Self-preservation Quotes

He was gifted with the sly, sharp instinct for self-preservation that passes for wisdom among the rich. (Evelyn Waugh)
When we quit thinking primarily about ourselves and our own self-preservation, we undergo a truly heroic transformation of consciousness. View quote
Joseph Campbell
We have the wolf by the ears, and we can neither hold him nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, self-preservation in the other. View quote
Thomas Jefferson
The modern state appeals to morality, to religion, and to natural law as the ideological foundation of its existence. At the same time it is prepared to infringe any or all of these in the interest of self-preservation. View quote
J. M. Coetzee
As a matter of self-preservation, a man needs good friends or ardent enemies, for the former instruct him and the latter take him to task. View quote
Diogenes of Sinope
Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong - these are the features which constitute the. View quote
Winston Churchill
Self-preservation isn't worth it if you can't live with the self you're preserving. View quote
David Levithan
No one could have called Mr. Standen quick-witted, but the possession of three sisters had considerably sharpened his instinct of self-preservation. View quote
Georgette Heyer
An insatiable appetite for glory leads to sacrifice and death, but innate instinct leads to self-preservation and life. View quote
José Martí
As for 'racism', the modern BNP opposes mass immigration and multi-culturalism on the grounds that human biocultural diversity is being exterminated by global capitalism. It demands for every single people and culture on planet Earth the right to self-preservation which it seeks for its own. Such a position is clearly out of step with the extermination-through-assimilation model of multi-culturalism promoted by the dominant ideology of the USA, but it equally clearly has nothing to do with 'hate' or wishing to harm others. View quote
Nicholas John Griffin
The world is, and has long been, in flames because races, nations and cultures are forced to violate their Nature ordained instincts for self-preservation. (David Lane (white nationalist))
The writer is an ordinary man, not a spokesman for the people, and that literature can only be the voice of one individual. Writing that becomes an ode to a country, the standard of a nation, the voice of a party... loses its nature-it is no longer literature. Writers do not set out to be published, but to know themselves. Although Kafka or Pessoa resorted to language, it was not in order to change the world. I, myself, believe in what I call cold literature: a literature of flight for one's life, a literature that is not utilitarian, but a spiritual self-preservation in order to avoid being stifled by society. I believe in a literature of the moment, for the living. You have to know how to use freedom. If you use it in exchange for something else, it vanishes. View quote
Gao Xingjian
The absent no longer entered our thoughts. One spoke of them who knows what happened to them? but their fate was not on our minds. We were incapable of thinking. Our senses were numbed, everything was fading into a fog. We no longer clung to anything. The instincts of self-preservation, of self-defense, of pride, had all deserted us. In one terrifying moment of lucidity, I thought of us as damned souls wandering through the void, souls condemned to wander through space until the end of time, seeking redemption, seeking oblivion, without any hope of finding either. View quote
Elie Wiesel
The hon. Member for Manchester (Mr. Bright) asks, "What is our interest in this war?" and he also asked me to explain the meaning of the expression "the balance of power." ...[The] "Balance of power" means only this-that a number of weaker States may unite to prevent a stronger one from acquiring a power which should be dangerous to them, and which should overthrow their independence, their liberty, and their freedom of action. It is the doctrine of self-preservation. It is the doctrine of self-defence, with the simple qualification that it is combined with sagacity and with forethought, and an endeavour to prevent imminent danger before it comes thundering at your doors. View quote
Henry Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston
‘It's his sense of self-preservation.' ‘The great Italian sense.' ‘The greatest Italian sense.' View quote
Ernest Hemingway
Most professors know that American higher education in the humanities is in a deplorable state. Yet many remain silent, perhaps through prudent self-preservation, which is starting to look a lot like moral cowardice. They have put loyalty to their colleagues before loyalty to their students, ostensibly the raison d'être for educational institutions. How many more minds must be distorted or destroyed before the faculty decides to defend the Western intellectual values of free inquiry and orderly acquisition of knowledge? View quote
Camille Paglia
Whether they are defending the Soviet Union or bleating for Saddam Hussein, liberals are always against America. They are either traitors or idiots, and on the matter of America's self-preservation, the difference is irrelevant. View quote
Ann Coulter
I normally can't stand vice-free people. They conflate a narcissistic instinct for self-preservation with moral superiority. Plus they suck the life right out of a party. View quote
Dennis Lehane
Self-preservation is the first law of nature. View quote
Samuel Butler (novelist)
One can act too much in the cause of self-preservation and experience nothing fresh as a result. View quote
Michael Moorcock
I started with an impulse of my heart, with that instinct of defense which even the least of the worms has, not with the instinct of personal self-preservation, but of defense of the race to which I belong. This is why I have always had the feeling that the whole race rests on our shoulders, the living, and those who died for the Fatherland, and our entire future, and that the race struggles and speaks through us, that the hostile flock, however huge, in relation to this historical entity, is only a handful of human detritus which we will disperse and defeat... The individual in the framework and in the service of his race, the race in the framework and in the service of God and of the laws of the divinity: those who will understand these things will win even though they are alone. Those who will not understand will be defeated. (Corneliu Zelea Codreanu)
Careers, children and homemaking all come above preserving your appearance. Self-preservation is at the bottom of the scale. View quote
Trinny Woodall
The white men of the South were aroused by the mere instinct of self-preservation to rid themselves, by fair means or foul, of the intolerable burden of governments sustained by the votes of ignorant negroes and conducted in the interest of adventurers. View quote
Woodrow Wilson
Adventurers swarmed out of the North, as much the enemies of one race as of the other, to cozen, beguile and use the negroes. The white men were aroused by a mere instinct of self-preservation - until at last there sprung into existence a great Kuklux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country. View quote
Woodrow Wilson
San Domingo, with a stable government, under which her immense resources can be developed, will give remunerative wages to tens of thousands of laborers not now upon the island. This labor will take advantage of every available means of transportation to abandon the adjacent islands and seek the blessings of freedom and its sequence-each inhabitant receiving the reward of his own labor. Porto Rico and Cuba will have to abolish slavery, as a measure of self-preservation, to retain their laborers. View quote
Ulysses S. Grant