Orson Scott Card Quotes

Viewed narrowly, all life is universal hunger and an expression of energy associated with it.

If I'm walking down the riverbank, and a man is drowning, even if I don't know how to swim very well, I feel this urge that the right thing to do is to try to save that person. Evolution would tell me exactly the opposite: preserve your DNA. Who cares about the guy who's drowning?

The sacrifice of personal existence is necessary to secure the preservation of the species.

To put it crudely but graphically, the monkey who did not have a realistic perception of the tree branch he jumped for was soon a dead monkey-and therefore did not become one of our ancestors.

In nature, creatures never ended the lives of others except to survive. To women, abortion was self-defense and preservation of the species. Abortion was not a fancy borne out of the female mind. Abortion was instinct beyond ideas. Abortion was fear (the cat that devours its litter when a predator nears).

Life will find a way.

Survival, in the cool economics of biology, means simply the persistence of one's own genes in the generations to follow.

Self-preservation, nature's first great law, all the creatures, except man, doth awe.

Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature's inexorable imperative.

It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change.

We should not live by Darwinian principles. But Darwin explains how we got here.

Surviving is not something you need to learn. You don't need to learn survival skills; you have them already. That's why we're here, all of us, because it's a game of survival anyway.

In the survival of favoured individuals and races, during the constantly-recurring struggle for existence, we see a powerful and ever-acting form of selection.

We can't help it. Life looks for life.

Often in evolutionary processes a species must adapt to new conditions in order to survive. Today the atomic bomb has altered profoundly the nature of the world as we know it, and the human race consequently finds itself in a new habitat to which it must adapt its thinking.

Everything has to evolve or else it perishes.

Those who refused to respond to the new stimulus would perish. Adapt or perish.

Suffering is a byproduct of evolution by natural selection, an inevitable consequence that may worry us in our more sympathetic moments but cannot be expected to worry a tiger - even if a tiger can be said to worry about anything at all - and certainly cannot be expected to worry its genes.

To exist is to adapt, and if one could not adapt, one died and made room for those who could.

The law is the survival of the fittest.... The law is not the survival of the 'better' or the 'stronger,' if we give to those words any thing like their ordinary meanings. It is the survival of those which are constitutionally fittest to thrive under the conditions in which they are placed; and very often that which, humanly speaking, is inferiority, causes the survival.

No. I'm simply saying that life, uh, finds a way.

I don’t think we’re an animal that was built to be happy; we are an animal that was built to reproduce.

What else should you be? Human beings didn't evolve brains in order to lie around on lakes. Killing's the first thing we learned. And a good thing we did, or we'd be dead, and the tigers would own the earth.

Nature has made up her mind that what cannot defend itself shall not be defended.

The laws of animality govern almost the whole of history.