"Survival of the fittest" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Chinaman liable to zymotic diseases died thousands of years ago, and that by the law of the survival of the fittest all Chinamen born now are immune from filth diseases; that they can drink sewage-water with impunity, and thrive under conditions which would kill any Europeans ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... justified was of course to get further support for that theory of evolution at large with which ... all my conceptions were bound up."[199] Instead of the metaphorical expression "natural selection," Spencer introduced the term "survival of the fittest," which found favour with Darwin as ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... They believe in a Supreme Being, whom they call the First Cause—that is the nearest English equivalent—and they recognize the existence of an immortal and unknowable life-principle, or soul. They believe that the First Cause has decreed the survival of the fittest as the fundamental law, which belief accounts for ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby
... it may seem, Samuel had never before heard the phrase, "the survival of the fittest." And so now he was living over the experience of the thinking world of fifty or sixty years ago. What a marvelous generalization it was! What a range of life it covered! And how obvious it seemed—one could think of a hundred things, perfectly well known, which fitted into it. And yet he had never ...
— Samuel the Seeker • Upton Sinclair
... building if you try; you don't know enough. What a grand harmony there is just here? We theologians would advise "natural selection to be present with such instructors as thus advise us, and continue with them long enough, at least, to reject the worst from the school and give us a blessing in the survival of the fittest, for we would like to know our duty." So much ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, - Volume I, No. 9. September, 1880 • Various
... then existed was not competition, in the sense which we use the word in this volume, but was a struggle for existence and a gratification of the baser desires, of the same sort as that which now prevails in the brute creation, resulting in a "survival of the fittest." With the introduction of the family relation, the principle of the "division of labor" was utilized, the female doing the hard and menial work, while the male devoted himself to hunting and fishing, or subsisting on the results of his helpmate's ...
— Monopolies and the People • Charles Whiting Baker
... the good luck to possess, as Dr. Johnson has it, "wealth beyond the dreams of avarice." Such is life,—and law: the most obstinate and the richest win: the less pertinacious and the poorer are allowed to fail: it is a process of Darwin's survival of the fittest. All this is now "too late to mend:" but I do hope that if ever I go to Engelfield Castle, Sir Richard will be kindly and genial to his far-off cousin, who (but for some legal quibble unknown) might have ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... to Black Rock House was a joy, very slightly alleviated by the poor condition of the trees under which Peter passed. It was primeval forest even here, with valuable trees stunted and poor ones vastly overgrown according to nature's law which provides for the survival of the fittest. This was the law too, which was to be applied to Peter. Would he grow straight and true in this foreign soil or gnarled and misshapen like the cedars and the maples that he saw? Yes. He would grow and ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... soldiers, though a certain proportion of the population will always be required for military service. With the great majority of men the struggle for existence is keen, and it is simply a question of the survival of the fittest, and of the weakest going to the wall. The requirements of the present time are therefore a capacity for endurance and an ability to withstand the effects of work day after day. We do not require athletes who are capable of performing ...
— The Art of Living in Australia • Philip E. Muskett (?-1909)
... became an obsession. It interwove with her biological work. She found herself asking more and more curiously, "Why, on the principle of the survival of the fittest, have I any sense of beauty at all?" That enabled her to go on thinking about beauty when it seemed to her right that she ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... universe. In the organic world all Nature seems to be praying in one form or another, and only those that pray with efficacy, based upon the above two conditions, survive in the struggle for existence. The economy of Nature is founded upon that inexorable law the "Survival of the Fittest"; every organism that is not in sympathy with its environment, and cannot therefore derive help and nourishment from its surroundings, perishes. Darwin tells us that the colours of flowering plants have been developed by the necessity ...
— Science and the Infinite - or Through a Window in the Blank Wall • Sydney T. Klein
... symmetrical forms, this wax-like texture, these marvellous rows of coloured, enamel-like encrustation, have been selected from almost endless and limitless possible variations, and have been accumulated and maintained there as they are in all their beauty, by survival of the fittest—by natural selection. All beauty of living things, it seems, is due to Nature's selection, and not only all beauty of colour and form, but that beauty of behaviour and excellence of inner quality which we call "goodness." ...
— More Science From an Easy Chair • Sir E. Ray (Edwin Ray) Lankester
... of the deeper needs of the Church. What intelligent acquaintance with Darwin's speculations would the world in general have made, except for two or three happy and comprehensive terms, as 'the survival of the fittest,' 'the struggle for existence,' 'the process of natural selection'? Multitudes who else would have known nothing about Comte's system, know something about it when they know that he ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... many has threatened the very foundations of human happiness and compelled the recognition of the fact that the weakness and injury of one are the weakness and injury of all. Ours is a world in which the law of the survival of the fittest not only works, but works very rapidly. Thus the more wealth a man has the more he can achieve. To-day, it is said, the various members of the Rothschild family in the different capitals of Europe control nine billions of dollars. This sum is accumulating ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis
... enterprise. The Carib strongholds were occupied, and by degrees their fierce spirit was subdued, their war dances relinquished, their war canoes destroyed, their traditions forgotten, and the bold savages, once the terror of the West Indian seas, succumbed in their turn to the inexorable law of the survival of the fittest. ...
— The History of Puerto Rico - From the Spanish Discovery to the American Occupation • R.A. Van Middeldyk
... of the second lap the real business of the race began, for the survival of the fittest had resulted in eliminations and changes of order. Jim still led, but now by only eight or nine yards. Drake had come up to second, and Adamson had dropped to a bad third. Two of the runners had given the race up, and retired, and the last man was a ...
— The Pothunters • P. G. Wodehouse
... is really nothing but a sort of new religion and an uncommonly nasty one. When people talked about the fall of man they knew they were talking about a mystery, a thing they didn't understand. Now that they talk about the survival of the fittest they think they do understand it, whereas they have not merely no notion, they have an elaborately false notion of what the words mean. The Darwinian movement has made no difference to mankind, except that, instead of talking unphilosophically about philosophy, ...
— The Club of Queer Trades • G. K. Chesterton
... the survival of the fittest in the struggle for existence, as an explanation of the origin of species, was from observation and experience. It was based on observed facts. But Darwin was an evolutionist—a disciple of Lamarck. He held the ...
— Ancient and Modern Physics • Thomas E. Willson
... resisting power and vigor of the human organism, which we had gravely underestimated. The second, that power of adaptation to new circumstances, including even the attack of infectious diseases, which we call "survival of the fittest." The third, that great, sustaining, conservative power of nature—heredity. More cheering yet, these forces came, not merely fully armed, but bearing new weapons fitted for our hands. The vigor and unconquerable toughness of the human animal presented us with three glittering ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson
... merit of this system in insuring the survival of the fittest was seen in its results. Heriot's elder brother passed away at the age of two in the course of a severe winter. Clearly he would never have been a credit to oatmeal. His younger brother broke loose at nineteen, pained his relatives exceedingly, and retired to a distant colony where the ...
— The Prodigal Father • J. Storer Clouston
... temperamentally outspoken. "I begin to wish there were no men in the world. If women are men in a higher stage of development, why didn't men die out, so that we could be rid of them? Isn't that what we generally get from the survival of the fittest?" ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... ago some of our minor poets tried to set Science to music, to write sonnets on the survival of the fittest and odes to Natural Selection. Socialism, and the sympathy with those who are unfit, seem, if we may judge from Miss Nesbit's remarkable volume, to be the new theme of song, the fresh subject-matter for poetry. The change has some advantages. Scientific laws are ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... farther east or north on the coast they will not go without turning on their persecutors. They will not put up with the shores of Labrador or Greenland, no matter how hot the season may be. The survival of the fittest is a great law, and has worked wonders in the animal world, but it must be remembered that it has to work in our day in subordination to that greater law of morality which makes weakness itself a strong tower ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... chattels, and the scalps of the white invaders. But, moralize as you may, the fiat of God had gone forth; the red man and the white man could not live peaceably together; one or the other must go. And in obedience to the law of the survival of the fittest, it was the red man that must disappear. It was, in my opinion, merely a continuation of the struggle for existence—a struggle as old as man, which began when "first the morning stars sang together," and will continue ...
— Reminiscences of a Pioneer • Colonel William Thompson
... Rome, Severus in the Illyrian provinces, and Maximin (who had been a Caesar) in Syria. Galerius still reigned, and even Maximian revoked his resignation and appeared once more as Augustus. But one by one this medley of Pretenders swept each other away, and the survival of the fittest was exemplified by the final victory of Constantine over them all. For a few years he bided his time, and then, at the head of the British army, marched on Rome. Clear-sighted enough to perceive that events ...
— Early Britain—Roman Britain • Edward Conybeare
... against an equal number of Moslems. But the latter show no constructive powers in time of peace, and have very rarely assimilated the conquered races. Putting the matter baldly, we may say that it is a question of the survival of the fittest between beavers and bears. And in the Nineteenth Century the advantage has been increasingly ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... of modern science. Nature is not stingy. She has not given the human race a meager inheritance. She did not blunder when she made the human body, nor did she allow the spirit of man to develop a civilization to whose demand his body is not equal. After its long process of development through the survival of the fittest, the human body, unless definitely diseased, is a perfectly adequate instrument, as abundantly able to cope with the complex demands of modern society as with the simpler but more strenuous life of the stone age. The body has stored within ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... roughly under three headings. The first is to assume there is a best race, to define as well as one can that best race, and to regard all other races as material for extermination. This has a fine, modern, biological air ("Survival of the Fittest"). If you are one of those queer German professors who write insanity about Welt-Politik, you assume the best race is the "Teutonic"; Cecil Rhodes affected that triumph of creative imagination, the "Anglo-Saxon race"; my friend, Moses Cohen, thinks there ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... the demands of civilization, or of the interests of a superior race, can be held to justify such a policy as that long pursued by the people of this country. The natural law of the "survival of the fittest" may doubtless be pleaded in explanation of all that has happened; but that is not a law of Christianity, nor of civilization, nor of wisdom. It is the law of greed and cruelty, which generally works in the end the destruction of its devotees. ...
— Forty-Six Years in the Army • John M. Schofield
... the Survival of the Fittest. Here physical strength begins to play its part, and the war spirit awakens, with woman as its cause. The chiefs struggle for supremacy, while their women try in vain to ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... deeply imbued with the principles on which rested the existence of the society in which they had been born. All they aspired to was to eliminate a certain number of men or people, in order to secure with greater ease certain advantages. It was the survival of the fittest, as primitive society understands it and as refined society attempts to enact, ...
— The Delight Makers • Adolf Bandelier
... In those days, the "survival of the fittest" was the rule, and if that survivor happened to live to a good old age, no one inquired about those ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett
... back of the watch. So is it with the world in which we live. These "ends" in nature are not to he attributed to "natural results," or "natural selection," results which are produced without intelligence, nor are they "the survival of the fittest," instances in which "accident and fortuity have done the work of mind." No, they are the results of a superintending and originating ...
— The Great Doctrines of the Bible • Rev. William Evans
... no salvation worth speaking of in either body of doctrine; but there is a strange, and what some might regard as a terrible parallelism between these doctrines and the inferences that may be drawn from physical science. The survival of the fittest has much in common with the doctrine of election, and philosophical necessity, as summed up in what we now call evolution, comes practically to much the same ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... hold that inheritance of functionally produced modifications is the chief factor throughout the higher stages of organic evolution, bodily as well as mental (see 'Principles of Biology,' i. 166), while I recognise the truth that throughout the lower stages survival of the fittest is the chief factor, and in the lowest ...
— Luck or Cunning? • Samuel Butler
... Municipality, with Individualists or Nationalists, or any of the various schools of though in the great field of social economics— excepting only those anti-christian economists who hold that it is an offence against the doctrine of the survival of the fittest to try to save the weakest from going to the wall, and who believe that when once a man is down the supreme duty of a self-regarding Society is to jump upon him. Such economists will naturally be disappointed with ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... it at all, yet now you do it as unconsciously as you grow your finger nails. You have a new faculty, and must have created some new bodily tissue as its organ. And you have done it solely by willing. For here there can be no question of Circumstantial Selection, or the survival of the fittest. The man who is learning how to ride a bicycle has no advantage over the non-cyclist in the struggle for existence: quite the contrary. He has acquired a new habit, an automatic unconscious habit, solely because he wanted ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... insects, of which I have seen none, one being perhaps the natural result of the other. The flowers have become singers by long practice, or else, those that were most musical having had the best chance to reproduce, we have a neat illustration of the 'survival of the fittest.' The sound is doubtless produced by a shrinking of the fibres as the sun withdraws its heat, in which case we may expect another song at sunrise, when the same result will be effected by their expanding." Searching for a camping-place in which to pass the coming ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... repression the order of the day, and the process of the survival of the fittest operating along this plane, that man who best exemplifies the repressive faculty will survive in the political warfare and thus will be brought to the front the element out of touch with the broadening influences of ...
— The Hindered Hand - or, The Reign of the Repressionist • Sutton E. Griggs
... son and other bystanders that it was all the working of evolution. If you couldn't change when your environment demanded it Nature scrapped you. Hand compositors would have to learn to set type by machinery or go down in the struggle for existence. Survival of the fittest—that was it. The doubting printer was not there to profit by this lecture. Though it was but five o'clock, he was down on the depot platform moodily waiting for ...
— The Wrong Twin • Harry Leon Wilson
... Oroid nation had dwelt in peace and security. These people cared nothing for adventure. No restless thirst for knowledge led them to explore deeply the limitless land surrounding them. Even from the earliest times no struggle for existence, no doctrine of the survival of the fittest, hung over them as with us. No wild animals harassed them; no savages menaced them. A fertile boundless land, a perfect climate, nurtured ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings
... dentist. One object is to meet the demand for information in regard to the properties and uses of tin foil; this information has been sought to be given in the simplest form consistent with scientific accuracy. The present use of tin is a case of the "survival of the fittest," because tin was used for filling teeth more than one hundred years ago. There is not a large amount of literature upon the subject, and no single text-book has treated the matter fully enough to answer the needs of both teacher and pupil. It is difficult for the student to ...
— Tin Foil and Its Combinations for Filling Teeth • Henry L. Ambler
... original parent form as much as the greyhound differs from any wild dog or the cauliflower from any wild plant. But animals or plants which thus differ in a state of nature are always classed as distinct species, and thus we see how, by the continuous survival of the fittest or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life, new species may ...
— Darwinism (1889) • Alfred Russel Wallace
... that in the course of all the ages, in various parts of our globe, many tribes of men may have arisen and perished who were in natural capacity as far superior to the primitive Aryans as these were to the races who surrounded them? Under the law of the survival of the fittest, it is not the strongest that survive, but the strongest of those that are placed in the most favorable circumstances. On any calculation of probabilities, it will seem likely enough that among the numberless small societies of men that have appeared and vanished in primeval Asia and ...
— Hiawatha and the Iroquois Confederation • Horatio Hale
... the battle for life, of varieties which possess any advantage in structure, constitution, or instinct, I have called Natural Selection; and Mr. Herbert Spencer has well expressed the same idea by the Survival of the Fittest. The term "natural selection" is in some respects a bad one, as it seems to imply conscious choice; but this will be disregarded after a little familiarity. No one objects to chemists speaking of "elective ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin
... mister; not for me. I'm making my five-pound note a week, I am, and each cove that dies off makes the survivors one richer, so to speak—survival of the fittest, they call it. So we don't talk much, and just pockets ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman
... commission in the glorious Second to head your dubious fortunes, negroes of the Fifty-fourth. That lonely kind of courage (civic courage as we call it in times of peace) is the kind of valor to which the monuments of nations should most of all be reared, for the survival of the fittest has not bred it into the bone of human beings as it has bred military valor; and of five hundred of us who could storm a battery side by side with others, perhaps not one would be found ready to risk his worldly fortunes all alone in resisting an enthroned abuse. ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... themselves. It was truly a pleasure, a relief, to be able to do something without being pushed about by people who didn't belong but thought they did. They sat back,—stiffly, of course,—and in utter stillness confessed that there could be such a thing as the survival of the fittest. Yes, there wasn't a nose there that couldn't be counted with perfect serenity. ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... lay in the very nature of those combinations which were suited to their ends (in other words, in harmony with their environment) to maintain themselves, while unfit combinations, having no proper habitat, must rapidly disappear. Thus, more than 2,000 years ago, the doctrine of the 'survival of the fittest,' which in our day, not on the basis of vague conjecture, but of positive knowledge, has been raised to such extraordinary significance, had received at all events partial enunciation. [Footnote: See 'Lange,' 2nd ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... them had heard the term "evolution;" knew anything about "the survival of the fittest." They were entirely ignorant of "protoplasm" or "bioplasm;" yet not one of them but had caught the meaning of some of these terms as they had been translated for them into the vernacular of the city slums; not one ...
— Ester Ried Yet Speaking • Isabella Alden
... artist to the subject. He divined the kind of man the first John Wingfield was; divined it almost as written in the chronicle which Jack kept in his room in hallowed fraternity. Only he bore hard on the unremitting, callous, impulsive aggressiveness of a fierce past age, with its survival of the fittest swordsmen and buccaneers, which had no heroes for him except the painters, poets, and thinkers it gave ...
— Over the Pass • Frederick Palmer
... another, those men, as readily as they prey upon society. Among them it is always merely a question of the survival of the fittest—and the fittest is always the quickest, and the strongest, ...
— A Woman at Bay - A Fiend in Skirts • Nicholas Carter
... promising him another if I found her well when I came back. I remember that he was much astonished at my parting with two blankets for the sake of such a worthless old creature. 'Why did I not leave her in the bush?' he asked. Those people carry the doctrine of the survival of the fittest to its ...
— Long Odds • H. Rider Haggard
... "the struggle for existence" is the dominant law—to the male mind, with the "survival of the fittest" and "the elimination ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman
... the nineteenth? Yes, absolutely yes. When a young man survived the "old fogy" methods of the fifties, sixties and seventies of the past century, he was, it cannot be gainsaid, an excellent artist. But he was, as a rule, the survival of the fittest. For one of him successful there were one thousand failures. Strong hands, untiring patience and a deeply musical temperament were needed to withstand the absurd soulless drilling of the fingers. Unduly prolonged, the immense amount of dry studies, the ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... England?" They may have been fed on "great shins of beef," till they became, as Benvenuto Cellini calls them, "the English wild beasts." But they increased in numbers slowly, if at all, for centuries. Those terrible laws of natural selection, which issue in "the survival of the fittest," cleared off the less fit, in every generation, principally by infantile disease, often by wholesale famine and pestilence; and left, on the whole, only those of the strongest constitutions to perpetuate a hardy, ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley
... university course lectures should have a presiding chairman would get no serious hearing. All the course lecturers now before the public dispense with chairmen. It is a case of survival of the fittest; the course lecturers who had chairmen didn't know their business and they disappeared. This does not apply to a series of three or four lectures, for in that case when the speaker has become familiar with his audience, and ...
— The Art of Lecturing - Revised Edition • Arthur M. (Arthur Morrow) Lewis
... rationing the men. All of these things had to be provided, and they were provided through a natural evolution of practical processes, crystallizing into form, tested by the duties of the day. The organization which grew up was a true survival of the fittest, both in personnel and in methods. The wonder is not that some abuses occurred, but that they were so few; not that there were occasional evidences of lack of efficiency, but that efficiency was on the whole so ...
— The Philippines: Past and Present (vol. 1 of 2) • Dean C. Worcester
... twenty-two years of uninterrupted labor he published a work in 1859, entitled "The Origin of Species," in which he aimed to show that life generally owes its course of development ot the struggle for existence and to "the survival of the fittest." ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... appalling. I realize in part, I think, the difficulty of getting the needs of the whites before a sympathizing audience. When it comes to a white man's needs and his condition, too many church members and others substitute the scientific theory of the survival of the fittest for Christ's law of love. They forget too, I fear, that many of these people in the mountains are victims of slavery as innocent as the Negro; and they do not see that their indifference is letting them lie in the hard ...
— The American Missionary - Volume 50, No. 6, June 1896 • Various
... principle by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term, "natural selection." Mr. Darwin adds that his meaning would be more accurately expressed by a phrase of Mr. Spencer's coinage, "Survival of the Fittest." ...
— At the Deathbed of Darwinism - A Series of Papers • Eberhard Dennert
... thrill. It involved violence, possibly a crime. Well, what of it? He was not the kind to be deterred by trifles. This man was nothing to him. Brotherly love, family ties—these were simply phrases to one who had never known them. He knew and obeyed only one instinct—the fight for life, the survival of the fittest. Society had waged war on him; he would be merciless in his war on society. This man—this alleged brother, threw him a sop, insulted him by offering him charity. Why should he hesitate? It was his life or another's. There was a big prize to be won. Life was sweet when one has millions to ...
— The Mask - A Story of Love and Adventure • Arthur Hornblow
... happiness to all the people. In considering the clearness and startling significance of these truths, we discover the cruel, criminal wrong of any system of competition, based on the old barbaric law of the survival of the fittest, which in its application means the pleasure and happiness of the few at the expense of the toil, pain and misery of the many. In this connection we note that man, in his evolutionary progress, has reached a point ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... been derived by a process of change from the forms which in earlier ages dwelt upon this planet. The exact manner in which these alterations were produced is not yet determined, but in large part it has evidently been brought about by the method indicated by Mr. Darwin, through the survival of the fittest individuals in the struggle ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
... think that the Indian has been absurdly pampered by the Government, and that it would be as sensible to try to change the arrangement of seasons as to attempt to prevent the survival of the fittest, or, in other words, to interfere with the gradual, but in their opinion inevitable, extermination ...
— My Native Land • James Cox
... jail-bird, to say nothing of the better-class seaman, taken mainly by gangs operating on the water, who was often content, when brought into contact with loyal men, to settle down and do his best for king and country. Amongst the pressed men, again, desertion and death made for the survival of the fittest, and in this residuum there was not wanting a certain savour. Subdued and quickened by man-o'-war discipline, they developed a dogged resolution, a super-capacity not altogether incompatible with degeneracy; and to crown all, ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson
... and obstacles of the way, men became demons of cruelty and aggression, ruthlessly thrusting aside and trampling down the weaker ones who thwarted their progress. Of pity, humanity, love, there was none, only the gold-lust, triumphant and repellent. It was the survival of the fittest, the most tenacious, the most brutal. Yet there was something grandly terrible about it all. It was a barbaric invasion, an army, each man fighting for his own hand under the banner of gold. It was conquest. Every day, as I watched that human torrent, ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... There are no Protestant labourers. If English working men, agricultural fellows, would settle in Ireland, they would soon get their Three acres and a cow. The people who can and will do the best with the land ought to have it, that's my theory. Ireland everywhere illustrates the principle of the survival of the fittest. The only way to succeed is by work. The Catholic Irish are so accustomed to leave everything to the priest that they have no self-reliance, and in worldly matters they always ask, who will help us? They are all beggars by nature. ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)
... illustrates and enforces one of nature's sternest laws: "To him that hath shall be given; from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath." Scientists call this law the survival of the fittest. The fittest are those who use what they have, who gain strength by struggle, and who survive by self-development by control of ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... forth by the "panspermists" as to meet with a ready refutation. He is laboring, of course, to strengthen his position that nature eternally works to get rid of her imperfect forms, or to ensure "the survival of the fittest." But while his facts accomplish little in this direction, they establish much in another, as the reader will see. He says: "In Staffordshire, on an estate of a relative, where I had ample means of investigation, there was a large ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... Nine o'clock, and the flowers still answering to the glow of the sun! And the people down there—in the States—called it a frozen land, a hell of ice and snow at the end of the earth, a place of the survival of the fittest! Well, to just such extremes had stupidity and ignorance gone through all the years of history, even though men called themselves super-creatures of intelligence and knowledge. It was humorous. And ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... is the central knot of the whole dark tangle. The German coveting greater economic opportunities, knowing himself strong to survive, believes in his divine right to possess. It is conscious Darwinism—the survival of the fittest, materially, which he is applying to the world—Darwinism accelerated by an intelligent will. And the non-Germanic world—the Latin world, for it is a Latin world in varying degrees of saturation outside of Germany—rejects the theory and the practice with ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... fond of beginning and ending with, there is still something behind it all their theories can't explain away? Protoplasm doesn't explain Life any more than the battery explains electricity. Instinct? Evolution? The survival of the fittest? Well, nothing is tagged for fair, and I'm more than willing to be shown. For the more I find out from the living things themselves,—you can't get truth from death, you've got to get it from life—the ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler |
