“All life is a struggle for existence. Why should it cease to be a struggle if it spreads among the stars?”

—  Ken MacLeod , book Learning the World

Source: Learning the World (2005), Chapter 14 “The Extraordinary and Remarkable Ship” (p. 239)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "All life is a struggle for existence. Why should it cease to be a struggle if it spreads among the stars?" by Ken MacLeod?
Ken MacLeod photo
Ken MacLeod 25
Scottish science fiction writer 1954

Related quotes

Emil M. Cioran photo

“I have always struggled, with the sole intention of ceasing to struggle. Result: zero.”

Emil M. Cioran (1911–1995) Romanian philosopher and essayist

Source: Drawn and Quartered

José Rizal photo

“To live is to be among men, and to be among men is to struggle, a struggle not only with them but with oneself; with their passions, but also with one's own.”

José Rizal (1861–1896) Filipino writer, ophthalmologist, polyglot and nationalist

Letter to his family, Dapitan (c. 1884)

Peter Kropotkin photo

“In the animal world we have seen that the vast majority of species live in societies, and that they find in association the best arms for the struggle for life: understood, of course, in its wide Darwinian sense — not as a struggle for the sheer means of existence, but as a struggle against all natural conditions unfavourable to the species.”

Peter Kropotkin book Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution

Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902)
Context: In the animal world we have seen that the vast majority of species live in societies, and that they find in association the best arms for the struggle for life: understood, of course, in its wide Darwinian sense — not as a struggle for the sheer means of existence, but as a struggle against all natural conditions unfavourable to the species. The animal species, in which individual struggle has been reduced to its narrowest limits, and the practice of mutual aid has attained the greatest development, are invariably the most numerous, the most prosperous, and the most open to further progress. The mutual protection which is obtained in this case, the possibility of attaining old age and of accumulating experience, the higher intellectual development, and the further growth of sociable habits, secure the maintenance of the species, its extension, and its further progressive evolution. The unsociable species, on the contrary, are doomed to decay.

Mao Zedong photo

“In the ideological field, the question of who will win in the struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie has not been really settled yet. We still have to wage a protracted struggle against bourgeois and petty bourgeois ideology. It is wrong not to understand this and to give up ideological struggle. All erroneous ideas, all poisonous weeds, all ghosts and monsters, must be subjected to criticism; in no circumstance should they be allowed to spread unchecked. However, the criticism should be fully reasoned, analytical and convincing, and not rough, bureaucratic, metaphysical or dogmatic.”

Mao Zedong (1893–1976) Chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China

Speech at the Chinese Communist Party’s National Conference on Propaganda Work (March 12, 1957), 1st pocket edition, pp. 26-27
Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong (The Little Red Book)

“In former days the struggle for existence was chiefly a struggle against nature, today it is primarily a struggle against other human beings.”

Kirby Page (1890–1957) American clergyman

"The Commercial Motive" Christian Century 40 (Feb 22, 1923)

Karl Marx photo

“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”

Karl Marx (1818–1883) German philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist

Source: The Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), Section 1, paragraph 1, lines 1-2.

Will Durant photo

“Here and everywhere is the struggle for existence, life inextricably enmeshed with war. All life living at the expense of life, every organism eating other organisms forever.”

Will Durant (1885–1981) American historian, philosopher and writer

Source: Fallen Leaves (2014), Ch. 4 : On Old Age

Adam Goldstein photo

“There’s no reason why I should have lived or why I lived and they didn’t. And it’s something I struggle with every day.”

Adam Goldstein (1973–2009) American DJ

DJ AM’s friend rushed to his SoHo apt., but he was already dead http://blog.taragana.com/e/2009/08/29/goldstein-suffered-daily-struggle-to-cope-29107/ Taragana. Retrieved August 30, 2009.

Benito Mussolini photo

“How can the idea of a creator be reconciled with the existence of dwarfed and atrophied organs, with anomalies and monstrosities, with the existence of pain, perpetual and universal, with the struggle and the inequalities among human beings?”

Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) Duce and President of the Council of Ministers of Italy. Leader of the National Fascist Party and subsequen…

1900s, God Does Not Exist (1904)

Keir Hardie photo

“If the State has no right to interfere to protect the poor struggling against circumstances over which they have no control in the industrial world, it is difficult to see why the same State should be considered a beneficent agency when called in to protect the property of the rich against an infuriated mob of starving people. If the poor are to be left to struggle for existence unaided by the State, then why not the rich?”

Keir Hardie (1856–1915) Scottish socialist and labour leader

Source: From Serfdom to Socialism (1907), pp. 3-4

Related topics