Henry F. Ashurst Quotes

It's like the animal kingdom. Adapt or go extinct.

Nature holds no brief for the human experiment; it must stand or fall by its results.

Adapt or die.

The fate of the vast majority of species on this planet has been extinction, eventually.

In the history of the world the prize has not gone to those species which specialized in methods of violence, or even in defensive armor. In fact, nature began with producing animals encased in hard shells for defense against the ill of life. But smaller animals, without external armor, warm-blooded, sensitive, alert, have cleared those monsters off the face of the earth.

Life is a copiously branching bush, continually pruned by the grim reaper of extinction, not a ladder of predictable progress.

Life on earth is hard. Competition for the necessities of life is fierce. How ridiculous to believe that the law of harsh survival would not be true elsewhere, or that it would be negated by the progress of technology in an advanced civilization.

The history of life is a tale of decimation and later stabilization of few surviving anatomies, not a story of steady expansion and progress.

As some species die out, forms better adapted to utilize the obstacles against which they struggled in vain come into being.

We have unmistakable proof that throughout all past time, there has been a ceaseless devouring of the weak by the strong.

Let's set the existence-of-God issue aside for a later volume, and just stipulate that in some way, self-replicating organisms came into existence on this planet and immediately began trying to get rid of each other, either by spamming their environments with rough copies of themselves, or by more direct means which hardly need to be belabored. Most of them failed, and their genetic legacy was erased from the universe forever, but a few found some way to survive and to propagate.

The law of evolution is that the strongest survives.

Nature knows no political boundaries. She puts living creatures on this globe and watches the free play of forces. She then confers the master's right on her favourite child, the strongest in courage and industry ... The stronger must dominate and not blend with the weaker, thus sacrificing his own greatness. Only the born weakling can view this as cruel.

It is in vain for us to devise schemes by which competition can be put out of civilized life. Competition is the condition of life.

There is nothing wrong with having competitive instincts. They are survival instincts.

In the new world, it is not the big fish which eats the small fish, it's the fast fish which eats the slow fish.

We will now discuss in a little more detail the Struggle for Existence.

If you do not change, you can become extinct !

Evolution loves death more than it loves you or me. This is easy to write, easy to read, and hard to believe.

Has it ever occurred to you how lucky you are to be alive? More than 99 percent of all the creatures that have ever lived have died without progeny, but not a single one of your ancestors falls into that group! ... Not a single one of your ancestors, all the way back to the bacteria, succumbed to predation before reproducing, or lost out in the competition for a mate.

Multiply, vary, let the strongest live and the weakest die.

If we consider the superiority of the human species, the size of its brain, its powers of thinking, language and organization, we can say this: were there the slightest possibility that another rival or superior species might appear, on earth or elsewhere, man would use every means at his disposal to destroy it.

A grain in the balance will determine which individual shall live and which shall die - which variety or species shall increase in number, and which shall decrease, or finally become extinct.

This survival of the fittest implies multiplication of the fittest.