They say cats have nine lives. I’ve had 12 already and I don’t know how many more I’ll have.

What the devil is the point of surviving, going on living, when it’s a drag? But you see, that’s what people do.

A fool’s brain digests philosophy into folly, science into superstition, and art into pedantry. Hence University education.

Owners of dogs will have noticed that, if you provide them with food and water and shelter and affection, they will think you are God. Whereas owners of cats are compelled to realize that, if you provide them with food and water and affection, they draw the conclusion that they are God.

The smallest feline is a masterpiece.

If you look at the movie ‚Belly,‘ I identify with Sincere the most. I am a gangster. I love my lady to death. I’m not in the game for the wrong reasons. I’m not in the game for the glory. I’m in the game to survive so the people that I love could be straight. I’m a highly intelligent individual.

Don’t dress to kill, dress to survive.

Our pleasures were simple – they included survival.

While we should never give up our principles, we must also realize that we cannot maintain our principles unless we survive.

Keeping an active mind has been vital to my survival, as has been maintaining a sense of humor.

We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones.

I wouldn’t be here today if it were not for the NHS. I have received a large amount of high-quality treatment without which I would not have survived.

If civilization is to survive, we must cultivate the science of human relationships – the ability of all peoples, of all kinds, to live together, in the same world at peace.

If you try and take a cat apart to see how it works, the first thing you have on your hands is a nonworking cat.

You cannot share your life with a dog, as I had done in Bournemouth, or a cat, and not know perfectly well that animals have personalities and minds and feelings.

Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.

Luck is a very thin wire between survival and disaster, and not many people can keep their balance on it.

Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of.

I’m not the kind of cat that’s going to cut off an ear if I can’t do something.

It seems strange that bears, so fond of all sorts of flesh, running the risks of guns and fires and poison, should never attack men except in defense of their young. How easily and safely a bear could pick us up as we lie asleep! Only wolves and tigers seem to have learned to hunt man for food, and perhaps sharks and crocodiles.

I busted a mirror and got seven years bad luck, but my lawyer thinks he can get me five.

Soldiers, I had lately like to have been taken from you by the attempt of a few desperate men, but by the grace and providence of the gods, I am still preserved.

If there was an observer on Mars, they would probably be amazed that we have survived this long.

I was born on a full moon. Both my children were born on full moons, too. Some people say that’s scary. It is what it is, man, I don’t be trippin‘. I couldn’t tell God when I wanted to be born.

Statistics show that of those who contract the habit of eating, very few survive.

A prisoner of war is a man who tries to kill you and fails, and then asks you not to kill him.

There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.

I certainly know that I would not be able to survive if it were not for the fact that I am being upheld by the prayers of so many people.

I expected to die. At no time before the trial did I expect to escape with my life. Yet being executed in the gas chamber did not necessarily mean defeat. It could be one more step to bring the community to a higher level of consciousness.

I was taught that the human brain was the crowning glory of evolution so far, but I think it’s a very poor scheme for survival.

For me life is continuously being hungry. The meaning of life is not simply to exist, to survive, but to move ahead, to go up, to achieve, to conquer.

By any accepted standard, I have had more than nine lives. I counted them up once, and there were 13 times I almost and maybe should have died.

To survive it is often necessary to fight and to fight you have to dirty yourself.

A black cat crossing your path signifies that the animal is going somewhere.

Nature is often hidden, sometimes overcome, seldom extinguished.

It is not easy to see how the more extreme forms of nationalism can long survive when men have seen the Earth in its true perspective as a single small globe against the stars.

To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.

Superstition is to religion what astrology is to astronomy the mad daughter of a wise mother. These daughters have too long dominated the earth.

My mother was a public school teacher in Virginia, and we didn’t have any money, we just survived on happiness, on being a happy family.

It is true that we are weak and sick and ugly and quarrelsome but if that is all we ever were, we would millenniums ago have disappeared from the face of the earth.

Certainly it is valuable to a trained writer to crash in an aircraft which burns. He learns several important things very quickly. Whether they will be of use to him is conditioned by survival. Survival, with honor, that outmoded and all-important word, is as difficult as ever and as all-important to a writer.

If I were dropped out of a plane into the ocean and told the nearest land was a thousand miles away, I’d still swim. And I’d despise the one who gave up.

I have no definite talent or trade, and how I stay alive is largely a matter of magic.

Life is warfare.

A countryman between two lawyers is like a fish between two cats.

When you go to war as a boy, you have a great illusion of immortality. Other people get killed, not you… Then, when you are badly wounded the first time, you lose that illusion, and you know it can happen to you.

We all live in a house on fire, no fire department to call; no way out, just the upstairs window to look out of while the fire burns the house down with us trapped, locked in it.

America is not nearly done. We’re only in the beginning. Who knows who we will be? Who knows… what color we will be? It is all something that, maybe, our descendants – if they survive that long – will see.

It has actually been suggested that warfare may have been the principle evolutionary pressure that created the huge gap between the human brain and that of our closest living relatives, the anthropoid apes. Whole groups of hominids with inferior brains could not win wars and were therefore exterminated.

The cause of my life has been to oppose superstition. It’s a battle you can’t hope to win – it’s a battle that’s going to go on forever. It’s part of the human condition.

In all my wild mountaineering, I have enjoyed only one avalanche ride; and the start was so sudden, and the end came so soon, I thought but little of the danger that goes with this sort of travel, though one thinks fast at such times.

If I should ever be captured, I want no negotiation – and if I should request a negotiation from captivity they should consider that a sign of duress.

I think we have a good chance of surviving long enough to colonize the solar system.

When you are a beginning film maker you are desperate to survive. The most important thing in the end is survival and being able to get to your next picture.

I die adoring God, loving my friends, not hating my enemies, and detesting superstition.

Fear is the main source of superstition, and one of the main sources of cruelty. To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.

Confidence, as a teenager? Because I knew what I loved. I loved to read; I loved to listen to music; and I loved cats. Those three things. So, even though I was an only kid, I could be happy because I knew what I loved.

I have heard of Texas pioneers living without bread or anything made from the cereals for months without suffering, using the breast-meat of wild turkeys for bread. Of this kind, they had plenty in the good old days when life, though considered less safe, was fussed over the less.

If my survival caused another to perish, then death would be sweeter and more beloved.

I got a chain letter by fax. It’s very simple. You just fax a dollar bill to everybody on the list.

No matter how much cats fight, there always seem to be plenty of kittens.