Survival Quotes

“How many times can a man go down and still be alive?”

“This is the emotional thing, you see - you must galvanize people, so they want to be completely alive and live forever, or the next thing to it. And out of that comes art, then, and survival through emotion.”

“If I was ever a rare fine summer person, that's long ago. Most of us are half-and-half. The August noon in us works to stave off the November chills. We survive by what little Fourth of July wits we've stashed away. But there are times when we're all autumn people.”

“When at last in a race a new principle appears, an idea--that conserves it; ideas only save races.”

“No art ever survived censorship; no art ever will.”

“...We're allotted a little space on earth and that we survive in that wilderness that can take back what it has given, as easily as blowing its breath on us or sending the sea to tell us we are not so big. When we forget how close the wilderness is in the night, my grandpa said, someday it will come in and get us, for we will have forgotten how terrible and real it can be.”

“The ability to "fantasize" is the ability to survive. It's wonderful to speak about this subject because there have been so many wrong-headed people dealing with it.... The so-called realists are trying to drive us insane, and I refuse to be driven insane.... We survive by fantasizing. Take that away from us and the whole damned human race goes down the drain.”

“(Waste = Loss): The first rule of business is to survive and the guiding principle of business economics is not the maximisation of profit, it is the avoidance of loss”

“Every organization must be prepared to abandon everything it does to survive in the future.”

“Nature has made up her mind that what cannot defend itself shall not be defended.”

“The large organization has to learn to innovate, or it won't survive.”

“People are inexterminable - like flies and bed-bugs. There will always be some that survive in cracks and crevices - that's us.”

“We have our Arts so we won't die of Truth.”

“To survive and succeed, every organization will have to turn itself into a change agent”

“The enterprise that does not innovate ages and declines. And in a period of rapid change such as the present, the decline will be fast.”

“It was only the other night everything was fine and the next thing I know Im drowning. How many times can a man go down and still be alive? I can't breathe”

“The finest poems of the world have been expedients to get bread.”

“The fundamental desire of life is the desire to exist.”

“An established company which, in an age demanding innovation, is not able to innovation, is doomed to decline and extinction.”

“Elephants have a hard time adapting. Cockroaches outlive everything.”

“Change is the norm; unless an organization sees that its task is to lead change, that organization will not survive.”

“Not to innovate is the single largest reason for the decline of existing organizations. Not to know how to manage is the single largest reason for the failure of new ventures.”

“We no longer have a choice between violence and non-violence. The choice of today stands between nonviolence or non-existence.”

“As for modern journalism, it is not my business to defend it. It justifies its own existence by the great Darwinian principle of the survival of the vulgarest.”

“During periods of discontinuous, abrupt change, the essence of adaptation involves a keen sensitivity to what should be abandoned - not what should be changed or introduced. A willingness to depart from the familiar has distinct survival value.”