Quotes about survival
page 11

“For ages the world has been waiting and watching; millions, with broken hearts, have hovered around the yawning abyss; but no echo has come back from the engulfing gloom —silence, oblivion, covers all. If indeed they survive; if they went away whole and victorious, they give us no signals. We wait for years, but no messages come from the far-away shore to which they have gone.”

Randolph Sinks Foster (1820–1903) American bishop

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), P. 291.

Age, World, Silence, Waiting

“A good man ("un homme de bien", Fr.) never wholly perishes, the best part of his being outlives (or survives) in eternity.”

African Spir (1837–1890) Russian philosopher

Source: Words of a Sage : Selected thoughts of African Spir (1937), p. 44.

Parting

“Acceptance is appreciation, and the high value of appreciation is such that to appreciate appreciation seems to be the fundamental prerequisite for survival. Mankind will not die for lack of information; it may perish for lack of appreciation.”

Abraham Joshua Heschel (1907–1972) Polish-American Conservative Judaism Rabbi

Source: Who Is Man? (1965), Ch. 5

“Thus, to depict Rama as a virile warrior was a sin against Hinduism, an imitation of colonialist virility myths, a betrayal of the feminine passivity of genuine Hinduism. Or, to organize the Hindu religious personnel on a common platform (the Dharma Sansad, more or less 'religious parliament') is an un-Hindu imitation of the Bishops' Synod in the Catholic Church. Or, to alert the Hindus against Muslim or Christian conversion campaigns is an abandonment of the cheerful Hindu indifference to sectarian name-tags, the only thing which really changes upon conversion. Indeed, anything that could play a role in upholding and preserving Hinduism was found to be un-Hindu, while anything that could make or keep Hinduism defenceless and moribund, was glorified as true Hinduism. Anything that smacked of vitality and the will to survive was dubbed 'Semitic.”

Koenraad Elst (1959) orientalist, writer

2000s, Who is a Hindu, (2001)

Change, Betrayal, Indifference

“My father was an atheist and he always described himself as a Serb. OK, maybe we were Muslim for 250 years, but we were orthodox before that and deep down we were always Serbs, religion cannot change that. We only became Muslims to survive the Turks.”

Emir Kusturica (1954) Serbian film director, actor and musician of Bosnian origin

The Guardian (4 March 2005)

Religion, Change

“The core of ethics runs deep in our species and is common to human beings everywhere. It survives the most appalling hardships and the most ruthless attempts to deprive human beings of their humanity. Nevertheless, some people resist the idea that his core has a biological basis which we have inherited from our pre-human ancestors.”

Peter Singer (1946) Australian philosopher

Source: The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress (1981), Chapter 2, The Biological Basis Of Ethics, p. 27

People, Idea

“You have to be self-reliant and strong to survive in this town. Otherwise you will be destroyed.”

Joan Crawford (1904–1977) American actress

Interview, Hedda Hoppers Hollywood (1945)

Strong

“It was the elision of the weaker element — the survival of the fittest; and some, indeed very many, mothers must lose their sons that way.”

Zane Grey (1872–1939) American novelist

The Desert of Wheat (1919).

Way

“I always tell the Kurds who defend independence: Let's say we declared the independent Kurdish state and Syria, Iran, Iraq and Turkey imposed sanctions on us, without waging a war. How would we survive under those circumstances?”

Jalal Talabani (1933–2017) Iraqi politician

Turkish Daily News staff (September 14, 2007) "Talabani: War against Turkey equal to war against democracy", Turkish Daily News.

War

“In the name of Hippocrates, doctors have invented the most exquisite form of torture ever known to man: survival.”

Luis Buñuel (1900–1983) film director

Mon Dernier soupir (My Last Sigh, 1983)

“The Shoshone, as well as those peoples around the world who still survive at the least complex levels of social organization, know that romantic love exists. But they also recognize it for what it is—in their case, a form of madness. …they regard the participants with tolerance and patience, for they know that the illness will soon go away. …To them, only someone mentally backward would base an institution so important to survival as marriage on romantic love. …it is a life and death business.”

Peter Farb (1929–1980) American academic and writer

Man's Rise to Civilization (1968)

Love, Life, Death, Marriage

““They call themselves the light.”
“What about it?”
“If you are the light,” she said, “then your enemies are darkness, right?”
“I suppose.”
“If you are the light, if your enemies are darkness, then there’s nothing that you cannot justify. There’s nothing you can’t survive, because there’s nothing that you will not do.””

Emily St. John Mandel book Station Eleven

Source: Station Eleven (2014), Chapter 23 (p. 139)

Light

“Material possessions in themselves are good. We would not survive for long without money, clothing, shelter and food. Yet if we refuse to share what we have with the hungry and the poor, we make of our possessions a false god. How many voices in our materialist society tell us that happiness is to be found by acquiring as many possessions and luxuries as we can! But this is to make possessions into a false god. Instead of bringing life, they bring death.”

Pope Benedict XVI (1927) 265th Pope of the Catholic Church

2008, Disadvantaged Youth (18 July 2008)

Life, Death, Money, God

“In general, the primary aim of this cleansing process is only to restore a certain sound and natural balance, and, secondly, to remove from official positions of national significance those elements to which one cannot entrust Germany’s survival or destruction. For it will not be possible to avoid, in the next few years, [the need] to make sure that certain processes which must not be communicated to the rest of the world for reasons of the highest national interest, will indeed remain secret. This can only be guaranteed by the inner homogeneity of the administrative bodies concerned.”

Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) Führer and Reich Chancellor of Germany, Leader of the Nazi Party

Letter to President Hindenberg http://alphahistory.com/nazigermany/hindenburg-and-hitler-on-jewish-war-veterans/, (April 5th 1933) 1930s

Secret, World, Communication, Nature

“The point cannot be just survival, nor even survival in numbers. Survival is just as well achieved by much less ambitions creatures which go in for sheer number. (In fact a cost-benefit-conscious gene that really understood its business would, no doubt, have remained on board something like the amoeba; it will probably be amoung the last to go.) Nor is it survival-as-society, since many animals achieve this despite a lot of bickering.”

Mary Midgley (1919–2018) British philosopher and ethicist

Beast and Man: The Roots of Human Nature (1979). 148.

Business, Animals

“Now I see what racing skiing is all about. It's all right to miss seeing the trees and the countryside and all the other things when you've got to be in a hurry. And when you're in a war you've got to be in a hurry. Don't you? So I guess maybe racing skiers weren't ruining the sport after all. They were preparing it, if you see what I mean, for the future. Everything has to evolve or else it perishes... I'm almost glad this war came along. It's like a test, isn't it, and only the things and the people who've been evolving the right way survive.”

John Knowles book A Separate Peace

Leper, on the need to change.
Source: A Separate Peace (1959), P. 116-117

War, People, Way, Sport

“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 book The Message to the Planet

The Message to the Planet (1989) p. 532.

“Sail forth into the sea of life,
O gentle, loving, trusting wife,
And safe from all adversity
Upon the bosom of that sea
Thy comings and thy goings be!
For gentleness and love and trust
Prevail o'er angry wave and gust;
And in the wreck of noble lives
Something immortal still survives.”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow The Building of the Ship

Source: The Building of the Ship (1849), Line 368.

Love, Life, Sea

“With the passage of time, whatever a man had done, whether for good or evil, with the man's bodily organs, left the man's parish unaffected: only a man's thoughts and dreams could outlive him, in any serious sense, and these might survive with perhaps augmenting influence: so that Kennaston had come to think artistic creation in words — since marble and canvas inevitably perished — was the one, possibly, worth-while employment of human life. But here was a crude corporal deed which bluntly destroyed thoughts, and annihilated dreams by wholesale. To Kennaston this seemed the one real tragedy that could be staged on earth….”

James Branch Cabell book The Cream of the Jest

Source: The Cream of the Jest (1917), Ch. 24 : Deals with Pen Scratches

Life, Dreams, Thinking, Sense

“I believe that our very survival depends upon us becoming better systems thinkers. How can we learn to see the systems we're participating in? How can we act intelligently when things remain fuzzy?”

Margaret J. Wheatley (1941) American writer

It's An Interconnected World (2002)

Intelligence, Learning, Dependency

“God is what survives the evidence that nothing deserves to be thought.”

Emil M. Cioran book The Trouble With Being Born

The Trouble With Being Born (1973)

God

“I got God on my side.
I'm just trying to survive.
What if what you do to survive
Kills the things you love?
Fear's a powerful thing;
It can turn your heart black you can trust.
It'll take your God filled soul
And fill it with devils and dust”

Bruce Springsteen (1949) American singer and songwriter

"Devils & Dust"
Song lyrics, Devils & Dust (2005)

Love, God, Fear, Soul

“How significant is the enormous heightening, under mescalin, of the perception of color! … Man's highly developed color sense is a biological luxury—inestimably precious to him as an intellectual and spiritual being, but unnecessary to his survival as an animal. … Mescalin raises all colors to a higher power and makes the percipient aware of innumerable fine shades of difference, to which, at ordinary times, he is completely blind. It would seem that, for Mind at Large, the so-called secondary characters of things are primary.”

Aldous Huxley book The Doors of Perception

describing his experiment with mescaline, pp. 26-27
The Doors of Perception (1954)

Color, Sense, Time, Animals

“The function [of objective thinking] is to reduce all phenomena which bear witness to the union of subject and world, putting in their place the clear idea of the object as in itself and of the subject as pure consciousness. It therefore severs the links which unite the thing and the embodied subject, leaving only sensible qualities to make up our world (to the exclusion of the modes of appearance which we have described), and preferably visual qualities, because these give the impression of being autonomous, and because they are less directly linked to our body and present us with an object rather than introducing us into an atmosphere. But in reality all things are concretions of a setting, and any explicit perception of a thing survives in virtue of a previous communication with a certain atmosphere.”

Maurice Merleau-Ponty book Phenomenology of Perception

Source: Phenomenology of Perception (1945), p. 374

World, Communication, Idea, Thinking

“He seems very mournful, but there is all the winter still to be survived. He no longer lives in years; he is down to seasons. Finally it will become single nights.”

James Salter book A Sport and a Pastime

A Sport and a Pastime (1967)

Winter, Night, Season

“An individual who has survived physical death can if he wishes recreate any portion of his own past as it was. He can recreate any portion of his own past in any way he wishes, changing his own actions within it if he so chooses, combining and reforming the entire composition. Such a procedure is usually a dead-end enterprise. The others involved are vivid hallucinations, and he may not realize this.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Session 396, Page 197
The Early Sessions: Sessions 1-42, 1997, The Early Sessions: Book 8

Death, Way, Change, Past

“For the rest of the earth’s organisms, existence is relatively uncomplicated. Their lives are about three things: survival, reproduction, death—and nothing else.”

Thomas Ligotti (1953) American horror author

The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror (2010)

Death

“We started with pure parliamentary democracy at the Centre and in the States. Now this has been extended to the grassroots, though not in the Gandhian way, but according to the dream of Gandhiji, along that line. We have extended democracy to the grassroots, in the panchayati raj experiment and I think that has given solid support to our parliamentary system. Our parliamentary system could not have survived, without this basic grassroot support. But all these can function only in an atmosphere of social and economic progress and greater equality.”

K. R. Narayanan (1920–2005) 9th Vice President and the 10th President of India

Shri K. R. Narayanan President of India in Conversation with N. Ram on Doordarshan and All India Radio

Dreams, Way, Democracy, Support

“I told her I could not believe in her movement because it did not promise anything for the future except freedom from the tyranny of the past. I told her that what little philosophy I’d detected driving the movement totally ignored human nature. That if the Rebels ever did manage to topple the empire, whatever replaced it would be worse. That was the lesson of history. New regimes, to make sure they survived, were always nastier than the ones before them.”

Glen Cook book The Silver Spike

Source: The Silver Spike (1989), Chapter 36 (p. 561)

History, Nature, Freedom, Past

“Needless to say, the history of the United States has been marred from its inception by an enormous quantity of unjust laws, far too many expressly bolstering the oppression of Black people. Particularized reflections of existing social inequities, these laws have repeatedly borne witness to the exploitative and racist core of the society itself. For Blacks, Chicanos, for all nationally oppressed people, the problem of opposing unjust laws and the social conditions which nourish their growth, has always had immediate practical implications. Our very survival has frequently been a direct function of our skill in forging effective channels of resistance. In resisting, we have sometimes been compelled to openly violate those laws which directly or indirectly buttress our oppression. But even when containing our resistance within the orbit of legality, we have been labeled criminals and have been methodically persecuted by a racist legal apparatus.”

Angela Davis (1944) American political activist, scholar, and author

If They Come in The Morning (1971)

People, Law, History, Problem

“Brenda and Eddie were the popular steadies
And the king and the queen of the prom
Riding around with the car top down and the radio on
Nobody looked any finer
Or was more of a hit at the Parkway Diner
We never knew we could want more than that out of life
Surely Brenda and Eddie would always know how to survive.”

Billy Joel (1949) American singer-songwriter and pianist

Scenes from an Italian Restaurant.
Song lyrics, The Stranger (1977)

Life, Cars

“They detained me for 81 days, but they never killed me. They clearly told me: 'If we were in the Cultural Revolution, you would have been killed 100 times.' They said: 'We have already improved.' I said: 'I thank you very much. Yes, you have improved. Not because you are really willing to improve yourself, but only because improvement is a matter of surviving.”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

2010-, Ai Weiwei: ‘Shame on Me.’, 2011

Time

“The meaning of life for human beings is to serve one another for the survival of humanity and the advancement of civilization.”

Newton Lee American computer scientist

ACM Computers in Entertainment (Volume 3, Issue 1, January 2005)

Life

“By 1970, approximately two-thirds of the marriages of those on the tribal rolls were to people who were not, with the result that only 59 percent of births reflected a situation in which both parents registered themselves as possessing any Indian blood at all; U. S. Dept. of Health, Education and Welfare, A Study of Selected Socio-Economic Characteristics of Ethnic Minorities Based on the 1970 Census, Vol. 3: American Indians (Washington, D. C.: U. S. Government Printing Office, 1974) pp. 74, 78. For effects in terms of the "blood quantum" criteria by which native identity is officially defined in the U. S., see Thorton, American Indian Holocaust and Survival, pp. 174-5. The implications are clear: "Set the blood quantum at one-quarter, hold to it as a rigid definition of Indians, let intermarriage proceed as it [has] and eventually Indians will be defined out of existence"; Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest; The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York; W. W. Norton, 1987) p. 338.”

Ward Churchill (1947) Political activist

[Kill the Indian, Save the Man: The Genocidal Impact of American Indian Residential Schools, City Lights Books, San Francisco, CA, November 2004, 88, 0872864340]

Marriage, People, Health, Education

“No government is ever really in favor of so-called civil rights. It always tries to whittle them down. They are preserved under all governments, insofar as they survive at all, by special classes of fanatics, often highly dubious.”

H.L. Mencken (1880–1956) American journalist and writer

33
1940s–present, Minority Report : H.L. Mencken's Notebooks (1956)

“If you do not act, the world dies, and you with it. Surely survival is worth a little effort? Unless you are so eager to retire to that dismal heaven of your Christian god?”

Melinda M. Snodgrass (1951) American writer

Source: Queen's Gambit Declined (1989), Chapter 2 (p. 21)

God, World, Effort

“I have survived or I existed or I lived”

Emmanuel-Joseph Sieyès (1748–1836) French ''abbé'' ad statesman

J'ai vécu.
After the Reign of Terror, when asked what he had done during that period; variously reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations (1922), "Life", p. 453; "War", p. 857.

“What many of us fail to realize is that the last four hundred years are a highly special period in the history of the world. The pace at which changes during these years have taken place is unexampled in earlier history, as is the very nature of these changes. This is partly the results of increased communication, but also of an increased mastery over nature, which on a limited planet like the earth, may prove in the long run to be an increased slavery to nature. For the more we get out of the world the less we leave, and in the long run we shall have to pay our debts at a time that may be very inconvenient for our own survival.”

Norbert Wiener book The Human Use of Human Beings

II. Progress and Entropy. p. 46
The Human Use of Human Beings (1950)

World, History, Communication, Nature

“Many discoveries must have been stillborn or smothered at birth. We know only those which survived.”

William Ian Beardmore Beveridge (1908–2006) British zoologist

Source: The Art of Scientific Investigation (1950), p. 65.

Birth

“Here I am, a human being who came in this world just like anybody else did. A lot of things happen in our lives. Some traumatic experiences happen, some happy experiences happen. And we all live. We all survive. And there is the one thing that’s so simple and so profound within inside of us, which is completely uncontaminated by everything that happens, everything that occurs all around us”

Prem Rawat (1957) controversial spiritual leader

Miami Beach, Florida, January 16, 1981
1980s

World, Happiness

“The same past data can confirm a theory and its exact opposite! If you survive until tomorrow, it could mean that either a) you are more likely to be immortal or b) that you are closer to death.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb (1960) Lebanese-American essayist, scholar, statistician, former trader and risk analyst

Source: The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (2007), p. 185

Death, Past

“Our morality itself is the result of a process of cultural selection. Those things survive which enable the species to multiply.”

Friedrich Hayek (1899–1992) Austrian and British economist and Nobel Prize for Economics laureate

1980s and later, Knowledge, Evolution and Society (1983), "Coping with Ignorance", "Our Moral Heritage"

“In the elemental emotions of fear and rage associated with the most primitive parts of the brain, this swift response without conscious intervention or direction is a condition of survival: but something more than survival comes forth from it; for this very automatism freed the growing brain and ramifying nervous system for more important services, detached from the immediate pressure for survival, performed by the new brain. Here by his conscious symbolic activities man created a second realm that conforms more closely to his higher personal and social needs.”

Lewis Mumford book The Myth of the Machine

pg 397
The Myth of the Machine (1967-1970), The Pentagon of Power (1970)

Fear, Rage, Parting, Personality

“Growing hemp as nature designed it is vital to our urgent need to reduce greenhouse gases and ensure the survival of our planet.”

Jack Herer (1939–2010) American Cannabis/Hemp and freedom activist

Attributed to Herer in Blunts' The Quotable Stoner (2011), p. 133.

Nature

“As one who fought in all of Israel's wars, and learned from personal experience that without proper force, we do not have a chance of surviving in this region, which does not show mercy towards the weak, I have also learned from experience that the sword alone cannot decide this bitter dispute in this land.”

Ariel Sharon (1928–2014) prime minister of Israel and Israeli general

Ariel Sharon. "Speech at the Knesset, at knesset.gov, October 2004 ( Knesset.gov.il online) http://www.knesset.gov.il/docs/eng/sharonspeech04.htm 2000s

War, Learning, Chance, Personality

“Human beings are emotional amoral egoists, driven above all by emotional self-interest. All of our thoughts, beliefs and motivations are neurochemically mediated, some predetermined for survival, others alterable.”

Nayef Al-Rodhan (1959) philosopher, neuroscientist, geostrategist, and author

Source: Sustainable History and the Dignity of Man (2009), p.27

Motivation

“You who survive these times must not forget. Forget neither the good nor the bad… I want this to be known: that there were no nameless heroes here; that they were people with names, faces, longings and hopes, and that the pain of the very last of them was no less than the pain of the very first… Man's duty does not end with this fight, for to be a man will continue to demand a heroic heart as long as mankind is not quite human.”

Julius Fučík (journalist) (1903–1943) Czech journalist and revolutionary

Cited in: John Fraser (1985) "Prayers, parades in Berlin," The Globe and Mail, 8 May 1985; Cited in: Julius Lukasiewicz (1994) Ignorance Explosion: Understanding Industrial Civilization. p. 61.

Pain, People, Hope, Time

“Before the eighteenth century the demographic impact of the profession of medicine remained negligible. Relatively few persons could afford to pay a doctor for his often very expensive services; and for every case in which the doctor's attendance really made a difference between life and death, there were other instances in which even the best available professional services made little difference to the course of the disease, or actually hindered recovery. …Only with the eighteenth century did the situation begin to change; and it was not until after 1850 or so that the practice of medicine and the organization of medical services begin to make large-scale differences in human survival rates and population growth.”

William H. McNeill (1917–2016) Canadian historian

Source: Plagues and Peoples (1976), Ch.6.

Life, Death, Disease, Change

“The one central character of the whole explosive saga to survive, somehow, the traumatic after-events.”

David Frith (1937) cricket writer and historian

Of Bill Voce; The Fast Men (1982)

“Of course, Charlie and I can identify only a few Inevitables, even after a lifetime of looking for them. Leadership alone provides no certainties: Witness the shocks some years back at General Motors, IBM and Sears, all of which had enjoyed long periods of seeming invincibility. Though some industries or lines of business exhibit characteristics that endow leaders with virtually insurmountable advantages, and that tend to establish Survival of the Fattest as almost a natural law, most do not. Thus, for every Inevitable, there are dozens of Impostors, companies now riding high but vulnerable to competitive attacks.”

Warren Buffett (1930) American business magnate, investor, and philanthropist

1996 Chairman's Letter http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/1996.html Letters to Shareholders (1957 - 2012)

Law, Business, Nature

“The fault is all ours. We have become overwhelming. About one in twenty of all the people who have ever existed is alive today, compared to just one in a thousand of other species. As a result we are depleting the earth.
But even now the question is still asked: Does it really matter? So we lose a few cute mammals, and a lot of bugs nobody ever heard of. So what? We’re still here.
Yes, we are. But the ecosystem is like a vast life-support machine. It is built on the interaction of species on all scales of life, from the humblest fungi filaments that sustain the roots of plants to the tremendous global cycles of water, oxygen, and carbon dioxide. Darwin’s entangled bank, indeed. How does the machine stay stable? We don’t know. Which are its most important components? We don’t know. How much of it can we take out safely? We don’t know that either. Even if we could identify and save the species that are critical for our survival, we wouldn’t know which species they depend on in turn. But if we keep on our present course, we will soon find out the limits of robustness.
I may be biased, but I believe it will matter a great deal if we were to die by our own foolishness. Because we bring to the world something that no other creature in all its long history has had, and that is conscious purpose. We can think our way out of this.
So my question is—consciously, purposefully, what are we going to do?”

Stephen Baxter book Evolution

Source: Evolution (2002), Chapter 16 “An Entangled Bank” section I (pp. 509-510)

Life, People, World, Way

“Tips on surviving the regime: Respect yourself and speak for others. Do one small thing every day to prove the existence of justice.”

Ai Weiwei (1957) Chinese concept artist

Ai Weiwei Twitter feed: @AiWW (12:39 p.m. August 6, 2009)
2000-09, Twitter feeds, 2009

Justice

“Both we and the Soviets face the common threat of nuclear destruction and there is no likelihood that either capitalism or communism will survive a nuclear war.”

John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) American economist and diplomat

The Ashes of Capitalism and the Ashes of Communism (1986)

War, Communication

“There is today almost no scientific theory which was held when, say, the Industrial Revolution began about 1760. Most often today's theories flatly contradict those of 1760; many contradict those of 1900. In cosmology, in quantum mechanics, in genetics, in the social sciences, who now holds the beliefs that seemed firm sixty years ago? Yet the society of scientists has survived these changes without a revolution, and honors the men whose beliefs it no longer shares. No one has recanted abjectly at a trial before his colleagues. The whole structure of science has been changed and no one has been either disgraced or deposed. Through all the changes of science, the society of scientists is flexible and single-minded together, and evolves and rights itself. In the language of science, it is a stable society.”

Jacob Bronowski (1908–1974) Polish-born British mathematician

as quoted in American Journal of Physics, 44(2), p176, 1976-02
unsorted
Science and Human Values (1956, 1965)

Men, Science, Change

“A tactical retreat is not a bad response to a surprise assault, you know. First you survive. Then you choose your own ground. Then you counterattack.”

Lois McMaster Bujold Vorkosigan Saga

Vorkosigan Saga, A Civil Campaign (1999)

“There can be no doubt that the existence of public tortures and executions were connected with something quite other than this internal organization. Rusche and Kirchheimer are right to see it as the effect of a system of production in which labour power, and therefore the human body, has neither the utility nor the commercial value that are conferred on them in an economy of an industrial type. Moreover, this ‘contempt’ for the body is certainly related to a general attitude to death; and, in such an attitude, one can detect not only the values proper to Christianity, but a demographical, in a sense biological, situation: the ravages of disease and hunger, the periodic massacres of the epidemics, the formidable child mortality rate, the precariousness of the bio-economic balances – all this made death familiar and gave rise to rituals intended to integrate it, to make it acceptable and to give a meaning to its permanent aggression. But in analysing why the public executions survived for so long, one must also refer to the historical conjuncture; it must not be forgotten that the ordinance of 1670 that regulated criminal justice almost up to the Revolution had even increased in certain respects the rigour of the old edicts; Pussort, who, among the commissioners entrusted with the task of drawing up the documents, represented the intentions of the king, was responsible for this, despite the views of such magistrates as Lamoignon; the number of uprisings at the very height of the classical age, the rumbling close at hand of civil war, the king’s desire to assert his power at the expense of the parlements go a long way to explain the survival of so severe a penal system.”

Michel Foucault book Discipline and Punish

Source: Discipline and Punish (1977), pp. 51

Death, Hunger, War, Age

“The Pythagoreans discovered the existence of incommensurable lines, or of irrationals. This was, doubtless, first discovered with reference to the diagonal of a square which is incommensurable with the side, being in the ratio to it of √2 to 1. The Pythagorean proof of this particular case survives in Aristotle and in a proposition interpolated in Euclid's Book X.; it is by a reductio ad absurdum proving that, if the diagonal is commensurable with the side, the same number must be both odd and even. This discovery of the incommensurable… showed that the theory of proportion invented by Pythagoras was not of universal application and therefore that propositions proved by means of it were not really established…. The fatal flaw thus revealed in the body of geometry was not removed till Eudoxus discovered the great theory of proportion (expounded in Euclid's Book V.), which is applicable to incommensurable as well as to commensurable magnitudes.”

Thomas Little Heath (1861–1940) British civil servant and academic

p, 125
Achimedes (1920)

Books, Universe

“Yet at this moment Israel is our only reliable and unconditional ally. We can rely more on Israel than Israel can rely on us. And one has only to imagine what would have happened last summer had the Arabs and their Russian backers won the war to realize how vital the survival of Israel is to America and the West in general.”

Eric Hoffer (1898–1983) American philosopher

Israel's Peculiar Position (1968)

War, Imagination, Summer

“As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected. From the strong principle of inheritance, any selected variety will tend to propagate its new and modified form.”

Charles Darwin book On the Origin of Species (1859)

"Introduction", page 5 http://darwin-online.org.uk/content/frameset?pageseq=20&itemID=F373&viewtype=image On the Origin of Species (1859)

Life, Nature, Strong, Chance

“As one of my Jewish friends has been known to observe, the Jews who survived World War II were either now atheists or hadn’t been paying attention.”

Robert J. Sawyer book Calculating God

Source: Calculating God (2000), Chapter 14 (p. 140)

War, World

“The new attitude of the critic toward the artist has been rationalized for me by a leading European art historian who is also an influential critic of current art. It is based on a theory of division of labor in making art history. The historian, he contends, knows art history and, in fact, creates it; the artist knows only how to do things. Left to himself, the artist is almost certain to do the wrong thing — to deviate from the line of art history and thus to plunge into oblivion. The critic's role is to steer him in the proper direction and advise changes in his technique and subject matter that will coordinate his efforts with the forces of development. Better still, critics should formulate historically valid projects for artists to carry out. That not all critics have the same expectations of the future of art does not, I realize, weaken the cogency of my colleague's argument. The surviving artist would be one who has been lucky enough to pick the winning critic. My own view that art should be left to artists seemed to my mentor both out-of-date and irresponsible.”

Harold Rosenberg (1906–1978) American writer and art critic

Source: Art on the Edge, (1975), p. 249, "Thoughts in Off-Season"

Art, History, Effort, Change

“We live within a cultural mythology that tells us we are separate beings in competitive relation for power, even for survival. We long to return to a culture of inclusiveness, cooperation, and the sharing of gifts.”

Charles Eisenstein (1967) American writer

Charles Eisenstein, The Longing for Belonging http://www.huffingtonpost.com/charles-eisenstein/indigeneity-and-belonging_b_8011302.html, Huffington Post, 20 August 2015

“Laying aside all prejudice in favor of or against race, looking at the negro as politically and socially related to the American people generally, and measuring the forces arrayed against him, I do not see how he can survive and flourish in this country as a distinct and separate race, nor do I see how he can be removed from the country either by annihilation or expatriation.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

1880s, The Future of the Colored Race (1886)

People, Country

“Jacques Ellul observes in Propaganda: When dialogue begins, propaganda ends. His theme, that propaganda is not this or that ideology but rather the action and coexistence of all media at once, explains why propaganda is environmental and invisible. The total life of any culture tends to be "propaganda", for this reason. It blankets perception and supresses awareness, making the counter environments created by the artist indispensable to survival and freedom.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1970s, From Cliché to Archetype (1970), p.77

Life, Freedom

“One can never rely on the great keeping one's letters; and should those letters vanish, one is apt to be remembered only as the mysterious half of a dialogue to be reconstructed in the vaguest way from the surviving (and sometimes lesser!) half of the exchange.”

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) American writer

Source: 1960s, Julian (1964), Chapter 1, Libanius to Priscus, Antioch March 380

Way

“In my strategy, the training for killing enemies is by way of many contests, fighting for survival, discovering the meaning of life and death, learning the Way of the sword, judging the strength of attacks and understanding the Way of the "edge and ridge" of the sword.”

Miyamoto Musashi (1584–1645) Japanese martial artist, writer, artist

Go Rin No Sho (1645), The Fire Book

Life, Death, Way, Understanding

“But no - what’s this? The branch on which he is sitting is weak. That is not all: wood-mice are gnawing away at it: before long they will eat through it and it will snap and fall. The branch sags down over a well. Aha! Escape! Perhaps our hero can swim? But the well is dry and there are snakes writhing and hissing on its bed. As the branch bends lower, he perceives a solitary blade of grass on wall of well. On top of the blade of grass gleams a drop of honey. What is our hero to do? What action does our puranic man quintessential Indian, take in the situation? He bends with the branch and licks up the honey…. What did you expect? Some neat solution to the problem? The tiger changes its mind and goes away? Amitabh Bachchan leaps to the rescue? Don’t be silly. One strength of Indian mind is that it knows some problems cannot be resolved and it learns to make best of them. That is the Indian answer to the insuperable difficulty. One does not fight against that by which one is certain to be overwhelmed; but one finds the best way, for oneself, to live with it. This is our national aesthetic. Without it, india as we know it could not survive.”

Shashi Tharoor book The Great Indian Novel

The Great Indian Novel (1989)

Way, Problem, Grass, Learning

“I finally did not understand if we are living to survive or we are living to die!”

Javad Alizadeh (1953) cartoonist, journalist and humorist

Quoted in Humor & Caricature (February 1995), p. 3

Understanding

“Hinduism can survive modern times if only the people learn to bend with the wind. People will have to find a balance between the new and the old.”

Mark Tully (1935) British journalist

It's Sir Mark Tully in UK honors list, 2001

People, Learning, Time

“The two of them resembled the honeysuckle which clings to the hazel branch: when it has wound itself round and attached itself to the hazel, the two can survive together: but if anyone should then attempt to separate them, the hazel quickly dies, as does the honeysuckle. "Sweet love, so it is with us: without me you cannot survive, nor I without you."”

Marie de France Chevrefoil

D'euls deus fu il tut autresi
Cume del chevrefoil esteit
Ki a la codre se perneit:
Quant il s'i est laciez e pris
Ensemble poënt bien durer;
Mes ki puis les volt deservrer,
Li codres muert hastivement
E li chevrefoil ensement.
"Bele amie, si est de nus:
Ne vus sanz mei, ne mei sanz vus!"
"Chevrefoil", line 74; p. 110.
Lais

Love

“White southerners saw Lincoln as anti-slavery and his election as a direct threat to the survival of the peculiar institution. Are you going to tell me that they were stupid or deluded? Is that any way for white southerners to honor their ancestors, by ridiculing their intelligence? Indeed, Stephen Douglas' decision to accuse Lincoln of embracing racial equality tells us that playing the race, or racism, card in the 1850s was alive and well, because Douglas believed that he would gain political traction among racist Illinois voters, who were white, after all, by associating Lincoln with the cause of black equality. Lincoln's response was thus also an issue of political survival. So was his decision not to publicize his support for limited black suffrage in Louisiana in 1864. He advanced the idea in a private letter, but waited thirteen months until he made his sentiment public, and three days after he made that sentiment public, he fell victim to an assassin's bullet because that assassin could not bear the thought of black equality. Lincoln knew he lived in a racist America, North and South.”

Brooks D. Simpson (1957) American historian

Brooks D. Simpson. "Race and Slavery, North and South: Some Logical Fallacies" https://cwcrossroads.wordpress.com/2011/01/18/race-and-slavery-north-and-south-some-logical-fallacies/#comment-47560 (18 June 2011), Crossroads, WordPress 2010s

Stupidity, Way, Intelligence, Idea

“No business plan survives its first contact with customers.”

Steve Blank (1953) American businessman

Source: The Startup Owner’s Manual (2012), p. 53.

Business

“Why should five hundred or six hundred titled persons govern us, and why should their children govern our children for ever? I invite a reply from the apologists and the admirers of the House of Lords. I invite them to show any ground of reason, or of logic, or of expediency or practical common sense in defence of the institution which has taken the predominant part during the last few days in the politics of our country. There is no defence, and there is no answer, except that the House of Lords…has survived out of the past. It is a lingering relic of a feudal order. It is the remains, the solitary reminder of a state of things and of a balance of forces which has wholly passed away. I challenge the defenders, the backers, and the instigators of the House of Lords—I challenge them to justify and defend before the electors of the country the character and composition of the hereditary assembly.”

Winston S. Churchill (1874–1965) Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

The People's Rights [1909] (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), p. 23
Early career years (1898–1929)

Children, Sense, Past, Parting

“Iron Pillar: “…In our opinion this pillar was made in the ninth century before (the birth of) Lord Jesus… When Rai Pithora built a fort and an idol-house near this pillar, it stood in the courtyard of the idol-house. And when Qutbu’d-Din Aibak constructed a mosque after demolishing the idol-house, this pillar stood in the courtyard of the mosque…
”Idol-house of Rai Pithora: “There was an idol-house near the fort of Rai Pithora. It was very famous… It was built along with the fort in 1200 Bikarmi [Vikrama SaMvat] corresponding to AD 1143 and AH 538. The building of this temple was very unusual, and the work done on it by stone-cutters is such that nothing better can be conceived. The beautiful carvings on every stone in it defy description… The eastern and northern portions of this idol-house have survived intact. The fact that the Iron Pillar, which belongs to the Vaishnava faith, was kept inside it, as also the fact that sculptures of Kirshan avatar and Mahadev and Ganesh and Hanuman were carved on its walls, leads us to believe that this temple belonged to the Vaishnava faith. Although all sculptures were mutilated in the times of Muslims, even so a close scrutiny can identify as to which sculpture was what. In our opinion there was a red-stone building in this idol-house, and it was demolished. For, this sort of old stones with sculptures carved on them are still found.
”Quwwat al-Islam Masjid: “When Qutbu’d-Din, the commander-in-chief of Muizzu’d-Din Sam alias Shihabu’d-Din Ghuri, conquered Delhi in AH 587 corresponding to AD 1191 corresponding to 1248 Bikarmi, this idol-house (of Rai Pithora) was converted into a mosque. The idol was taken out of the temple. Some of the images sculptured on walls or doors or pillars were effaced completely, some were defaced. But the structure of the idol-house kept standing as before. Materials from twenty-seven temples, which were worth five crores and forty lakhs of Dilwals, were used in the mosque, and an inscription giving the date of conquest and his own name was installed on the eastern gate…“When Malwah and Ujjain were conquered by Sultan Shamsu’d-Din in AH 631 corresponding to AD 1233, then the idol-house of Mahakal was demolished and its idols as well as the statue of Raja Bikramajit were brought to Delhi, they were strewn in front of the door of the mosque…”“In books of history, this mosque has been described as Masjid-i-Adinah and Jama‘ Masjid Delhi, but Masjid Quwwat al-Islam is mentioned nowhere. It is not known as to when this name was adopted. Obviously, it seems that when this idol-house was captured, and the mosque constructed, it was named Quwwat al-Islam…””

Syed Ahmed Khan (1820–1898) Indian educator and politician

About antiquities of Delhi. Translated from the Urdu of Asaru’s-Sanadid, edited by Khaleeq Anjum, New Delhi, 1990. Vol. I, p. 305-16
Asaru’s-Sanadid

Books, Faith, Beauty, History

“Dinosaurs are interesting, or confusing, to scientists, I should say, because they have very small nostrils. And small lungs. So they wonder how on earth did they breathe? You know, their lungs are too small, they've got this 80 foot-long body, with tiny nostrils and tiny lungs. Well, today, they probably couldn't survive in our environment, but I think before the flood came, in the days of Noah, the earth had double the atmospheric pressure, and there are several reasons for all of this, and 30% oxygen. And under those conditions the people would certainly live longer, and be healthier.”

Kent Hovind (1953) American young Earth creationist

Coast-to-Coast AM interview (August 2-3, 2000)

People, Thinking

“The easiest way in which one can put unintentional strains on the enemy is to have a force which looks "trigger-happy." The one circumstance under which almost all Soviet experts agree the Russians might strike is the one in which they feel they are anticipating a strike by us. It will be difficult for them to read our intentions. They will doubtless err on the side of caution. But it is not clear which side will look cautious, particularly if there is a crisis which creates apprehension. It will add a real element of stability if our posture is such that we do not look as if we have to be "trigger-happy" in order to survive. This is an important reason for not relying solely on quick reaction as a protection and for not having forces so vulnerable that we could lose most of them from a Russian first strike. Under some circumstances our vulnerability to a Russian first strike would both tempt the Russians to initiate a war and at the same time compel them, because they might feel that we would be tempted to pre empt for our own protection. If we are sufficiently vulnerable they might find it impossible to believe that we were willing, in this crisis to rely on their good will, morality; caution, or sense of responsibility as a protection.”

Herman Kahn (1922–1983) American futurist

The Magnum Opus; On Thermonuclear War

War, Way, Feeling, Sense

“This book is not for the engineer content with hardware, nor for the biologist uneasy outside his specialty; for it depicts that miscegenation of Art and Science which begets inanimate objects that behave like living systems. They regulate themselves and survive: They adapt and they compute: They invent. They co-operate and they compete. Naturally they evolve rapidly.
Pure mathematics, being mere tautology, and pure physics, being mere fact, could not have engendered them; for creatures to live, must sense the useful and the good; and engines to run must have energy available as work : and both, to endure, must regulate themselves. So it is to Thermodynamics and to its brother Σp log p, called Information Theory, that we look for the distinctions between work and energy and between signal and noise.
For like cause we look to reflexology and its brother feedback, christened Multiple Closed Loop Servo Theory, for mechanical explanation of Entelechy in Homeostasis and in appetition. This is that governance, whether in living creatures and their societies or in our living artefacts, that is now called Cybernetics.”

Warren S. McCulloch (1898–1969) American neuroscientist

McCulloch (1961) in: Pask An approach to Cybernetics http://www.pangaro.com/pask/pask%20approach%20to%20cybernetics.pdf. Preface. p. 7

Books, Art, Mathematics, Nature

“It’s not right-wing populism that endangers Jewish survival in Europe and Canada; it’s the influx of Muslims. There’s nothing new in the Jewish leadership’s habit of kibitzing about the dangers to Jewish continuity from marauding Mormons (their sin is to convert dead Jews). Or, from Mel Gibson, whose movie “The Passion of the Christ” was supposed to unleash pogroms in Pittsburgh, as they falsely prophesied.”

Ilana Mercer South African writer

"Islam, Not Trump, Is The Elephant In The Room, Threatening Jewish Survival" https://townhall.com/columnists/ilanamercer/2017/02/23/islam-not-trump-is-the-elephant-in-the-room-threatening-jewish-survival-n2289643 Townhall.com, February 23, 2017 2010s, 2017

Passion, Christ, Falseness, Dead

“The Holocaust was perpetrated by the Nazis for very specific reasons. They saw in the Jews the ultimate enemy, who was behind all the other enemies they had. And the Jews were in their eyes Satan; coming from a Christian background, although anti-Christian, if somebody was Satan you knew what to do with him. Murder him. Kill him. Annihilate him. Ultimately. Perhaps drive him out first. And then finally when this didn't work kill him. And it wasn't really directed against the Jews of country X but against the concept of the Jew. The Jew. Anywhere. Everywhere. At all times. Forever. And that is unique. That has never happened before but it can happen again. The idea of some powerful force that unless it is totally annihilated there's no chance for your survival. That was the Nazi ideology.”

Yehuda Bauer (1926) Israeli historian of the Holocaust

Interview with Michael Dunn (2 June 1993) http://www.remember.org/hist.per.bauer.html.

Idea, Chance, Time, Country

“Birds were flying from continent to continent long before we were. They reached the coldest place on Earth, Antarctica, long before we did. They can survive in the hottest of deserts. Some can remain on the wing for years at a time. They can girdle the globe. Now, we have taken over the earth and the sea and the sky, but with skill and care and knowledge, we can ensure that there is still a place on Earth for birds in all their beauty and variety – if we want to … and surely, we should.”

David Attenborough (1926) British broadcaster and naturalist

Closing lines
The Life of Birds (1998)

Beauty, Knowledge, Bird, Time

“A strong and independent Judiciary is necessary for our republic to remain strong, for our democracy to survive, and for the rule of law to flourish. To understand what I mean by independence, let me first clarify what independence is not. Judicial independence does not mean complete freedom from scrutiny or criticism. Judges' decisions may be criticized, and the nature of the job virtually guarantees it. After all, in every court case there will be a loser. Judges must resist the temptation to craft their opinions to avoid criticism or to seek approval, whether from the press, the public, the academy, or Congress.”

Alberto Gonzales (1955) 80th United States Attorney General

Speech to American Enterprise Institute (January 17, 2007)

Law, Democracy, Understanding, Nature

“It is only through the discovery of History — more precisely by the awakening of the historical consciousness in Judaeo-Christianity and its propagation by Hegel and his successors — it is only through the radical assimilation of the new mode of being represented by human existence in the world that myth could be left behind. But we hesitate to say that mythical thought has been abolished. As we shall soon see, it managed to survive, though radically changed (if not perfectly camouflaged). And the astonishing fact is that, more than anywhere else it survives in historiography!”

Mircea Eliade (1907–1986) Romanian historian of religion, fiction writer and philosopher

Source: Images and Symbols (1952), p. 113.

World, History, Change

“I was always bothered by the idea of hitting a beautiful, living, innocent animal over the head, cutting him up into pieces, then shoving the pieces into my mouth. I finally made my decision to stop eating animals when I came upon a ritual slaughter scene during a visit to Israel. My experiences in the Warsaw Ghetto during the Nazi Holocaust had a profound impact on my subsequent life choices. I felt some guilt that I lived when so many others didn't, and a sense of duty to redeem my survival by assuming their share of responsibility for making this planet a better place to live for all its inhabitants.”

Alex Hershaft (1934) American activist

"Alex Hershaft", in People Promoting and People Opposing Animal Rights: In Their Own Words, ed. John M. Kistler (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002), p. 145 https://books.google.it/books?id=kIgAi6k69IQC&pg=PA145.

Life, Beauty, Idea, Decision

“Trump is going to go under an electron microscope. And everything I know about Donald Trump, and I know a fair bit about him going back to my Jersey days when he was operating in Atlantic City – that’s where I first kind of encountered him – he is one of the least likely people to survive an electron microscope into his life, I believe, and his business life of anybody. So, my instincts are strongly that they are going to find some stuff.”

Mike Murphy (political consultant) (1962) American political consultant

2010s, 2018, Interview with Bill Kristol (2018)

Life, People, Business

“I want to be able to make sure that we have enough capital to survive at least three consecutive failures. If you want to make a small fortune in the launch vehicle business, start with a large one.”

Elon Musk (1971) South African-born American entrepreneur

Conversation: Elon Musk on Wired Science (2007)

Failure, Business

“What are some principles worth living by? Ask a roomful of people, and you will get a roomful of answers. There already exists a code of principles established thousands of years ago and adhered to by people from a variety of religious backgrounds. It has been accepted as a basis for appropriate behavior. Fortunately, no one has copyrighted the Ten Commandments.Although some attempts have been made to prohibit these principles from being displayed, they have survived through the ages. They are the foundation of our laws and commonly accepted codes of human behavior.”

Mike Huckabee (1955) Arkansas politician

[2007-06-01, Character Makes a Difference: Where I'm From, Where I've Been, and What I Believe, B&H Publishing, 9780805446777, 7935510M, 74, http://books.google.com/books?id=Tis1PI_QlecC&pg=PA74]

People, Age, Law, Behavior

“The business virtue par excellence is honesty—without it markets can’t long survive.”

Ted Malloch (1952) American businessman

Source: Doing Virtuous Business (Thomas Nelson, 2011), p. 27.

Business

“The "human rights" advertised by the imperialists are privileges of the rich, privileges to do anything on the strength of money. The imperialists do not recognize the right of unemployed people to work, or the right of orphans or people without support to eat and survive, for instance, as human rights. As they do not grant working people elementary rights to existence and as they pursue anti-popular policies and policies of racial and national discrimination and colonialism, the imperialists have no right to speak about human rights. The imperialists are the most heinous enemy of human rights.”

Kim Jong-il (1941–2011) General Secretary of the Workers' Party of Korea

"Socialism is a Science" http://www.korea-dpr.com/lib/106.pdf, article in Rodong Sinmun (1 November 1994)

Money, People, Support

“Irony deals with opposites; it has nothing to do with coincidence. If two baseball players from the same hometown, on different teams, receive the same uniform number, it is not ironic. It is a coincidence. If Barry Bonds attains lifetime statistics identical to his father's, it will not be ironic. It will be a coincidence. Irony is "a state of affairs that is the reverse of what was to be expected; a result opposite to and in mockery of the appropriate result." For instance: a diabetic, on his way to buy insulin, is killed by a runaway truck. He is the victim of an accident. If the truck was delivering sugar, he is the victim of an oddly poetic coincidence. But if the truck was delivering insulin, ah! Then he is the victim of an irony. If a Kurd, after surviving bloody battle with Saddam Hussein's army and a long, difficult escape through the mountains, is crushed and killed by a parachute drop of humanitarian aid, that, my friend, is irony writ large. Darryl Stingley, the pro football player, was paralyzed after a brutal hit by Jack Tatum. Now Darryl Stingley's son plays football, and if the son should become paralyzed while playing, it will not be ironic. It will be coincidental. If Darryl Stingley's son paralyzes someone else, that will be closer to ironic. If he paralyzes Jack Tatum's son, that will be precisely ironic.”

George Carlin (1937–2008) American stand-up comedian

Books, Brain Droppings (1997)

Way, Mountain, Football

“When [Jagged Little Pill] came out, I feel like I immediately went into survival mode to keep the 'overwhelm' that comes from being famous at bay. Ten years later, I have the luxury of time and distance to formally honor it.”

Alanis Morissette (1974) Canadian-American singer-songwriter

"Ten Years On, Alanis Unplugs Little Pill" by Melinda Newman in Billboard (4 March 2005) http://www.billboard.com/bbcom/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1000827178

Feeling, Time

“We are men and women from many lands, representing a rich variety of cultures. And we have been brought together to work in a great common cause: the survival and progress of mankind. The concept of unity in diversity … underlies our various pursuits at the United Nations.”

Kurt Waldheim (1918–2007) 4th Secretary-General of the United Nations, President of Austria

World-service speech http://www.srichinmoylibrary.com/stsg-8, 1978

Women, Men

“The effective decisions can only be made by the independently thinking and adequately informed human individuals and their telepathically intercommunicated wisdom--the wisdom of the majority of all such human individuals--qualifying for continuance in Universe as local cosmic problem-solvers--in love with the truth and in individually spontaneous self-commitment to absolute faith in the wisdom, integrity, and love of God, who seems to wish Earthian humans to survive.”

Buckminster Fuller (1895–1983) American architect, systems theorist, author, designer, inventor and futurist

From 1980s onwards, Critical Path (1981)

Love, Wisdom, God, Truth

“… nothing was easy, least of all surviving Sunday afternoons without love.”

Gabriel García Márquez book Living to Tell the Tale

Living to Tell the Tale (2002)

Love

“But my friends, my brothers and sisters of the Pacific, we know who we are. We carry in our hearts the knowledge that we are the bearers of a proud legacy that surely marks us as people of strength, and courage and will. We have survived in our aquatic continent through many centuries.”

Kamisese Mara (1920–2004) President of Fiji

Opening address, Pacific Vision festival, Auckland, New Zealand (26 July 1999) http://www.minpac.govt.nz/resources/reference/pvdocs/opening/mara.php.

People, Courage, Knowledge, Sister

“What we’re after is to remind ourselves that we didn’t come to Anarres for safety, but for freedom. If we must all agree, all work together, we’re no better than a machine. If an individual can’t work in solidarity with his fellows, it’s his duty to work alone. His duty and his right. We have been denying people that right. We’ve been saying, more and more often, you must work with the others, you must accept the rule of the majority. But any rule is tyranny. The duty of the individual is to accept no rule, to be the initiator of his own acts, to be responsible. Only if he does so will the society live, and change, and adapt, and survive. We are not subjects of a State founded upon law, but members of a society founded upon revolution. Revolution is our obligation: our hope of evolution.”

Ursula K. Le Guin Hainish Cycle

Source: Hainish Cycle, (1974), Chapter 12 (p. 359)

People, Law, Hope, Freedom

“The self that does not survive scrutiny is the subject of experience in each present moment—the feeling of being a thinker of thoughts inside one's head, the sense of being an owner or inhabitant of a physical body, which this false self seems to appropriate as a kind of vehicle. Even if you don't believe such a homunculus exists—perhaps because you believe, on the basis of science, that you are identical to your body and brain rather than a ghostly resident therein—you almost certainly feel like an internal self in almost every waking moment. And yet, however one looks for it, this self is nowhere to be found. It cannot be seen amid the particulars of experience, and it cannot be seen when experience itself is viewed as a totality. However, its absence can be found—and when it is, the feeling of being a self disappears.”

Sam Harris (1967) American author, philosopher and neuroscientist

Source: 2010s, Waking Up (2014), p. 92

Feeling, Sense, Science, Falseness

“Eons and unimaginable eons ago, before mankind existed on earth, only the waters existed. There was no land. And from the slime there sprang up a race of beings which dwelt in the sunken abysses of the ocean, inhuman creatures that worshipped Dagon, their god. When eventually the waters receded and great continents arose, these beings were driven down to the lowest depths. Their mighty kingdom, that had once stretched from pole to pole, was shrunken as the huge land masses lifted. Mankind came — but from whence I do not know — and civilizations arose. … These things hate man, for they feel that man has usurped their kingdom. Their greatest hope is to sink the continents again, so that the seas will roll over all the earth, and not a human being will survive. Their power will embrace the whole world, as it once did eons ago. They are not human, you see, and they worship Dagon. They want no other gods worshipped on Earth. Ishtar, dark Eblis, even Poseidon of the sunlit seas....”

Henry Kuttner (1915–1958) American author

Short fiction, The Spawn Of Dagon (1938)

God, Hate, World, Hope

“Traditional organizational theories have tended to view the human organization as a closed system. This tendency has led to a disregard of differing organizational environments and the nature of organizational dependency on environment. It has led also to an over-concentration on principles of internal organizational functioning, with consequent failure to develop and understand the processes of feedback which are essential to survival.”

Daniel Katz (1903–1998) American psychologist

Source: The Social Psychology of Organizations (1966), p. 34

Failure, Understanding, Nature, Dependency

“We need a reserve of life, every kind of life,” he explained. “Today for the spirit—a glimpse of space and green. Tomorrow for survival, flat-out survival.”

Poul Anderson book There Will Be Time

Source: There Will Be Time (1972), Chapter 5 (p. 53)

Life

“Many formal organizational structures arise as reflections of rationalized institutional rules. The elaboration of such rules in modern states and societies accounts in part for the expansion and increased complexity of formal organizational structures. Institutional rules function as myths which organizations incorporate, gaining legitimacy, resources, stability, and enhanced survival prospects. Organizations whose structures become isomorphic with the myths of the institutional environment-in contrast with those primarily structured by the demands of technical production and exchange-decrease internal coordination and control in order to maintain legitimacy. Structures are decoupled from each other and from ongoing activities. In place of coordination, inspection, and evaluation, a logic of confidence and good faith is employed.”

John W. Meyer (1935) Sociologist and professor at Stanford University

Meyer, John W., and Brian Rowan. " Institutionalized organizations: Formal structure as myth and ceremony http://www.sasse.se/akademiska/310/meyer%20rowan.pdf." American journal of sociology (1977): 340-363.

Faith, Confidence, Parting

Quotes about survival page 11

Quotes about survival
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