Jack London Quotes

Those who want to live, let them fight, and those who do not want to fight in this world of eternal struggle do not deserve to live.

This world belongs to the strong, my friend! The ritual of our existence is based on the strong getting stronger by devouring the weak. We must face up to this. No more than right that it should be this way. We must learn to accept it as a law of the natural world. The rabbits accept their role in the ritual and recognize the wolf as the strong. In defense, the rabbit becomes sly and frightened and elusive and he digs holes and hides when the wolf is about. And he endures, he goes on. He knows his place. He most certainly doesn't challenge the wolf to combat. Now, would that be wise? Would it?

It never troubles the wolf how many the sheep may be.

Big fish eat little fish.

The aim of life was meat. Life itself was meat. Life lived on life. There were the eaters and the eaten. The law was: EAT OR BE EATEN. He did not formulate the law in clear, set terms and moralize about it. He did not even think the law; he merely lived the law without thinking about it at all.

Such is the condition of organic nature! whose first law might be expressed in the words 'Eat or be eaten!' and which would seem to be one great slaughter-house, one universal scene of rapacity and injustice!

We're interested in things that have big teeth, and you can see the evolutionary value of that, and you can also see the practical consequences by watching 'Animal Planet.' You notice they make very few programs about gerbils. It's mostly about things that have big teeth.

Take, for example, the African jungle, the home of the cheetah. On whom does the cheetah prey? The old, the sick, the wounded, the weak, the very young, but never the strong. Lesson: If you would not be prey, you had better be strong.

The law of the survival of the fittest led inevitably to the survival and predominance of the men who were effective in war and who loved it because they were effective.

The truth is, everything is eating and being eaten.

Fishes live in the sea, as men do a-land; the great ones eat up the little ones.

The fast fish, not the big fish, eats the small fish.

With all our mastery over the powers of Nature we have adhered to the view that the struggle for existence is a permanent and necessary condition of life.

When a lion doesn't get its prey, it remains hungry. When the prey saves himself, he has not won, but has saved his life.

That's what the cat said to the canary when he swallowed him - 'You'll be all right.'

Many cats are the death of the mouse.

The wolf asketh not how many the sheep may be.

I should premise that I use the term “Struggle for Existence” in a large and Metaphorical Sense, including dependence of one being on another, and including (which is more important) success in leaving progeny.

Unlike your fish tank, in nature, fish eat each other. When the population of a species gets too low, it will die out.

That's the food chain that cricket is sometimes. You have to be at the top of it otherwise you get swept away and eaten up.

Life eats life to live.

Nothing is easier than to admit in words the truth of the universal struggle for life, or more difficult - at least I have found it so - than constantly to bear this conclusion in mind...We behold the face of nature bright with gladness...We do not see, or we forget, that the birds which are idly singing round us mostly live on insects and seeds, and are thus constantly destroying life.

An animal so poor in spirit that he won't even fight on his own behalf is already an evolutionary dead end; the best he can do for his breed is to crawl off and die, and not pass on his defective genes.

Not only does every animal live at the expense of some other animal or plant, but the very plants are at war.... The individuals of a species are like the crew of a foundered ship, and none but good swimmers have a chance of reaching the land.

The whole of organic nature on our planet exists only by a relentless war of all against all. ... The raging war of interests in human society is only a feeble picture of an unceasing and terrible war of existence which reigns throughout the whole of the living world.