Quotes about Survival

As Solzhenitsyn elegantly expressed it in his classic One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, faith in God may not get you out of the camp, but it is enough to see you through each day.

Israel is the only country in the world targeted for annihilation.

A society can survive bad donkey drivers. But it cannot survive contempt for truth—whether inside or outside a courtroom.

But the human being is a social creature. We don't merely want companionship, we need it to survive.

So too I would say we South Africans will survive and prevail only together, black and white bound together by circumstance and history as we strive to claw our way out of the morass that was apartheid racism. Up and out together, black and white together. Neither group on its own could or would make it. God had bound us, manacled us, together. In a way it was to live out what Martin Luther King, Jr., had said, "Unless we learn to live together as brothers [and sisters]".

Our first responsibility in the midst of violence is to prevent it from destroying us.

Auschwitz stands as a tragic reminder of the terrible potential man has for violence and inhumanity.

And as he went, he sang, saying-- Well, Faithful, thou hast faithfully profest Unto thy Lord; with whom thou shalt be blest, When faithless ones, with all their vain delights, Are crying out under their hellish plights: Sing, Faithful, sing, and let thy name survive; For though they kill'd thee, thou art yet alive!

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art, like the universe itself (for God did not need to create). It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival.

Living never wore one out so much as the effort not to live.

When I was young I lost everything.

It's no wonder I hid from the world. It's no wonder parties made me tired or I got exhausted after I spoke. It's no wonder criticism made me angry or I overreacted to failure. I think the part of me I sent out to interact with the world was, in some ways, underdeveloped, still trying to be bigger and smarter as a measure of survival.