Extreme Conditions Quotes

I've fallen down crevasses, been bitten by snakes, been knocked unconscious, had various limbs broken and once, a heavy camera came plunging down which very nearly decapitated me.

You can't have a helicopter fly over boiling lava. It would've exploded from the heat, and is just way too dangerous. The pilot of a helicopter would've flatly refused anyway.

Losing a game is not a tragedy after experiencing border raids and having to eat beetles because you are out of rations.

El Capitan is the most chapping environment in the world: windy, cold, super dry. I wake up twice a night and reapply lotion to my hands. We sand our fingertips to keep them smooth.

I function better in the jungle in Amazonia or Antarctica or Alaska or the Sahara desert. An artificial environment like a studio has never attracted me. I could work in a studio, but I would never really feel at home.

After a level, it does not matter if you are capable to do 100 push-ups, but how to take action in a do-or-die situation - saving your country while on mission.

On Mount Everest it feels as if you are in the womb, but on K2 you are always out on the edge.

Life on a lifeboat isn’t much of a life. It is like an end game in chess, a game with few pieces. The elements couldn’t be more simple, nor the stakes higher.

I have played in rain before. I have played in wind before. I have played in cold before, but not all put together. They were the hardest conditions I ever played in.

On my job I end up jumping out of planes. Last week I got in an 18-wheeler and drove down a runway onto a skid track. The week before that they put me in a car and sunk me to the bottom of a lake to see if I could escape without an oxygen tank.

When you're sharing a mud hole with a wildebeest derriere in sub-Saharan Africa, that's a living hell.

I think the next [21st] century will be the century of complexity. We have already discovered the basic laws that govern matter and understand all the normal situations. We don't know how the laws fit together, and what happens under extreme conditions. But I expect we will find a complete unified theory sometime this century. The is no limit to the complexity that we can build using those basic laws.

It may be an extreme example brought about by abnormal circumstances - but the criteria of human rights kick in, surely, precisely when the conditions are extreme and the situation is abnormal.

Omar Sharif and I spent nine months in the desert, day after day for nine months.

An experience that shaped me happened early in my TV career when I filmed in Mozambique, Angola and Bangladesh for 'Blue Peter' and Comic Relief. Places with extreme poverty. When you see that first-hand as a young person, you take it with you for life.

The stratosphere is a hostile place.

Black holes provide theoreticians with an important theoretical laboratory to test ideas. Conditions within a black hole are so extreme, that by analyzing aspects of black holes we see space and time in an exotic environment, one that has shed important, and sometimes perplexing, new light on their fundamental nature.

There is something addictive in space that makes you want to go back - like the mountain climbers who want to go back to the Himalayas although their fingers were cut by frostbite.

Blue as the evening sky, blue as cranesbill flowers, blue as the lips of drowned men and the heart of a blaze burning with too hot a flame. Yes, sometimes it was hot in this world, too. Hot and cold, light and dark, terrible and beautiful, it was everything all at once. It wasn't true that you felt nothing in the land of Death. You felt and heard and smelled and saw, but your heart remained strangely calm, as if it were resting before the dance began again. Peace. Was that the word?

Similar (of course, far from identical) irritations in similar conditions call out similar reflexes; the more powerful the irritation, the sooner it overcomes personal peculiarities. To a tickle, people react differently, but to a red-hot iron, alike. As a steam-hammer converts a sphere and a cube alike into sheet metal, so under the blow of too great and inexorable events resistances are smashed and the boundaries of "individuality" lost.

For me the Everest solo was the icing on the cake of my climbs: the highest mountain in the world, during a monsoon, and as far as possible even on a new route, of course without oxygen.

Although anything can happen when under the influence of ice water.

Wealth and want equally harden the human heart, like frost and fire both are alien to human flesh. Famine and gluttony alike drive nature away from the heart of man.

Now, Venus is an extremely hostile environment, and as such presents a lot of challenges for a science fiction author who wants to create life there. However, as I began to research it more thoroughly, I found myself intrigued by the possibilities the world offers.

My experience is that if the military didn't want to use force and was confronted with a president that did, the military would come back with what I would call the 'bomb Moscow' scenario. They would say it had to be done with conditions that were so extreme, you obviously wouldn't do it.