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.

The original reason to start the project, which was that the Germans were a danger, started me off on a process of action, which was to try to develop this first system at Princeton and then at Los Alamos, to try to make the bomb work.

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.

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.

I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do.

We live in a time-crunched world, and just about everything we do seems to be urgent.

I felt unhappy and trapped. If I left baseball, where could I go, what could I do to earn enough money to help my mother and to marry Rachel? The solution to my problem was only days away in the hands of a tough, shrewd, courageous man called Branch Rickey, the president of the Brooklyn Dodgers.

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.

Old men are dangerous: it doesn’t matter to them what is going to happen to the world.

Just as courage is the danger of life, so is fear its safeguard.

Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold.

Why does man kill? He kills for food. And not only food: frequently there must be a beverage.

I have, indeed, no abhorrence of danger, except in its absolute effect – in terror.

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

Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them humanity cannot survive.

The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation.

When Thomas Edison worked late into the night on the electric light, he had to do it by gas lamp or candle. I’m sure it made the work seem that much more urgent.

There is poison in the fang of the serpent, in the mouth of the fly and in the sting of a scorpion; but the wicked man is saturated with it.

To a profound pessimist about life, being in danger is not depressing.

Our pleasures were simple – they included survival.

Many people say that this is not an easy issue, we cannot just say that this is how it is, it’s not black and white. But I say that this is black and white. Either we stop the emissions or we don’t. There are no gray areas when it comes to survival.

If you have a particular faith or religion, that is good. But you can survive without it.

After a hard day of basic training, you could eat a rattlesnake.

It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid.

The true man wants two things: danger and play. For that reason he wants woman, as the most dangerous plaything.

In Buddhism, we talk of meditation as an act of awakening, to be awake to the fact that the earth is in danger and living species are in danger.

Convictions, in the end, they can be dangerous, but a world without them is just kind of an awful kind of gray, amorphous mass.

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.

The real danger is not inaction. The real danger is when politicians and CEOs are making it look like action is happening when in fact nothing is being done.

Without a sense of urgency, desire loses its value.

I probably wouldn’t have made it this far if I were a refugee.

Life is a gamble. You can get hurt, but people die in plane crashes, lose their arms and legs in car accidents; people die every day. Same with fighters: some die, some get hurt, some go on. You just don’t let yourself believe it will happen to you.

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.

When you’re drowning, you don’t say ‚I would be incredibly pleased if someone would have the foresight to notice me drowning and come and help me,‘ you just scream.

In this business, by the time you realize you’re in trouble, it’s too late to save yourself. Unless you’re running scared all the time, you’re gone.

Politics is almost as exciting as war, and quite as dangerous. In war you can only be killed once, but in politics many times.

We’re all caught up in circumstances, and we’re all good and evil. When you’re really hungry, for instance, you’ll do anything to survive. I think the most evil thing – well, maybe that’s too strong – but certainly a very evil thing is judgment, the sin of ignorance.

Someone asked me, if I were stranded on a desert island what book would I bring… ‚How to Build a Boat.‘

It’s fun to be hopelessly in love. It’s dangerous, but it’s fun.

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.

Reading, solitude, idleness, a soft and sedentary life, intercourse with women and young people, these are perilous paths for a young man, and these lead him constantly into danger.

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.

All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume.

The nation which can prefer disgrace to danger is prepared for a master and deserves one.

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

Desperation is a necessary ingredient to learning anything, or creating anything. Period. If you ain’t desperate at some point, you ain’t interesting.

As soon as there is life there is danger.

The fishermen know that the sea is dangerous and the storm terrible, but they have never found these dangers sufficient reason for remaining ashore.

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.

Nothing in all the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.

It was the Law of the Sea, they said. Civilization ends at the waterline. Beyond that, we all enter the food chain, and not always right at the top.

War is the province of danger.

Love is an adventure and a conquest. It survives and develops, like the universe itself, only by perpetual discovery.

Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art… It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things that give value to survival.

People need motivation to do anything. I don’t think human beings learn anything without desperation.

John F. Kennedy was the victim of the hate that was a part of our country. It is a disease that occupies the minds of the few but brings danger to the many.

The target of preventive war must have several characteristics. It must be virtually defenceless; it must be important enough to be worth the trouble; it must be possible to portray it as the ultimate evil and an imminent threat to our survival.

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 have found it easier to identify with the characters who verge upon hysteria, who were frightened of life, who were desperate to reach out to another person. But these seemingly fragile people are the strong people really.

It is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad.

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.