#viva

Over the years, Americans in particular have been all too willing to squander their hard-earned independence and freedom for the illusion of feeling safe under someone else's authority. The concept of self-sufficiency has been undermined in value over a scant few generations. The vast majority of the population seems to look down their noses upon self-reliance as some quaint dusty relic, entertained only by the hyperparanoid or those hopelessly incapable of fitting into mainstream society. ↗

— Cody Lundin

#preparedness #self-reliance #self-sufficiency #survival #freedom

[I]t was in the pairs that the prisoners kept alive the semblance of humanity concluded Elmer Luchterhand, a sociologist at Yale who interviewed fifty-two concentration camp survivors shortly after liberation. Pairs stole food and clothing for each other, exchanged small gifts and planned for the future. If one member of a pair fainted from hunger in front of an SS officer, the other would prop him up. Survival . . . could only be a social achievement, not an individual accident, wrote Eugene Weinstock, a Belgian resistance fighter and Hungarian-born Jew who was sent to Buchenwald in 1943. Finally the death of one member of a pair often doomed the other. Women who knew Anne Frank in the Bergen-Belsen camp said that neither hunger nor typhus killed the young girl who would become the most famous diarist of the Nazi era. Rather, they said, she lost the will to live after the death of her sister, Margot. ↗

— Blaine Harden

#pair #survival #death

It's one thing to affirm that God is free to do as God wills in this world. The real crunch comes in allowing God the freedom and trust to act in one's own life. John Indermark ↗

— Lynelle Clark

#mitch-alexander #survival-story #freedom

One man’s fight is another man’s freedom. ↗

— Amaya Ellman

#broken-shells #freedom #iran #quote #survival

It's only life. We all get through it. ↗

— Dean Koontz

#life #living #survival #humor

As if I'd had time to drug it in the two milliseconds she'd let me out of her sight. ↗

— Nenia Campbell

#humor #sarcasm #survival #humor

The secret of survival is a defective imagination. ↗

— John Banville

#imagination

‎Using his burgeoning intelligence, this most successful of all mammals has exploited the environment to produce food for an ever increasing population. Instead of controlling the environment for the benefit of the population, perhaps it's time we controlled the population to allow the survival of the environment. ↗

— David Attenborough

#nature #population #science #survival #food

To have endured all the horrors he did, to have seen the worst of humanity and have your life made unrecognizable by it, to come out of all that the honorable and brave and good person I knew him to be— *that* was magical. ↗

— Ransom Riggs

#survival #whimsy #life

Surviving is one thing," he said quietly, his voice suddenly calmer, "but you've got to have a reason to do it. There's no point in living if you don't have anything worth living for. ↗

— David Moody

#living #reason #survival #life