Survival Machine Quotes & Sayings

All health, beauty, intelligence, and social grace has been teased from a vast butcher's yard of unbounded carnage, requiring incalculable eons of massacre to draw forth even the subtlest of advantages. This is not only a matter of the bloody grinding mills of selection, either, but also of the innumerable mutational abominations thrown up by the madness of chance, as it pursues its directionless path to some negligible preservable trait, and then - still further - of the unavowable horrors that 'fitness' (or sheer survival) itself predominantly entails. We are a minuscule sample of agonized matter, comprising genetic survival monsters, fished from a cosmic ocean of vile mutants, by a pitiless killing machine of infinite appetite. (This is still, perhaps, to put an irresponsibly positive spin on the story, but it should suffice for our purposes here.) — Nick Land

I want to tell you that I love you I want to tell you that I love you I want to tell you that I love I love I love I love but you do not. — Joyce Carol Oates

The devil is the initiator of persecution — Sunday Adelaja

I love you till kingdom come, evergreen. — Anonymous

Meaning, Wahram thought, that right now somewhere in the system there could be machines in human form, escaped into the crowd, doing their best to stay free, perhaps, when any X-ray machine or other surveillance device would reveal what they were - out there hiding, trying to accomplish the goals they had been given, perhaps, or new ones they might choose for themselves, according to some self-invented algorithm of survival. Damaged, dangerous, detached from any other consciousness, solitary and afraid - in other words, just like everyone else. — Kim Stanley Robinson

The body is a survival machine programmed to propagate the genes that reside inside it. — Richard Dawkins

As there is no insignificant work, there is not an insignificant leader. All leaders need training ... not just a few. — Quint Studer

Different sorts of survival machine appear very varied on the outside and in their internal organs. An octopus is nothing like a mouse, and both are quite different from an oak tree. Yet in their fundamental chemistry they are rather uniform, and, in particular, the replicators that they bear, the genes, are basically the same kind of molecule in all of us - from bacteria to elephants. We are all survival machines for the same kind of replicator - molecules called DNA - but there are many different ways of making a living in the world, and the replicators have built a vast range of machines to exploit them. A monkey is a machine that preserves genes up trees, a fish is a machine that preserves genes in the water; there is even a small worm that preserves genes in German beer mats. DNA works in mysterious ways. — 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

A refined soul is distressed to know that someone owes it thanks; a crude soul, to know that it owes someone thanks. — Friedrich Nietzsche

To attract more money, you must be attractive, in the sense that people will want and prefer your products or service over those of your competitior. — Jack Canfield

Will we even know when the first AGI is created? The first machine to become conscious may quickly achieve a reasonably clear understanding of its situation. Anything smart enough to deserve the label superintelligent would surely be smart enough to lay low and not disclose its existence until it had taken the necessary steps to ensure its own survival. In other words, any machine smart enough to pass the Turing test would be smart enough not to. It — Calum Chace

If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough. — Meister Eckhart

I am very interested in loyalty, even if the person to whom one is loyal is flawed, criminal, or otherwise in the wrong. — A.M. Homes

Taking responsibility and having faith in your own judgment will help you make good choices and decisions at the end of your pet's life. — Jon Katz

The Chicago mobs ... They practiced their own perverted form of "survival of the fittest." Where the strong clawed their way to the top of a criminal empire. And the weak died in a hail of machine gun bullets. — Walter Winchell

It is easy sometimes to blame genetics, some obesity gene perhaps. But even if this were true, we'll still be referring to the machine. Genetics are predispositions. The body is designed as a closed system, physiologically speaking and unless acted upon by an outside or higher force it maintains its functions. It is designed to sustain its own survival. The psychological (self-ordinate command) is essential for this survival because the body also belongs to a self, one that can overfeed it, starve it or kill it as may be. It is also by material urges that you seek to acquire wealth and by self command, suppose what you consider a higher more fulfilling purpose that you choose to give it all away.
The hard core truth is that despite some obesity gene, you can starve yourself to death if you want, or perhaps if you feel you have an ulterior higher purpose like an anorexic might, to look thin and beautiful in the eyes of the communal. — Dew Platt

We are slaves in the sense that we depend for our daily survival upon an expand-or-expire agro-industrial empire - a crackpot machine - that the specialists cannot comprehend and the managers cannot manage. Which is, furthermore, devouring world resources at an exponential rate. We are, most of us, dependent employees. ... Edward Abbey (1927-1989) — Edward Abbey

We see cancer patients battling death as valiant, and we think that if they try hard enough, they'll beat it. In truth, cancer is an equal-opportunity killer and is impervious to moral virtues and emotional strength. No amount of courage increases a patient's likelihood of survival. For every courageous patient who survives, there is another courageous patient who does not. Of course you'd never know that from popular media, where patients wage battle against cancer and win, and where almost everyone survives CPR and looks remarkably good hooked up to a breathing machine. — Bloomsbury Publishing

The modern man has become a machine for survival, which is largely the result of work of chemicals and genetic codes. — Lynne McTaggart

The human brain became large by natural selection (who knows why, but presumably for good cause). Yet surely most "things" now done by our brains, and essential both to our cultures and to our very survival, are epiphenomena of the computing power of this machine, not genetically grounded Darwinian entities created specifically by natural selection for their current function. — Stephen Jay Gould

Human activity is destroying the natural systems that we depend upon for our survival. Our most basic instinct as humans is to survive; yet we continue to destroy our life-support machine. Connected humans understand this terrible contradiction; disconnected humans are not able to.

Not all humans are responsible: just those who are part of Industrial Civilization. Industrial Civilization depends on economic growth and the unsustainable use of natural resources, so it has developed a complex set of tools for keeping people disconnected from the real world and living a life that keeps civilization running. Humans have been manipulated in order to be part of a destructive system.

The only way to prevent global ecological collapse and thus ensure the survival of humanity is to rid the world of Industrial Civilization. — Keith Farnish