Existential Threat Quotes & Sayings

I shall arm myself with a knife" said Mr. Hale: "the days of eating fruit so primitively as you describe are over with me. I must pare it and quarter it before I can enjoy it. — Elizabeth Gaskell

The single biggest existential threat that's out there, I think, is cyber. — Michael Mullen

I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I had to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, it's probably that. So we need to be very careful ... With artificial intelligence we're summoning the demon. — Elon Musk

I dedicate this work to Vasily Arkhipov, the deputy commander of a Soviet nuclear submarine off the Cuban shore who said no to his comrades and may have saved the world. That was on October 27, 1962, around the time my father came home from his defense job and told me at the doorstep to our house that there was "only a twenty-percent chance, son" the next day would never come. No terrorist action today remotely poses that kind of existential threat for our world, and I hope you'll keep that in mind in reading on. — Scott Atran

Well, Israel, obviously, thinks of the Iranian nuclear program as an existential threat to Israel. — Robert M. Gates

When we watch a play under the standard circumstances, we've lost volition and time is passing. A still play feels like an existential threat. — Richard Greenberg

Awareness of freedom and responsibility creates anxiety, which is also referred to as anguish or angst. Aspects of romantic attachments can relieve anxieties. For example, Mario Mikulincer et al. argue that loving relationships can act as a "death-anxiety buffering mechanism", since the sense of security, protection, comfort, self-esteem, and social validation that close relationships provide may serve as defensive devices with respect to existential anxiety about the threat of mortality. — Skye Cleary

I also think that we [Americans] are operating out of fear in our country. It's not that terrorism is not a threat, but it's not an existential threat. It is not the preeminent threat facing most Americans on any given day, and yet the power of nightmares is so strong. — Jeremy Scahill

Some find the overt anti-Semitism of Holocaust deniers the ranting of idiots who are best ignored. Others take these comments quite seriously and see a dire and existential threat to Jewish well-being. They see a Holocaust-denying president of a large country, one that is poised to have nuclear weapons, occupying the podium of a world forum that was founded in the wake of the Final Solution with a mandate to stop genocide. They hear him deny the Final Solution and threaten the existence of the Jewish state.

The Eichmann Trial, page XXVII — Deborah E. Lipstadt

From the Israeli perspective, the fear is that if pressure is off of Iran, Israel would be left having to accept the balance of power in the region significantly shifting toward Iran. It's not an existential threat, but it would definitely be a problem for Israel. — Trita Parsi

I think Romney's talking himself out of the election, to be honest. I was wondering what was gonna happen when the Republican power structure turned the money on, and then they turned on the money and nothing happened. — Lupe Fiasco

The alarm bells sound regularly: cybergeddon; the next Pearl Harbor; one of the greatest existential threats facing the United States. With increasing frequency, these are the grave terms officials invoke about the menace of cybercrime - and they're not understating the threat. — Preet Bharara

A meal without mushrooms is like a day without rain. — John Cage

I don't feel we need to be independent for me to feel confident in my Scottish identity. I think Scotland is pretty comfortable in its identity. We won't need independence to preserve it ... if we don't become independent, it won't disappear; it isn't under existential threat. — Nicola Sturgeon

So when you're dealing with an existential threat like death or like climate change, if you see it as 'we are all toast anyway,' then denial is a pretty good way of coping. — Bob Inglis

Democrats and Republicans love Israel and all of us care about the existential threat to Israel from Iran. — Jane Harman

The financial system in its current condition poses an existential threat to Western democracy far exceeding any terrorist threat. — John Lanchester

ISIS is not an existential threat to something happening to someone in the United States of America. It's a serious problem overseas, but it's confusing and frightening. — Joe Biden

All these lacrimal events and bouts of depersonalization were no doubt leading, I was then convinced, to the onset of schizophrenia. Indeed, the irony of my recent cardiac diagnosis was that it gave me an objective reason for my emotional turbulences and so was, in that sense, stabilizing: now I was reckoning with a specific existential threat, not just the vacuum of existence. — Ben Lerner

For my generation, coming of age at the height of the Cold War, fear of nuclear winter seemed the leading existential threat on the horizon. But the danger posed by war to all humanity-and to our planet-is at least matched by climate change. — Ban Ki-moon

Any time someone makes you feel guilty about how you are living, that is part of the old system (pre-Christ). — Rob Bell

The episode of Banaka pointing to his chest and crying out of existential anguish reminds me of a line from Goethe's West-East Divan: "Is one man alive when others are alive?" Deep within Goethe's query lies the secret of the writer's creed. By writing books, the individual becomes a universe (we speak of the universe of Balzac, the universe of Chekhov, the universe of Kafka, do we not?). And since the principal quality of a universe is its uniqueness, the existence of another universe constitutes a threat to its very essence. — Milan Kundera

Hezbollah, Hamas, Al-Qaeda, they all have ties to Iranian money. I think they are the biggest exist - existential threat. Russia could be up there, but it would probably be to one of our NATO allies rather than the homeland. — Eric Bolling

Around the world, climate change is an existential threat - but if we harness the opportunities inherent in addressing climate change, we can reap enormous economic benefits. — Ban Ki-moon

Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann represent an existential threat to the Democratic Party the way that twenty years ago Clarence Thomas as a black man represented to liberals and the Democratic Party. — Andrew Breitbart

If they find me, they will kill me. But my life is not in question here. You are all that matters. — Anthony Horowitz

related type of argument is that we ought - rather callously - to welcome small and medium-scale catastrophes on grounds that they make us aware of our vulnerabilities and spur us into taking precautions that reduce the probability of an existential catastrophe. The idea is that a small or medium-scale catastrophe acts like an inoculation, challenging civilization with a relatively survivable form of a threat and stimulating an immune response that readies the world to deal with the existential variety of the threat.15 — Nick Bostrom

We, the great American nation, decided that we've got 138 military bases around the world and we've now figured out that we can buy these drones from the Israelis, and we've decided that the way to proceed is to use this new technology to go and kill anybody that we don't like or who disagrees with us or who we might perceive as making an existential threat. — Roger Waters