Survival Of The Fittest Quotes

“It is not the strongest or the most intelligent who will survive but those who can best manage change.”
― Leon C. Megginson

“The weak die out and the strong will survive, and will live on forever”
― Anne Frank, The Diary of Anne Frank

“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

“Survivors aren't always the strongest; sometimes they're the smartest, but more often simply the luckiest.”
― Carrie Ryan, The Dark and Hollow Places

“Institutionalized rejection of difference is an absolute necessity in a profit economy which needs outsiders as surplus people.”
― Audre Lorde

“He was a killer, a thing that preyed, living on the things that lived, unaided, alone, by virtue of his own strength and prowess, surviving triumphantly in a hostile environment where only the strong survive.”
― Jack London, The Call of the Wild

“With savages, the weak in body or mind are soon eliminated; and those that survive commonly exhibit a vigorous state of health. We civilised men, on the other hand, do our utmost to check the process of elimination; we build asylums for the imbecile, the maimed, and the sick; we institute poor-laws; and our medical men exert their utmost skill to save the life of every one to the last moment. There is reason to believe that vaccination has preserved thousands, who from a weak constitution would formerly have succumbed to small-pox. Thus the weak members of civilised societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly any one is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.

The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, if so urged by hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with a certain and great present evil. Hence we must bear without complaining the undoubtedly bad effects of the weak surviving and propagating their kind; but there appears to be at least one check in steady action, namely the weaker and inferior members of society not marrying so freely as the sound; and this check might be indefinitely increased, though this is more to be hoped for than expected, by the weak in body or mind refraining from marriage.”
― Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man

“The very comprehensibility of the world points to an intelligence behind the world. Indeed, science would be impossible if our intelligence were not adapted to the intelligibility of the world. The match between our intelligence and the intelligibility of the world is no accident. Nor can it properly be attributed to natural selection, which places a premium on survival and reproduction and has no stake in truth or conscious thought. Indeed, meat-puppet robots are just fine as the output of a Darwinian evolutionary process.”
― William A. Dembski, The Design Revolution: Answering the Toughest Questions About Intelligent Design

“There was no such thing as a fair fight. All vulnerabilities must be exploited.”
― Cary Caffrey

“The spirit finds a way to be born.
Instinct seeks for ways to survive.”
― Toba Beta, Betelgeuse Incident: Insiden Bait Al-Jauza

“If theft is advantageous to everyone who succeeds at it, and adultery is a good strategy, at least for males, for increasing presence in the gene pool, why do we feel they are wrong? Shouldn't the only morality that evolution produces be the kind Bill Clinton had - being sorry you got caught?”
― Robert J. Sawyer, Calculating God

“My firm conviction is that if wide-spread Eugenic reforms are not adopted during the next hundred years or so, our Western Civilization is inevitably destined to such a slow and gradual decay as that which has been experienced in the past by every great ancient civilization. The size and the importance of the United States throws on you a special responsibility in your endeavours to safeguard the future of our race. Those who are attending your Congress will be aiding in this endeavour, and though you will gain no thanks from your own generation, posterity will, I believe, learn to realize the great dept it owes to all the workers in this field.”
― Leonard Darwin

“We are all in the middle of nature beauty contest.”
― Toba Beta, My Ancestor Was an Ancient Astronaut

“If anyone rises to power, it's not only because he could, but also because the stars were aligned in his favor. Many with apparent means to take it failed simply because they weren't destined for the honor”
― Bangambiki Habyarimana, Pearls Of Eternity

“Civilization is much more than the survival of the fittest and the unrelenting culling of the weakest members. Civilized people share a value system that extends far beyond doing whatever it takes to survive. Mere barbarians might be devoted to a life of exploitation. In contrast, civilized people value nature and care for the most vulnerable members of their kind.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“For Homo sapiens has rewritten the rules of the game. This single ape species has managed within 70,000 years to change the global ecosystem in radical and unprecedented ways. Our impact is already on a par with that of ice ages and tectonic movements. Within a century, our impact may surpass that of the asteroid that killed off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.”
― Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow

“The survival of the fittest instinct should end with our generation. We have evolved to grow out of it. There are enough resources out there for us not to kill someone over them.”
― Rajesh`, Random Cosmos

“Social Darwinism, or the idea that those who are the best and smartest earn the most money, has two holes: first, not all intelligent people opt to chase the money wagon and second, most morons are greedy, and many of them succeed through luck or persistence.”
― Brett Stevens, Nihilism: A Philosophy Based In Nothingness And Eternity

“The survival of the fittest is the ageless law of nature, but the fittest are rarely the strong. The fittest are those endowed with the qualifications for adaptation, the ability to accept the inevitable and conform to the unavoidable, to harmonize with existing or changing conditions.”
― Dave Smalley

“Survival of the fittest," which Sax had always considered a useless tautology. But if social Darwinists were taking over, then maybe the concept gained importance, as a religious dogma of the ruling order....”
― Kim Stanley Robinson, Green Mars

“Tig would have fit on that plane just fine. Tig, Art, Takis, these anomalous, scrappy survivors, might be the lucky ones. They ate less and took up less space: the humans of the future.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Unsheltered

“...As Joe walked back to them, he heard the cow elk gurgle and settle into the grass on top of her calf.

"This is what wolves do," Joe said, his voice calm, a betrayal of what he felt. "I'm not saying they shouldn't be here, but this is what they do. They're wolves. I know it sounds real nice to say they're magical and beautiful and they balance nature and restore an ecosystem--and it's true, they do that. But this is how they do it. They go after the weakest first. When the mother stays back, the wolves open a hole in her belly and pull out her entrails. Then they wait until she doesn't have the strength to protect herself, then they'll move in and tear her throat out.”
― C.J. Box, Savage Run

“After the lockdown, when markets become less active, the subject of mainstream economics faces another tough ground. There are millions of poor people who do not have work. When lockdown happens, a great many people find resource markets stalled where they used to get income. More than ever, such crises necessitate the flow of resources from the haves to the have-nots. But, frozen goods and resource markets cannot help much, especially the poor and vulnerable people. That is where, pro-social behaviour and beyond-market distribution of resources is necessary. However, mainstream economics treats altruism as ‘impure’. It looks at altruism in the paradigm of pursuing self-interest.”
― Salman Ahmed Shaikh, Reflections on the Origins in the Post COVID-19 World

“The paradigm of self-interest is neutral between a person’s decision to help others or to not help others. If fear and uncertainty make people more short-sighted, self-centric and engage in hoarding cash, withdrawing from banks, disinvesting their savings in capital markets and buying essential goods in bulk, then there is no drive, urge or impetus that economics can offer to suggest otherwise. It is neutral between these choices and the choice for altruism.

On the other hand, as per physics, we were stardust before and stardust after extinction. As per evolutionary biology, we are one of the millions and millions of species that have earned the right to survive under the sun for a brief period until genetic mutations bury our specie as well. We were born through a fierce and destructive competition and survive until we manage to withstand that competition. While waiting and acting on morals, we should not be here in the first place.”
― Salman Ahmed Shaikh, Reflections on the Origins in the Post COVID-19 World

“Motivation for moral behaviour and pro-social cooperative response has to come from somewhere else. In poor countries like Pakistan, people with surplus resources are engaging in charity, donations, and volunteering. Empirical evidence in Pakistan in multiple research studies has found that faith is the biggest motivation behind charitable donations and it encapsulates and is associated with other humane motives. This trend is also seen in other parts of the world. But, economics is largely silent and irrelevant when it comes to exchange, allocation and distribution of economic resources outside of markets.”
― Salman Ahmed Shaikh, Reflections on the Origins in the Post COVID-19 World

“A reflective mind will keep in mind the scientific and historical evidence that death is as much a fact as is life. The belief in life hereafter completes the cause and effect puzzle even in moral sphere of life. In life hereafter, everyone will get deterministic reward for intentional acts in this life based on the ability and freedom in the circumstances which one faced in this life, no matter whether rich or poor, white or black, male or female, strong or weak and elite or commoner. That makes life of everyone meaningful rather than a constant struggle of survival in one form of matter to the other form of matter where survival instinct is the only moral code.”
― Salman Ahmed Shaikh, Reflections on the Origins in the Post COVID-19 World

“Handcrafted Humanity Sonnet 95

Nature always tries to trick us most strongly,
Into being a filthy bunch of egotistical morons.
If we stand true to our conviction of community,
No cockeyed canine is gonna dictate our terms.
Survival of the fittest is the motto of animal,
Sacrifice for the helpless is the motto of human.
The decision is to be made by none but you,
What'll you spend your life as - animal or human!
Let's not spend another day with cold shoulder,
Let us rather put all of our shoulders together.
Only then we will be a tad stronger than history,
And rise as the mightiest descendant of Nature.
To conquer ourselves is to conquer space and time.
We live the fullest when we live as people's lifeline.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Handcrafted Humanity: 100 Sonnets For A Blunderful World

“Survival of the fittest is the motto of animal, sacrifice for the helpless is the motto of human.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Handcrafted Humanity: 100 Sonnets For A Blunderful World

“When raping and pillaging is the preferred scheme for mating, speed is of the essence. So, the sturdy Neanderthals did not survive.”
― Debra Gavant

“And with this feeling, I poised in my mind some other questions as to the soundness of beliefs I had long held, based upon copy-book maxims drilled into one generation of American children after another: "Merit wins...Survival of the fittest...You can't change human nature...The best people...The poor you have with you always...and the whole long line of rubber-stamp moral precepts. What were these but glittering emblems set up by the moneyed class to serve its own purposes? Born bourgeois, my brain had been filled from infancy with the nonsense of super-patriotism, with the lily-white virtues of imperialism added in due time. I had harbored these false values because I didn't know any better. I had been a drifter, innocent and sheep-minded long enough.”
― Art Young, The Best of Art Young