscribed on the walls at the gravesite of John F. Kennedy at Arlington National Cemetery.

• What doesn't kill you makes you stranger.
  • The Joker Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight screenplay by Jonathan Nolan and Christopher Nolan

• Humanity will ever seek but never attain perfection. Let us at least survive and go on trying.
  • Dora Russell, in The Religion of the Machine Age (1983)

• 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, speech at Binghamton Community High School (1968)

• The survival of the fittest.
  • Herbert Spencer, Principles of Biology, III, ch.12 p. 165

External links

• Survival Gear