Survival Machine Quotes

An itinerant selfish gene/ Said 'bodies a- plenty I've seen./ You think you're so clever/ But I'll live for ever./ You're just a survival machine. ~ Richard Dawkins

Prediction in a complex world is a chancy business. Every decision that a survival machine takes is a gamble, and it is the business of genes to program brains in advance so that on average they take decisions that pay off. The currency used in the casino of evolution is survival, strictly gene survival, but for many purposes individual survival is a reasonable approximation. ~ Richard Dawkins

Dualities and polarities are the clouds of your mind. Come out of the negative thought patterns. Come out of the survival machine. Time to time you need stop the thinking machine, and get in touch with the eternity - the state of the 'no-mind'  - the state of the pure being ~ Amit Ray

Listen to the customer's complaint and act fast. ~ Richard Branson

Winston worked in the RECORDS DEPARTMENT (a single branch of the Ministry of Truth) editing and writing for The Times. He dictated into a machine called a Speakwrite. Winston would receive articles or news-items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to alter, or, in Newspeak, rectify. If, for example, the Ministry of Plenty forecast a surplus, and in reality the result was grossly less, Winston's job was to change previous versions so the old version would agree with the new one. ~ George Orwell

I love being white. Seriously, I really do. If you're not white, your missing out. 'Cuz this shit is thoroughly good. Let me clear this up by the way: I'm not saying white people are better. I'm saying that BEING white is clearly better. Who could even argue? If it was an option I would re-up every year! 'Oh yeah, I'll take white again. Absolutely.' Here's how great it is to be white: if I would have a time machine I could go to any time and it would be awesome when I get there! That is exclusively a white privilege! Black people can't fuck with time machines! . ~ Louis C.K.

The human body is an incredible machine, but most people only get out of that machine what their mind allows them to. ~ Rich Froning Jr.

Bandit or demon, human or beast, none of it made any difference. The bandits had made this a situation of predators and prey. Only living mattered. Everything else was nothing more than an afterthought. ~ Drew Hayes

A writer from ESPN magazine once described me as the world's largest eleven-year-old. That's true. I ride my Sea-Doo jet ski, play putt-putt golf, go to water parks, and act silly. On the bottom floor of my house in Beverly Hills, I have video games, a pool table, a Pepsi machine, and all the things they have in arcades. I drive go-karts, at least the ones I can fit in. I karate-chop my friends when they come over, like the Kato dude in the Pink Panther movies. ~ Shaquille O'Neal

Taking a risk to survive isn't that impressive. Taking a risk to be happy, that takes guts. ~ Sarah Noffke

We're in this together, and if we united and we inter-culturally cooperated, then that might be the key to humanity's survival. ~ Jeremy Gilley

What is the task of higher education? To make a man into a machine. What are the means employed? He is taught how to suffer being bored. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Humans are not the fastest or the strongest animals on the planet, but when it comes to survival, we have had the unique advantage of being clever. ~ David Perlmutter

...the fact that there's a lot you have to blank out if you want to get through life... ~ Lucy Ellmann

I want to go to sleep in my time machine and wake up eight hours in the future. ~ Jarod Kintz

If my survival caused another to perish, then death would be sweeter and more beloved. ~ Kahlil Gibran

There is a story in the book Night Shift, called 'The Mangler,' about a laundry machine that takes on a sort of malignant life. I worked in a laundry for about a year and a half after I got out of college. It was the only job I could find to support my wife and our first child. There was a fellow there that had no hands or forearms. He simply had hooks. This is one of the things that they don't tell you about when you become management. You have to wear a tie. It was this fellow's tie that did him in. ~ Stephen King

It's a law of survival, isn't it? - to seek the best. I didn't come for your sake. I came for mine. ~ Ayn Rand

I want to keep my dreams, even bad ones, because without them, I might have nothing all night long. ~ Joseph Heller

The business card does not fully reflect who we are. We are being judged, we feel, in a humiliating way. We feel there is so much in us that has not got an expression in capitalism. You know, capitalism is a machine that recognizes outward financial, external achievement. And most of us carry all kinds of richness which we are unable to translate into that language. ~ Alain De Botton

Withdrawing. If you do this, a lot of people will call you a 'defeatist' or a 'doomer', or claim you are 'burned out'. They will tell you that you have an obligation to work for climate justice or world peace or the end of bad things everywhere, and that 'fighting' is always better than 'quitting'. Ignore them, and take part in a very ancient practical and spiritual tradition: withdrawing from the fray. Withdraw not with cynicism, but with a questing mind. Withdraw so that you can allow yourself to sit back quietly and feel – intuit – work out what is right for you, and what nature might need from you. Withdraw because refusing to help the machine advance – refusing to tighten the ratchet further – is a deeply moral position. Withdraw because action is not always more effective than inaction. Withdraw to examine your worldview: the cosmology, the paradigm, the assumptions, the direction of travel. All real change starts with withdrawal. ~ Paul Kingsnorth

Max, Hans, and Rosa I cannot account for, but I know that Liesel Meminger was thinking that if the bombs ever landed on Himmel Street, not only did Max have less chance of survival than everyone else, but he would die completely alone. ~ Markus Zusak

My own fault. The equipment had safeties but your primary piece of protective equipment was your brain. There was a presumption that anyone entering this room was intelligent enough to keep away from hot things, sharp things, and things carrying large stores of momentum. ~ Max Barry

I also came across the word neoteny, which means "remaining young." It's something which we as humans have developed into a survival trait. Other animals, when they are young, have a curiosity about the world, a flexibility of response, and an ability to play which they lose as they grow up. As a species we have retained it. As a species, we are forever sticking our fingers into the electric socket of the universe to see what will happen next. It is a trait that will either save us or kill us, but it is what makes us human beings. I would rather be in the company of people who look at Mars than people who contemplate humanity's navel - other worlds are better than fluff. ~ Anonymous

Notwithstanding the extravagance of some of their characters, these nineteenth-century novelists describe a world in which inequality was to a certain extent necessary: if there had not been a sufficiently wealthy minority, no one would have been able to worry about anything other than survival. This view of inequality deserves credit for not describing itself as meritocratic, if nothing else. In a sense, a minority was chosen to live on behalf of everyone else, but no one tried to pretend that this minority was more meritorious or virtuous than the rest. … Modern meritocratic society, especially in the United States, is much harder on the losers, because it seeks to justify domination on the ground of justice, virtue, and merit, to say nothing of the insufficient productivity of those at the bottom. ~ Thomas Piketty

She had known it all the time: I'm so enormously exhausted, so utterly, basically tired, and in fibre of myself, that to know I haven't got to go through with living is like a reprieve. How extraordinary! And every one of these people, with the possible exception of this exuberant young man, is terrified that the machine is going to crash, and yet we all trooped obediently into it. So perhaps we all feel the same way? ~ Doris Lessing

How Evolution Came to Indiana


In Indianapolis they drive
five hundred miles and end up
where they started: survival
of the fittest. In the swamps
of Auburn and Elkhart,
in the jungles of South Bend,
one-cylinder chain-driven runabouts fall
to air-cooled V-4's, a-speed gearboxes,
16-horse flat-twin midships engines -
carcasses left behind
by monobloc motors, electric starters,
3-speed gears, six cylinders, 2-chain drive,
overhead cams, supercharged
to 88 miles an hour in second gear, the age
of Leviathan ...
There is grandeur in this view of life,
as endless forms
most beautiful and wonderful
are being evolved.
And then
the drying up, the panic,
the monsters dying: Elcar, Cord,
Auburn, Duesenberg, Stutz - somewhere
out there, the chassis of Studebakers,
Marmons, Lafayettes, Bendixes, all
rusting in high-octane smog,
ashes to ashes, they
end up where they started. ~ Philip Appleman

Utopian speculations ... must come back into fashion. They are a way of affirming faith in the possibility of solving problems that seem at the moment insoluble. Today even the survival of humanity is a utopian hope. ~ Norman O. Brown

We'd stared into the face of Death, and Death blinked first. You'd think that would make us feel brave and invincible. It didn't. ~ Rick Yancey

According to the mate, there were three main jobs that needed to be done to ensure their survival. ~ Gordon Korman

The arbitrariness of the revolutionaries is terrible not because they're villains, but because it's a mechanism out of control, like a machine that's gone off the rails. ~ Boris Pasternak

Nearly losing my life made me want to live my life. ~ Rahm Emanuel

This suntan lotion acts as an accelerator and an extender, meaning that this fire will burn brighter and longer. ~ Joe Teti

The fantastical idea of virtue and the public good being a sufficient security to the state against the commission of crimes...was never mine. It is only the sanguinary hue of our penal laws which I meant to object to. Punishments I know are necessary, and I would provide them strict and inflexible, but proportioned to the crime. Death might be inflicted for murder and perhaps for treason, [but I] would take out of the description of treason all crimes which are not such in their nature. Rape, buggery, etc., punish by castration. All other crimes by working on high roads, rivers, gallies, etc., a certain time proportioned to the offence... Laws thus proportionate and mild should never be dispensed with. Let mercy be the character of the lawgiver, but let the judge be a mere machine. The mercies of the law will be dispensed equally and impartially to every description of men; those of the judge or of the executive power will be the eccentric impulses of whimsical, capricious designing man. ~ Thomas Jefferson

I know there are some people out there
who think I am supposed to end up
in a room by myself

with a gun and a bottle full of hate,
a locked door and my slack mouth open
like a disconnected phone.

But I hate those people back
from the core of my donkey soul
and the hatred makes me strong
and my survival is their failure,

and my happiness would kill them
so I shove joy like a knife
into my own heart over and over

and I force myself toward pleasure,
and I love this November life
where I run like a train
deeper and deeper
into the land of my enemies. ~ Tony Hoagland

Was humanity, or even life itself, that significant in the grand scheme of things? Wasn't humanity's survival directly related to nature's decline? ~ M.R. Mathias

I'm glad you still have your survival instinct."

"We've all got something." I lift my fingertips to the exposed skin on my face. It's colder than the night sea. Cupping my hands, I blow into them, let my breath warm my nose and cheeks. "I apparently still have a face, which is good."

Holden vaults up onto the wooden platform and I step up after him. "That is good," he says, pulling me in close. He lifts his gloved hands to my cheeks. "After all, this is one of my favorite faces."

I scrunch my lips into a pretend pout. "One of?"

He grins. "Well, you know. I'm a sucker for the classics. Helen of Troy, the Mona Lisa, that - "

"Hey. The Mona Lisa isn't even hot." I give him a little shove away from me, toward the edge of the platform.

"Disagree," Holden says. "She's beautiful in her own way. That mischievous smile, those dark, soulful eyes, the way she - "

"Fine, whatever." I cross my arms. "But I insist on being ranked above her."

"Okay, okay," Holden says. "Yours can be my second-favorite face . . . right after that guy from The Scream." He pulls me in close again.

"You're such an ass," I say, as our lips touch.

Holden laughs. "My girl Mona Lisa would never be so rude. ~ Paula Stokes

Feminism is a tremendously underestimated force, viewed in the present context primarily as a woman's concern. The understanding has not yet percolated throughout society that the advancement of women is a program vitally connected to the survival of human beings as a species. The reason for this is simply that institutions take on the character of the atoms which compose them, and what we are most menaced by in the twentieth century are dehumanized institutions. If women played a major role in policy formation and execution on the part of these institutions, I think they would have a far more benign and ecologically sensitive kind of character. So I see feminism not as a kind of war between the sexes or any of these stereotypic images, but as actually a kind of effort to shift the ratios of our emphasis that is expressed through our institutions. ~ Terence McKenna