"Survival of the fittest" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... observe that the only skill—and this involves design—supposed by Mr. Darwin to be exercised in the foregoing process, is the "unerring skill" of natural selection. Natural selection, however, is, as he himself tells us, a synonym for the survival of the fittest, which last he declares to be the "more accurate" expression, and to be "sometimes" equally convenient.[9] It is clear then that he only speaks metaphorically when he here assigns "unerring skill" to ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... Barere, formed an opposition. Not that the latter were more moderate or merciful than Robespierre, but because, in the nature of things, there could be but one Dictator, and it became a question of the survival of the fittest. Carnot took little or no part in active politics. He devoted himself to the war, but he disapproved of the Terror and came to a breach with Saint-Just. Robespierre's power culminated on June 10, 1794, with the passage of the Law of 22 Prairial, which put the life of every ...
— The Theory of Social Revolutions • Brooks Adams
... Malthus should have been needed to give him the clue, when in the Note Book of 1837 there should occur—however obscurely expressed—the following forecast{13} of the importance of the survival of the fittest. "With respect to extinction, we can easily see that a variety of the ostrich (Petise{14}), may not be well adapted, and thus perish out; or on the other hand, like Orpheus{15}, being favourable, many ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... after the first few days, that Hume's one working theory of life was that of the survival of the fittest. Eminently fit himself, capable physically in strong, clean body, mentally in cool, calculating, single purposed brain, morally in a code of ethics which resolved all considerations to his working theory of life, he looked down upon other lives than his own from the passionless heights of a supreme ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory
... Write the name of Charles Darwin there (on the one hand) and the name of every theologian that ever lived there (on the other hand), and from that name has come more light to the world than from all those. His doctrine of evolution, his doctrine of the survival of the fittest, his doctrine of the origin of species, has removed in every thinking mind the last vestige of orthodox Christianity. He has not only stated, but he has demonstrated, that the inspired writer knew nothing of this world, nothing of the origin of man, nothing of geology, nothing of astronomy, ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... now know as the survival of the fittest, the mere's capacity had snuffed out her weaker spouse's incompetency; she had taken her place at the helm, because she belonged there by virtue of natural fitness. There were no tender illusions which would suffer, in seeing the husband allotted to her, probably by her parents and ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... specific type. Thus, on the one hand, while there is a perpetual civil war being waged between members of the same species, on the other hand there is a foreign war being waged by the species as a whole against its world as a whole. Hence it follows that natural selection does not secure survival of the fittest as regards individuals only, but also survival of the fittest as regards types. This is a most important point to remember, because, as a general rule, these two different causes produce exactly opposite ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... the same relation to their ordinary flight that dancing does to the every-day walk of men and women. The two seemed equally enchanted, and both sang. Little they knew of the "struggle for existence" and the "survival of the fittest." Adam and Eve, in Paradise, ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... the nature and function of good and evil. The one cannot exist without the other, and both are relative terms. Our present thought on these problems has been too largely dominated by a wrong interpretation of the theory of the survival of the fittest as the primary force in human evolution. We have assumed, and the German militarists carried the doctrine to a logical conclusion, that this hypothesis gave the sanction of a biological law to a competitive struggle between men. But such an inference was explicitly denied by Charles Darwin,[15] ...
— The Farmer and His Community • Dwight Sanderson
... minutes before you could not do 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 to, and kept trying until ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... 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
... quality or group of qualities and breeding them, is not the way of nature at all. Nature is not a breeder; she is a reckless coupler and—she slays. It was a popular misconception of the theory of the Survival of the Fittest, a misconception Lord Salisbury was at great pains to display to the British Association in 1894, that the average of a species in any respect is raised by the selective inter-breeding of the individuals ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... that under our present financial system the rich are growing richer and the poor are becoming poorer day by day, we hear some one say, "that is true, but the law of the survival of the fittest is to blame for those facts." If you will pardon me for seemingly diverging from the subject I will say something in regard to the abuse of the law of the survival of the fittest. Yes, I admit that ...
— One Thousand Secrets of Wise and Rich Men Revealed • C. A. Bogardus
... and after each the faithful struck in with the original refrain.... At first those responsories would probably have been extempore ... left to the genius or to the inspiration of the individual chanter, but gradually, by a survival of the fittest, the most beautiful ones became stereotyped and spread throughout several churches.... Later they were carefully collected, arranged and codified by St. Gregory or one of his predecessors and passed into all the books of liturgy" (Rev. M. Eaton, loc. cit.). Monsignor Battifol ...
— The Divine Office • Rev. E. J. Quigley
... that his sympathies with the melancholy stranger were not very deep, and that his idea of the survival of the fittest was the survival of the strongest. His human nature at that time was of the old Saxon type, that went directly for what it wanted, without much thought or sentiment for those weak enough ...
— Without a Home • E. P. Roe
... the woods 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 straight ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... plasticity of organization which leads to many injurious deviations of structure, as well as the redundant power of reproduction which inevitably leads to a struggle for existence, and as a consequence, to the natural selection or survival of the fittest, must appear to us superfluous laws of nature. On the other hand, an omnipotent and omniscient Creator ordains everything and foresees everything. Thus we are brought face to face with a difficulty as insoluble as is that of free will ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various
... 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 ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds - A Romance of the Future • John Jacob Astor
... of race antipathy! The contempt and hatred of white men for yellow, red, brown, and black men has worked all over earth, is working yet, and will work for ages. It is a motive of that tremendous tragedy which Spencer has entitled "the survival of the fittest," ...
— Overland • John William De Forest
... 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
... 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. It was a ...
— The Hollow of Her Hand • George Barr McCutcheon
... 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
... like everything else that comes before the public, has to prove its merits. The law of the survival of the fittest applies in this field as in others. Lydia E. Pinkham's Vegetable Compound has been used by ...
— Food and Health • Anonymous
... shirt is to the collar, that is the glorious, tough old Northern saga, or maritime spun yarn, to the canard, or duck. The yarn will wash; it passes into myth and history; it fits exactly, because it was made to order; its age and glory illustrate the survival of the fittest. ...
— The Gypsies • Charles G. Leland
... 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
... them too hard and too far. Much 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 ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... obeying this cosmic law of evolution from grossness to refinement; from crudity to perfection; from the limited to the all-inclusive, is indisputable. As the motor power of electricity has become general, we find that beasts of burden are fast disappearing from the earth, according to the law of the "survival of the fittest," this law, always being subject to change. The "fittest" means that which is best fitted to ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... symbolizes 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 ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber
... own ways of protecting what there is of any utility; there is a law of the survival of the fittest that we all appreciate. If, then, this penile appendage is of any utility, why is it that, unlike the rest of the body, it falls such an easy victim to gangrene? The procreative function seems to be, in a sense, one of the main cares of nature in its relation ...
— History of Circumcision from the Earliest Times to the Present - Moral and Physical Reasons for its Performance • Peter Charles Remondino
... paper she was suddenly afflicted by a vivid vision of Susan Burnet's father, losing heart and not knowing what to do. She had an unreasonable feeling that Susan Burnet's father must have been a small, kindly, furry, bunnyish, little man. Of course there had to be progress and the survival of the fittest. She found herself weighing what she imagined Susan Burnet's father to be like, against the ferrety face, stooping shoulders and ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... thousands of years in history, he found that Force had been felt as occult attraction — love of God and lust for power in a future life. After 1500, when this attraction began to decline, philosophers fell back on some vis a tergo — instinct of danger from behind, like Darwin's survival of the fittest; and one of the greatest minds, between Descartes and Newton — Pascal — saw the master-motor of man in ennui, which was also scientific: "I have often said that all the troubles of man come from his not knowing how to sit still." Mere restlessness forces action. "So passes the ...
— The Education of Henry Adams • Henry Adams
... Burns, the plowman and poet, "dinnered wi' a lord." The story goes that he was put at the second table. That lord is dead, but Robert Burns still lives. He is immortal. It is "the survival of the fittest" "For a' That and a' That" is a poem that wipes out the superficial value put on money and other externalities. This poem is more valuable in education than good ...
— Poems Every Child Should Know - The What-Every-Child-Should-Know-Library • Various
... 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
... or medical school would think of having in our world. The government medical schools of Dore-lyn are marvels indeed. Nothing is spared that money or talent can furnish. The full graduates of these schools are only "the survival of the fittest." Others take a secondary degree and can act as assistants or retire from the list. The government has a series of institutions that do a work similar to our hospitals and have a corps of full graduates supplying the stations. This entire system ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris
... romantically conceived, for the desolate islands and roaring tideways of the North. The common run of mankind have, from generation to generation, an instinct almost as delicate as that of Scott; but where he created new things, they only forget what is unsuitable among the old; and by survival of the fittest, a body of tradition becomes a work of art. So, in the low dens and high-flying garrets of Edinburgh, people may go back upon dark passages in the town's adventures, and chill their marrow with winter's tales about ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the doctrine of "the struggle for existence ending in the survival of the fittest" to Otare, he replied that it was an excellent principle for snakes; but he considered it beneath the dignity and wisdom of men to struggle for a life which could be maintained by the labour of love, and ought to be devoted to ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... inferior, that is, of those who are not adapted to their environment. The gradual dying out of the inferior or unadapted through competition results in the survival of the superior or better adapted, and ultimately in the survival of the fittest or those most adapted. Thus the type is raised, and we have evolution through natural selection, that is, through the elimination ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... passion can an unemployed workman feel when he is firing at an invisible unemployed workman or semi-savage in the interest of a mining concession? Nor is it true that war in these days encourages eugenics by promoting the survival of the fittest. On the contrary, the fittest, the bravest, and the biggest are the most likely to be killed. The smallest, the cowards, the men who get behind stones and stick there, will probably survive. And as to the dangers of effeminate peace, it is only the very small circle of the rich, the overfed, ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson
... the ideal of a nation being "modified en masse by transmission of the effects" of its institutions and habits. Use-inheritance will "mould its members far more rapidly and comprehensively" than can be effected by the survival of the fittest alone. ...
— Are the Effects of Use and Disuse Inherited? - An Examination of the View Held by Spencer and Darwin • William Platt Ball
... They intend to destroy bourgeois society with most of its sweet ideals and dear moralities, and chiefest among these are those that group themselves under such heads as private ownership of capital, survival of the fittest, ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... parents; these will have the advantage over others and will be the ones to grow up and have the children of the next generation again, and so on. So by constant Variation and Natural Selection—that is, the "Survival of the Fittest" in competition with the rest—there will be constant ...
— The Story of the Mind • James Mark Baldwin
... are periodically born, but a small number can survive. I have called this 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
... "Darwinism" and the theory of Lamarck, according to which the modification of living forms has been effected mainly through the needs of the living forms themselves, which vary with varying conditions—the survival of the fittest (which, as I see Mr. H. B. Baildon has just said, "sometimes comes to mean merely the survival of the survivors" {181c}) being taken as a matter of course. According to this view of evolution, there is a remarkable analogy between the development of living organs, or tools, and that of those ...
— Selections from Previous Works - and Remarks on Romanes' Mental Evolution in Animals • Samuel Butler
... "The survival of the fittest; that is the only test, after all. The man who makes good doesn't whine for justice. There's enough of it in the world to go round, and he who misses it gets all that's due him ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... "The survival of the fittest," he rambled, as he stared into the fog; "cause and effect. It explains the Universe—and me." He lifted his hand and spoke loudly, as though to some unseen familiar of the deep. "What will be the last effect? Where in the scheme of ultimate ...
— The Wreck of the Titan - or, Futility • Morgan Robertson
... dozen peach trees, and the farmer who keeps two cows and trades the surplus butter for calico. These things have absolutely forced progress upon the farmer. It is indeed a "struggle for life." Out of it comes the "survival of the fittest," and the fittest ...
— Chapters in Rural Progress • Kenyon L. Butterfield
... as I do, that all the corporeal and mental organs (excepting those which are neither advantageous nor disadvantageous to the possessor) of all beings have been developed through natural selection, or the survival of the fittest, together with use or habit, will admit that these organs have been formed so that their possessors may compete successfully with other beings, and thus increase in number. Now an animal may be led to pursue that course of action which is most beneficial ...
— The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, Volume I • Francis Darwin
... Settlements, is nearly seventy miles in circumference, with a population of about one hundred thousand, one-half of which is Chinese, the remainder Malays, Klings, Javanese, Hindoos, and every other Eastern race under the sun, I believe, and a few Europeans. Here the "survival of the fittest" is being fought out under the protection of the British flag, which insures peace and order wherever it floats. In this struggle we have no hesitation in backing the Heathen Chinee against the field. Permanent occupation by any Western race is of course out of the question. An Englishman would ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie |
