Survival Quotes

People who have so much of their personality invested in the Internet can’t really survive as whole individuals without it.

~ Mark A. Rayner

The enemy is anybody who's going to get you killed, no matter which side he is on.

~ Joseph Heller

The law of evolution is that the strongest survives!' 'Yes, and the strongest, in the existence of any social species, are those who are most social. In human terms, most ethical...There is no strength to be gained from hurting one another. Only weakness.

~ Ursula K. Le Guin

I will give you a few guarantees of my own, Mukthar. I guarantee that before the sun sets, even if you win, even if my cold, dead body is lying on the field, you will rue the day you ever set foot in the Plains. For every inch you advance I'll exact gallons of Mukthar blood. I guarantee that there will be not one family of the Bear Mukthars or they will mourn at least one of theirs. I guarantee that even if you are triumphant the fruits of victory will taste like dust in your mouth. I guarantee that if you fail to kill me today, you will meet me again. You will meet me at the Ximerionian border. You will meet me at every city, town, village, and hamlet. You will meet me on every Amirathan crossroad, on every hill. I will fight you with every sword at my command, with every arrow, with every dagger. I will fight you with pitchforks. I will fight you with the very rocks of the land you try to conquer. I will never, never, never gi

~ Andrew Ashling

For no matter how many battles had been won or lost, no matter how many friends and soldiers killed, every battle felt like the first. And I realized that it wasn't the training, nor the pain of seeing friends die, nor the will to win that made the men fight, but their will to survive that made them soldiers.

~ Magus Guidan

Soldiers manage by dividing themselves. They're one man in the killing, another at home, and the man that dandles his bairn on his knee has nothing to do wi' the man who crushed his enemy's throat with his boot, so he tells himself, sometimes successfully.

~ Diana Gabaldon

That's what any committed patriot would do: Fight to the last. Defeat your enemy at any cost, then hope you have enough left to rebuild.

~ Randolph D. Calverhall

Aside from clinically-diagnosed psychopaths, I have not met one person in war who thoroughly enjoyed killing. If someone ended up bragging over a kill, it was safe to assume that their story was mere fabrication or that they were one bad day away from an inpatient psychiatric ward. No matter how much someone may appear to deserve to be killed, something dies within us when we kill. It's contradictory, the antithesis of our species survival instinct.

~ M.b. Dallocchio

A woman in combat? Yes. Since when? Since Native American warrior Buffalo Calf Road Woman knocked that prick General George Custer off of his horse. Since Pantea Arteshbod propelled herself to become one of the greatest Persian commanders during the reign of Cyrus the Great. Since Hua Mulan disguised herself as a male to engage in combat and became one of China’s most respected heroines.

~ M.b. Dallocchio

To stay alive, you have to keep moving. Running, relocating, driving, doing everything in your power to stay in motion and make it to safety.

~ M.b. Dallocchio

A moving target is harder to kill, and I didn't stop running, maneuvering, until I reached home base, where I could breathe between death-defying sprints. I just need to make it home alive, and this will all be over, I told myself. Home.

~ M.b. Dallocchio

You can keep your paper promisesand all your worldly treasures.But you cannot buy peace of mindor escape from the headstone garden.Lyrics from Headstone Garden by the Troubled Land Band at the Independence Day celebration 12 years after the impact that destroyed civilization.

~ Raymond Dean White

Military men say that troops can stand twenty percent losses; more than that, they go to pieces. But we had many an outfit with only twenty percent survivors and they went on fighting.

~ Upton Sinclair

He doesn't trust people because he knows they are all the same. Everyone cares about their own survival and nothing else, just like him. Since he is more than willing to kill for it, so are they. After all, he has endured through all these years, leading him to be alone, it was the only conclusion that made sense.

~ Joe Reyes

Your people sell the weapons. My people use them.

~ Henry V. O'neil

For Achilles, the death of Patroclus pushed him into a fury, but it was not only grief that drove him. It was also a sense of shame and guilt because he had not been there to protect his friend. Sometimes men in combat feel this sort of survivor’s guilt even though, realistically, they could have done nothing to prevent their comrade’s death.

~ Nel Noddings

Surviving makes other people’s tears unbearable. You might drown in them.

~ Marceline Loridan-Ivens

Lewis exasperated her, always talking about life before the Plague and how it would be if everything was different. He was a dreamer. “It would be nice, but it’s not gonna happen, Lewis. You shouldn’t spout off talk like that, giving false hope to people. It’d be better if they focused on surviving. It’s more important than some silly dream.” “But Alice, dreams are how people get by in a place like this,” Lewis countered. His freckles faded with his smile. “We gotta find somethin’ to hold onto, else we’ll all go mad.

~ J.m. Sullivan

Along my journey I have seen the horrors that humans can inflict on one another, but I've also witnessed acts of tenderness and kindness and sacrifice in the worst imaginable circumstances. I know that it is possible to lose part of your humanity in order to survive. But I also know that the spark of human dignity is never completely extinguished, and that given the oxygen of freedom and the power of love, it can grow again.

~ Yeonmi Park

There are moment of sadness and moment of joy. This is life.

~ Beth Cohen

Man must be free or he will not survive.

~ John Kramer

There are a wide variety of freedoms; whether if it's to break away from drug addiction or government suppression. On a general scale, the one element all these types of freedoms share is the need to survive - however that may be.

~ Lauren Lola

Every revolution starts with the aim to help the poor, but when the poor get it they forget who they were and become the new oppressors. The cycle goes on forever

~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

We are evolving beyond the need for instinctual survival. No longer do we need to rely on our instincts of fight or flight, because our stresses today are not life-threatening. We have the recourse to remain at peace and in tune with the Universe. No longer do we need to be blinded by our impulsive human behaviors and reactions. We are coming to a time of transcendence in which we can choose to unplug ourselves from our predictable reactions and create a new future. Right now, our futures are easily calculable by those who understand the formula for humanity. Yet, what is missing from the formula is humanity’s ability to awaken and begin to truly exercise free will.

~ Alaric Hutchinson

The greatest thieves are not caught. Not because it’s not known that they are thieves but because you cannot accuse them of robbery and live. These thieves are praised as national heroes and liberators or as successful entrepreneurs.

~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

We have always trusted the control of our doomsday devices to the “key” elected of our nations.The current “interests” reorganizing the world now transcend the interests of nations.So these weapons will only be launched to serve interests other than that of the nations that launch them,Hence the “key” elected…

~ Haroutioun Bochnakian

Politicians know it's a game of power, every politician at every level, even in the common of mortals.

~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

Nothing is sweeter and addictive than power, the unlucky soul this demon possesses, if he is not sacrificed on its altar will sacrifice others himself to get it

~ Bangambiki Habyarimana

Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference - those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are black, who are older - know that survival is not an academic skill...For the master's tools will not dismantle the master's house. They will never allow us to bring about genuine change.

~ Audre Lorde

The secret to being a rider in the hippodrome wasn't just that you must be agile, or that you must be good with horses, or that you must be strong and steady as the horse careens to the far end of the arena and back with you riding on its back. It was that you must hide inside your costume a little of a killer's heart.The animal will be tender with you, and you with it, but the animal never forgets that when what it wants for survival requires your death, it will become unafraid to kill you. And so you cannot forget this, either.It is, on reflection, good training to be a courtesan. A woman of any kind.

~ Alexander Chee

it's telling yourself that you want the things that society tells you you should want. women thikn that survival depends on conformity. but for some women, conformity is death. it's a death to the soul. the soul, she said, is a precious thing. when you live a lie, you damage the soul.

~ Candace Bushnell

No one can tell what goes on in between the person you were and the person you become. No one can chart that blue and lonely section of hell. There are no maps of the change. You just come out the other side.Or you don't.

~ Stephen King

Cultural survival is not about preservation, sequestering indigenous peoples in enclaves like some sort of zoological specimens. Change itself does note destroy a culture. All societies are constantly evolving. Indeed a culture survives when it has enough confidence in its past and enough say in its future to maintain its spirit and essence through all the changes it will inevitably undergo.

~ Wade Davis

Change is part of life. Civilizations rise and fall, the tides wax and wane, the planet undergoes periods of climatic revolution, the young grow up, and the old die. What will come is that what shall be. Survival as individuals and as a species demands fluidity of human thought and the demonstrated ability, temperament, and perseverance to change.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

Pain is essential for survival, pain is the tangible material that creeps into our mind and screams at us to recognize that something is terribly wrong.

~ Kilroy J. Oldster

To deny the battle is unwise. To believe that I can fight it without God is insane. To actually do so is suicidal. No wonder so many of us walk around looking like death warmed over.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

Soul work is the 'more' that we need to do to heal our souls.Soul retrieval is one more step toward balance and wholeness. The trauma of major illness, death, financial devastation, abuse, terror, and other stressors in our lives will not cease while we live and breathe. But, knowing they can rob us of our soul allows us to address those loses before or as they occur, so that we do not have to struggle to survive without that which makes us who we are.

~ Barbara Lieberman

The spirit and soul are the body and brain, which are destructible-that is precisely why they are so precious.

~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

For the human soul is virtually indestructible, and its ability to rise from the ashes remains as long as the body draws breath.

~ Alice Miller

It starts off like climbing a tree or solving a puzzle - poetry, if nothing else, is just fun to write. But deeper into each and every piece, you no longer hesitate to call it work. It's passion. A poet's sense of lyrical accomplishment is then his food and water, his means of survival.

~ Criss Jami