"Survival of the fittest" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... survival of the fittest," said he. "If he had been the better man she would not have deserted him. Let's drop the subject, for I have ...
— Tales of Terror and Mystery • Arthur Conan Doyle
... models which have proved reliable and efficient under normal conditions are unsuited to military operations. The early days of the war enabled those of doubtful value to be eliminated, the result being that those machines which are now in use represent the survival of the fittest. Experience has furthermore emphasised the necessity of reducing the number of types to the absolute minimum. This weeding-out process is being continued and there is no doubt that by the time the war is concluded the ...
— Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War • Frederick A. Talbot
... Darwin's theories, to the effect that nature weeds out the weak and unfit, leaving the others to continue the species; the result is called "the survival of the fittest." ...
— Modern Prose And Poetry; For Secondary Schools - Edited With Notes, Study Helps, And Reading Lists • Various
... that it nearly blin's ye." No doubt some kind of specific was required on such a trying day as Saturday, for it was indeed a clear case of illustrating the old adage, when exclusively applied to man, about the survival of the fittest. There is this about Ibrox Park, however, which certainly recommends it to the impartial spectator—fine even turf, without a flaw, and no advantage even to the home club itself when playing matches. It is well sheltered, and the arrangements for the big ...
— Scottish Football Reminiscences and Sketches • David Drummond Bone
... all who were conscious 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 called ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... 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 extreme, ...
— Long Odds • H. Rider Haggard
... have advanced, although unconscious of any such theory, except that so broadly and unqualifiedly put 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 and extremely barren heath, which had never been touched ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... 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
... beggars, who are as lithe as monkeys. If they had run it would have been easy to get a cut at them; so it would if they had stood up. But they were as cool as cucumbers, and dodged just at the right moment. Of course some were not quite so spry as others, and got cut down; it was a case of the survival of the fittest. What acrobats they would be in time if this game lasted ...
— For Fortune and Glory - A Story of the Soudan War • Lewis Hough
... chances. The fault lies with the army people at Washington, who give credentials to any one who asks. To The Independent and other periodicals—in no sense newspapers, and they give seven to one paper, consequently we as a class are a pest to the officers and to each other. Fortunately, the survival of the fittest is the test and only the best men in every sense get to the front. There are fifty others at the base who keep the wire loaded with rumors, so when after great difficulty we get the correct news back to Daiquire a Siboney there is no room for it. Some of the "war correspondents" ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis
... has vitiated our natural science, our political science, our history, our philosophy, and even our religion. Science declared that 'the survival of the fittest' was a law of nature, though nature has condemned to extinction the majestic animals of the saurian era, and has carefully preserved the bug, the ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... Man, and had made a vivid, somewhat fanciful picture of that personage's pathetic beginnings as a miasm floating on the earth's surface, and of his accidental, no less pathetic progression as a Survival of the Fittest. He gathered that even more than old Jaegers, Mr. Ricardo hated God Almighty and Jesus Christ, the latter of whom was intimately connected with something called a Sun Myth—chiefly, Robert supposed, ...
— The Dark House • I. A. R. Wylie
... more than the usual number of Russians were going hungry to bed, America undertook to abrogate the law of the survival of the fittest by sending the starving wretches a ship-load of provisions. Dr. T. DeWitt Talmage, Dr. Louis Klopsch and other prominent Americans were sent over as commissioners to give out the grub. While in Russia they were permitted, as a special concession, to speak to the Caesarovitch, who afterwards succeeded ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... 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 might be produced. This requires ...
— The Foundations of the Origin of Species - Two Essays written in 1842 and 1844 • Charles Darwin
... [622-4] This survival of the fittest which I have here sought to express in mechanical terms, is that which Mr. Darwin has called "natural selection, or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life."—HERBERT SPENCER: ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... once when I had to bake sourdough bread, I pointed out that the garden needed weedin', an' explained to him just what effect weedin' had on garden truck. He sez to me, "My motto is, 'Competition results in the survival of the fittest.' I ain't no Socialist." When I asked him what this bunch of words meant, he told me that he didn't know of any exercise 'at would do me so much good as learnin' to think for myself; an' that's all the satisfaction ...
— Happy Hawkins • Robert Alexander Wason
... about with us, ready to burst at any moment into flame, the smouldering and sinister traits of character by means of which they lived through so many massacres, harming others, but themselves unharmed.... If evolution and the survival of the fittest be true at all, the destruction of prey and of human rivals must have been among the most important of man's primitive functions, the fighting and the chasing instincts must have become ingrained. Certain perceptions must immediately, and without the intervention of inferences and ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas
... slavery, the North would have the right to hold the South in the Union. If the South wanted to stuff fate into a small pocket of logic and allow their narrow bigotry to get the better of their reason, I was in favor of licking them in the name of sport and in justification of Darwin's law of the survival of the fittest. ...
— Children of the Market Place • Edgar Lee Masters
... this is the view that anthropology gives us. The foreign plant, it is true, will gradually change, but a native plant will ultimately take its place by the law of the "survival of the fittest." The exotic must die out, for it was but a hothouse plant, reared in ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, March 1887 - Volume 1, Number 2 • Various
... believe," he asked, "in the universal principle, the survival of the fittest? Where there is wealth there must ...
— The Lighted Way • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... the tug of war. Teeth, axe, gun, fire, dog, bear, and boys all mixed up in a fight to the finish. Finally, as bruin was not fully recovered from the comatose state of his winter hibernating, after many scratches and thumps, cuts and shots, came the survival of the fittest. ...
— The Gentleman from Everywhere • James Henry Foss
... sacrificed to the next generation—an outrageous absurdity. People snivel over the deaths of babies; I see nothing to grieve about. If a child dies, why, the probabilities are it ought to die; if it lives, it lives, and you get survival of the fittest. We don't want to choke the world with people, most of them rickety and wheezing; let us be ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... whenever it may be found necessary, under proper hygienic conditions. It has been nowhere so energetically carried out as in the Nord. Of course, such a law as this flies directly in the face of the great gospel of the 'survival of the fittest.' But though that gospel was introduced to Paris on the stage as one of the curiosities of the Centennial Exposition of 1889, it has made little progress as yet in Catholic France. Even at the theatres in Paris, I am glad to say, the popular instinct still regulates the queue ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert
... end. In the West, virgin yet recalcitrant, every man stood—or fell—by force of his own exertions; every man, without fear or favour, struggled for fortune, for competence—or for existence. It was a case of the survival of the fittest. In face of bleak Nature—the burning alkali desert, the obdurate soil, the rock-ribbed mountains,—all men were free and equal, in a camaraderie of personal effort. In this primitive democracy, every man demanded for himself what he saw others getting. The pretender, the hypocrite, the sham, the ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson
... no influence at all in the vegetable world; and probably nothing contributed so much to discredit evolution, in the early part of this century, as the floods of easy ridicule which were poured upon this part of Lamarck's speculation. The theory of natural selection, or survival of the fittest, was suggested by Wells in 1813, and further elaborated by Matthew in 1831. But the pregnant suggestions of these writers remained practically unnoticed and forgotten, until the theory was independently devised and promulgated by Darwin and Wallace in 1858, and the effect ...
— Darwiniana • Thomas Henry Huxley
... seems to become more intelligible or less puzzling when it is thrown back into a series of beginnings and endings. This method also was in harmony with those vague ideas of evolution and of the survival of the fittest which we have detected in myth. The various tentative human races of the Popol Vuh degenerated or were destroyed because they did not fulfil the purposes for which they were made. In Brahmanic myth we shall see that type after type was condemned and perished ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang
... visit has not been in vain," he thought. "I have delayed matters, and that now means a great deal. She will marry the survivor of this financial gale, and in every man's philosophy the survival of the fittest is always the ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... either with Socialists of the State, or Socialists of the 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 ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... struggle for existence. These minute 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
... were not made in a day, nor in a thousand years, nor in a million years. As said the first Greek philosopher, Empedocles, who 560 B.C. adumbrated the "survival of the fittest" theory of Darwin, they are the result of ceaseless trials of nature. While the Sequoia was first emerging from the Carboniferous, or Coal Period, the reptile-like ancestors of these mammals, covered with ...
— American Big Game in Its Haunts • Various
... my recollections to get thoroughly strained free from all chaff till nothing be except the pure gold; allow my memory to choose out what is truly memorable by a process of natural selection; and I piously believe that in this way I ensure the Survival of the Fittest. If I make notes for future use, or if I am obliged to write letters during the course of my little excursion, I so interfere with the process that I can never again find out what is worthy of being preserved, or what should be given in full length, what in torso, ...
— Essays of Travel • Robert Louis Stevenson
... 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 scheming ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... tenets helped much in the war which the new science was forced to wage with the odium theologicum. The new science, it must be said, perhaps has hardly yet made sure its footing. Are Natural Selection and Survival of the Fittest clews with which we can face confidently the workings of the "roaring-gloom that weaves for God the garment we see him by"? But no doctrine is better accepted than that in some way Evolution and not ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer
... treatment on my lofty, self-sacrificing character, evidenced by my pursuit of the chaste in art and the sane in philosophy. But all hope had then well-nigh departed. I realized that there were inconsistencies in the theories of the survival of the fittest and natural selection. I was an example of the exception to the rule. Excluded, I became the last of my race. I was the last candy in the box—just as full of sugar as those that had been devoured, but condemned to rattle in solitude because, ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent
... pales and pines and seems to lose its ambition. The tree, knowing it has lost its grip, then seems to grow thin and gaunt, and one day it goes crashing down, to rot and furnish nourishment for the giants that overwhelmed it. The tree's life, like ours, is a struggle for existence, with the survival of the fittest." ...
— Grace Harlowe's Overland Riders in the Great North Woods • Jessie Graham Flower
... 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 ...
— The Girl in the Golden Atom • Raymond King Cummings
... reconciling of bayonet-drill and high explosives with the words "Love one another." Or if bayonet-drill and high-explosive force were to be the rule of life in preparation for another struggle such as this, then at least let men put hypocrisy away and return to the primitive law of the survival of the fittest in a jungle world subservient to the king of beasts. The devotion of military chaplains to the wounded, their valor, their decorations for gallantry under fire, their human comradeship and spiritual sincerity, would not bridge the gulf in the minds of many soldiers between a gospel ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... 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
... numerous denizens of the deep and air, were sporting about in fearless indifference to the presence of their great enemy, man, but these were unheeded until hunger began to affect the Eskimo. Then the war began, with its usual result—"the survival of the fittest." ...
— The Walrus Hunters - A Romance of the Realms of Ice • R.M. Ballantyne
... walk through 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 ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... side with his. For neither is there record beyond the scattered implements of the stone age and the rude drawings of the cave-dwellers, from which one may see that warfare was the chief life of both. The subjugation of the weaker by the stronger is the story of all time; the "survival of the fittest," the modern ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell
... rise to a Battle for Life. In this battle those are the victors who are the best able to secure food for themselves and their offspring and are best able by fight or flight to protect themselves from their enemies. This is called the Law of the Survival of the Fittest, but remember, the Fittest are not always the best or most highly developed forms, but simply those forms best suited to the then existing environment. These two extremely interesting papers of Wallace are printed as the two first chapters of his book "Natural Selection ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte
... history is prolific only in negation. A correct interpretation of its pages teaches us that it has not taught the lesson of the "survival of the fittest," but rather the survival of the strongest. That the strongest is not always the "fittest" needs [6] no commentary. That the fit should survive is the genetic law of nature, and it has been strictly obeyed by biology and humanity when these sciences ...
— The Eugenic Marriage, Volume I. (of IV.) - A Personal Guide to the New Science of Better Living and Better Babies • W. Grant Hague, M.D.
... natural selection by means of the survival of the fittest in the struggle for existence. Changes in the conditions and surroundings of life, and more or less {41} perfect adaptation of the organisms to the new conditions of form, color, food and habit, are the main causes of those individual variations, the accumulation of which ...
— The Theories of Darwin and Their Relation to Philosophy, Religion, and Morality • Rudolf Schmid
... 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,' ...
— Fragments of science, V. 1-2 • John Tyndall
... 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 effects. Success in the civil war, where each is ...
— Darwin, and After Darwin (Vol. 1 and 3, of 3) • George John Romanes
... and which still remain what they were, the doctrine of Evolution adds the design of a perpetual progress. Things are so arranged that animals are perpetually better adapted to the life they have to live. The very phrase which we commonly use to sum up Darwin's teaching, the survival of the fittest, implies a perpetual diminution of pain and increase of enjoyment for all creatures that can feel. If they are fitter for their surroundings, most certainly they will find life easier to live. And, as if to mark still more plainly the beneficence of the whole work, the less developed creatures, ...
— The Relations Between Religion and Science - Eight Lectures Preached Before the University of Oxford in the Year 1884 • Frederick, Lord Bishop of Exeter
... Great War on land and sea were now beginning to encircle the earth. While the gigantic armies on the battle grounds of Europe were engaged in the greatest test of "the survival of the fittest" that the world had ever witnessed, while the sharp encounters on the seas were carrying the war around the globe, the outbreaks in the Far East were bringing the Orient and the Occident—the two competitive systems of civilization—into a strange alignment. The Moslem world was ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume III (of VIII) - History of the European War from Official Sources • Various
... student of Nature should be to encourage the survival of the fittest. There is a grass called nut grass, and another called Parramatta grass, either of which holds its own against anything living or dead. The average gardening manual gives you recipes for destroying these. Why should you destroy them in ...
— Three Elephant Power • Andrew Barton 'Banjo' Paterson
... northern town, the man with a 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 is the ...
— Chapters in Rural Progress • Kenyon L. Butterfield
... at the battle of Jena. According to the philosophy of force, this was because Prussia was 'inferior' and France was 'superior.' Suppose we admit for the moment that this was the case. The selection now represents the survival of the fittest, the selection which perfects the human species. But what shall we say of the battle of Leipsic? At Leipsic, in 1813, all the values were reversed; it is now France which is the 'inferior' nation.... Furthermore, a large number of the same generals and soldiers who took ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... Convention. It is as useless to deny an English parentage for the American Constitution as to deny that there were English colonies in America. So did the heirs of the ages avoid the mistakes of the past by seeking the results of the law of the survival of the fittest. They form a strong contrast with another people, less fitted by inheritance for self-government, who were at about the same time entering upon the task of constitution-making. "It is somewhat singular that we should be engaged ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks
... (147/1. This paragraph was published in "Life and Letters," II., page 390. It is not clear why a belief in "direct action" should diminish the glory of Natural Selection, since the changes so produced must, like any other variations, pass through the ordeal of the survival of the fittest. On the whole question of direct action see Mr. Adam Sedgwick's "Presidential Address to the Zoological Section ...
— More Letters of Charles Darwin - Volume I (of II) • Charles Darwin
... when population increases too rapidly. But his book had lain unfruitful to naturalists since 1798, until Darwin read it, and with his special knowledge evolved from it the brilliant idea of the preservation of better-equipped races in the struggle for life, or, as Herbert Spencer put it, the survival of the fittest. At one bound the gloomy revelations of misery which the "Essay on Population" contained, were exchanged for the bright view of perpetual progress and improvement as being necessitated and brought about by the very struggle which ensued upon the natural increase of animal and ...
— Life of Charles Darwin • G. T. (George Thomas) Bettany
... offer of mercy, and so looking around him, and seeing many going astray, he would be tempted to congratulate himself on his success, when so many failed, and to fondly imagine that it was a case of the survival of the fittest. Once let the Christian grasp the actual truth, and he is deprived of this element of self-glorification. His title to honour is removed by the thought that an exterior power, unknown to himself, drew him with the cords of love, or drove him with the lash of fear. There are ...
— General Gordon - A Christian Hero • Seton Churchill
... Where snow is deep and ice is stark, And half the year is cold and dark; He still survives a clime like that By growing fur, by growing fat. These traits, O bear, which thou transmittest Prove the Survival of the Fittest. ...
— Communism and Christianism - Analyzed and Contrasted from the Marxian and Darwinian Points of View • William Montgomery Brown
... chapters of this book Moses' praises of Hebrew valor in marching into a land already occupied and utterly destroying men, women and children, seems much like the rejoicing of those who believe in exterminating the aboriginees in America. Evidently Moses believed in the survival of the fittest and that his own people were the fittest. He teaches the necessity of exclusiveness, that the hereditary traits of the people may not be lost by intermarriage. Though the Israelites, like the Puritans, had notable foremothers as well as forefathers, ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... existed. Have we any reason to doubt 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 ...
— Hiawatha and the Iroquois Confederation • Horatio Hale
... the property, had its advantages. We will come back to self-government yet, but higher up in the scale. It was like a big country school, in a country town, where lessons in self-reliance are handed out with the bark on. The survival of the fittest prevails, and out of the mass emerges now and then a strong man who makes ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 13 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Lovers • Elbert Hubbard
... only a slight variation of Tag-Tug, pronounced Uttu. For the real beginning of humanity we refer you to Darwin's Origin of Species.' And then the modern man would go on to justify plutocracy to the mediaeval man by talking about the Struggle for Life and the Survival of the Fittest; and how the strongest man seized authority by means of anarchy, and proved himself a gentleman by behaving like a cad. Now I do not base my beliefs on the theology of John Ball, or on the literal and materialistic reading of the text of Genesis; though I think the story of Adam and Eve infinitely ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... doubt, by the suggestions that had been made to the Admiralty, that their standard proof strain was not only too high in itself, but produced permanent damage to what at the outset was of the toughest iron. My system of continued proof-straining was, in fact, another exemplification of the "Survival of the Fittest"! ...
— James Nasmyth's Autobiography • James Nasmyth
... indirectly one of the causes of the World War seems to me quite obvious. Unwittingly the great and gentle naturalist has more to answer for than he ever dreamed of. His biological doctrine of the struggle for existence, natural selection, and the survival of the fittest, fairly intoxicated the Germans from the first. These theories fell in well with their militarism and their natural cruelty and greediness. Their philosophers took them up eagerly. Weissmann fairly made a god of natural selection, as did other German thinkers. And when they ...
— Under the Maples • John Burroughs
... it unjust; they call it simply business,'" said Faith bitterly. "The one who sells the most goods is considered the smartest. It is a case where might makes right—the survival of the fittest." ...
— For Gold or Soul? - The Story of a Great Department Store • Lurana W. Sheldon
... "that's good news! Then there is no such thing as 'the survival of the fittest,' and the ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... 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
... of beauty 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 should be thinking ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... independence. In the spring of 1849 no Italian prince preserved that appearance except the King of Sardinia. Many causes contributed to the elimination, but most of all the logic of events. It was a case of the survival of the fittest. What seemed a calamity was ...
— The Liberation of Italy • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... sixteen and twenty-two, when she arranges a match with young Hambell, of Cambell & Hambell, who fatuously considers himself her first love, and between engagements the P. D. (she is selected by the cut-in system at dances, which favors the survival of the fittest) has other sentimental last kisses in the moonlight, or the ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... that covets most and by power gets most, that race shall survive!" And here 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 ...
— The World Decision • Robert Herrick
... fact that I've nothing to blame but myself. I'm not adequate, that's the trouble; no charm, you see,' Mr. Kane again almost mused, 'no charm. Charm is the great thing, and it means more than it seems to mean, all evolution, the survival of the fittest—natural selection—is in it, when you come to think of it. If I'd had charm, personality, or, well, greatness of some sort, I'd have probably won Althea long ago. You know, of course, that it's Althea I'm in love with, and have been for years and years. Well, there it is,' Franklin ...
— Franklin Kane • Anne Douglas Sedgwick
... 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 till ...
— Reminiscences of a Pioneer • Colonel William Thompson
... regions with a Bible in one hand and a shotgun in the other. The inhabitants of those regions that he cannot convert with the aid of the Bible and bring into his markets, he gets rid of with the shotgun. It is but another demonstration of the survival of the fittest." (Hon. C.A. Sulloway, Rochester, ...
— "Imperialism" and "The Tracks of Our Forefathers" • Charles Francis Adams
... numbers, instead of winged 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 ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor
... 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 ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... 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 ...
— Round the World • Andrew Carnegie
... individuals in any particular 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 above the average. ...
— Mankind in the Making • H. G. Wells
... there has been a survival of the fittest. Doubtless this is so. So in the future there will be a survival of the fittest. What is it? Wisdom, gentleness, meekness, brotherly kindness, and charity. Over those who have these traits death hath no permanent ...
— Recreations in Astronomy - With Directions for Practical Experiments and Telescopic Work • Henry Warren
... own time. The Baron offers a model of correspondence on both sides, and, if his example is followed, up goes the price of "Celebrities," and, consequently, of interviewed and interviewers, there will be only a survival of the fittest. ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 99., October 25, 1890 • Various
... 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 ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... to quarrel over these "revelations"; that He allowed them to persecute, and slay, and torture each other on account of divergent readings of his "revelations" for ages and ages; and that He is still looking on while a number of bewildered and antagonistic religions fight each other to achieve the survival of the fittest. Is that a reasonable theory? Is it the kind of theory a reasonable man can accept? Is it consonant with ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford
... the modifications which follow use and disuse can by no possibility account for changes in the numbers of vertebrae; but after recognizing spontaneous, or rather fortuitous, variation as a factor, we can see that where an additional vertebra hence resulting (as in some pigeons) proves beneficial, survival of the fittest may make it a constant character; and there may, by further like additions, be produced extremely long strings of vertebrae, such as snakes show us. Similarly with the mammary glands. It is not an unreasonable supposition that by the effects of ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer
... 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 the ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad
... 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 in the class but perceived that ...
— Ester Ried Yet Speaking • Isabella Alden
... the coffin of our beloved is there soothing comfort in the satisfactory reflection that perhaps at some distant epoch, by the harmonious operation of "Natural Selection" and by virtue of the "Conservation of Force," the "Survival of the fittest" will certainly ensure the "Differentiation" the "Evolution" of our buried treasure into some new, strange, superior type of creature, to us for ever unknown and utterly unrecognizable? Tormented by ...
— Infelice • Augusta Jane Evans Wilson
... 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) ...
— My Life as an Author • Martin Farquhar Tupper
... that no very great difference exists between them save for the advantages presented by life in the West for the higher development of character. Western people are usually brighter, quicker, more progressive and less conservative, and more liberal than those from whom they came. The survival of the fittest is the rule out there and the qualities of character necessary to that end are brought to the top by the strenuous life necessitated by the hardships of the frontier. If the people are not any better than they were, it is because they are ...
— A Little Book for Christmas • Cyrus Townsend Brady
... nine o'clock. 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 ...
— The Alaskan • James Oliver Curwood
... pivots: one, the illimitable fecundity which she has given to all species: the other, the innumerable difficulties which reduce the results of that fecundity." Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck followed in the same sense. They thus admit the survival of the fittest as fully as Mr. Darwin himself, though they do not make use of this particular expression. The dispute turns not upon natural selection, which is common to all writers on evolution, but upon the nature and causes ...
— The Humour of Homer and Other Essays • Samuel Butler
... become dangerous to push 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 ...
— Reflections and Comments 1865-1895 • Edwin Lawrence Godkin
... 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
... true almost invariably, if we look at social questions of every kind in a comprehensive way, that the survival of the fittest means the survival of the morally best? That the religion which endures is of the highest type? Business success in the long run, is so strongly based upon mutual confidence and trust, that, especially in these later ...
— The Making of a Nation - The Beginnings of Israel's History • Charles Foster Kent and Jeremiah Whipple Jenks
... and 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 ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... difficulty in applying the law of the survival of the fittest to the facts of the destruction of Greece until it occurred to him that in this instance the strongest was the fittest. Civilized people's have been destroyed by ruder races ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... to reproduce, and if the best stock survives to perpetuate its kind. "This preservation of favourable individual differences and variations, and the destruction of those which are injurious, I have called natural selection, or the survival of the fittest," Darwin wrote; and he went on to show that the principal checks on increase were overcrowding, the difficulty of obtaining food, destruction by enemies, and the lethal effects of climate. These causes may be conveniently ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... to life and a respectable member of society. With him came the growth of political economy, apparently the first really scientific study of man. From Political Economy Darwin borrowed the conception of the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest, and from the new biology the doctrine of Evolution through individual competition returned to reinforce with the prestige of the new science the economists' ...
— Recent Developments in European Thought • Various
... many white men were more anxious to get the Negro out of the country than to have him do well when out; and, in many instances, some unworthy Colored people got transportation to Liberia, of whom Americans were rid, but of whom Liberians could not boast. But the law of the survival of the fittest carried the rubbish to the bottom. The republic grew and expanded in every direction. From year to year new blood and fresh energy were poured into the social and business life of the people; and England, America, and other powers ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams
... of kings is cognizable as a right based on the survival of the fittest, backed by the sword; filled with human weaknesses and shortcomings, but defensible as a system, withal; just as the real intent of the words "captain of industry" should mean one whose fatherly care over his laborers, his judgment, his risk of capital, his foresight in weathering ...
— Blood and Iron - Origin of German Empire As Revealed by Character of Its - Founder, Bismarck • John Hubert Greusel
... used by Mr. Herbert Spencer of the Survival of the Fittest is more accurate, and is ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett
... subsequent generations make better still. He realised something of the struggle for existence and even pointed out that this advantageously checks the rapid multiplication. "As Dr Krause points out, Darwin just misses the connection between this struggle and the Survival of the Fittest." ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... outposts. A moment later the contest was on, the bloodiest and probably the most brilliant battle of the whole campaign. It was a bitterly contested fight for seven hours—a death struggle for the survival of the fittest. During the first three hours the British force numbered only 1,640, until reinforced by 1,200 additional combatants. All through the long hours of the black night the battle waged furiously. Charge succeeded charge, followed by the screams of the mutilated and the dead silence of the stricken. Over ...
— The Story of Isaac Brock - Hero, Defender and Saviour of Upper Canada, 1812 • Walter R. Nursey
... An aristocracy represents a survival of the fittest—not necessarily the ideally fit, but the fittest to meet the conditions under which it must prove a survivor. The conditions which Spain created here to mould Filipino character were mediaeval, monarchical, ...
— A Woman's Impression of the Philippines • Mary Helen Fee
... coffee-cup is sad rather than sinful. It is as much part and parcel of a bygone time, as the Coliseum or the ruins of Pompeii; and the respectability of the survival of the fittest is its own. But almonds-and-raisins are different; to a certain class of society they represent the embodiment of refinement and luxury ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler
... masses of detail and many needful interlocking facts are, of necessity, relegated to the quiet workers of the present and the earnest laborers of the years to come. But it is a doctrine which cannot be shaken. The constant and universal action of variation, the struggle for existence, and the "survival of the fittest," few who are competent to grasp will have the temerity to doubt. And to many, that lies within it as a doctrine, and forms the fibre of its fabric, is the existence of a continuity, an unbroken stream of unity running from the base to the apex of the entire organic ...
— Scientific American Supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, Jan. 3, 1885 • Various
... "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 ...
— The Fighting Chance • Robert W. Chambers
... or the survival of the fittest, is one of the processes by which evolution takes place. According to this law, only the fittest survive in the struggle for life. Darwin was led to this discovery on reading Malthus's thesis regarding the disproportion between ...
— The Fertility of the Unfit • William Allan Chapple
... gradually adapting itself to changed conditions. No longer did he gasp when a child in Stepney picked up orange-peel from the gutter and ate it. Here was the unending manifestation of Nature's inexorable law, the survival of the fittest, more clearly and cruelly displayed than in New York. Wealth and Poverty were more definitely marked. If they merged at all, it was away in the suburbs, or in the Jewish quarter, whence issued, on Saturdays, thousands of dark-skinned lads and girls, westward ...
— Colorado Jim • George Goodchild
... 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
... evolution thus proved, and the "survival of the fittest" an accomplished fact, the next step was to ascertain "how," as Cope asked, "the fittest originated?" It was felt by some that natural selection alone was not adequate to explain the first steps in the origin of genera, families, orders, ...
— Lamarck, the Founder of Evolution - His Life and Work • Alpheus Spring Packard
... 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 ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... wearing of the surplice, kneeling at the Communion, and the sign of the cross at Baptism, as there had been in the earlier part of Elizabeth's reign. When prejudices began to pass away, prevailing practice would probably have been guided, after an interval, by the rule of the 'survival of the fittest,'—of those customs, that is, which best suited the temper of the people and the spirit of the Church. The surplice, for instance, would very likely have become gradually universal, much in the same manner as in our own day it has gradually superseded the gown in the pulpit. A concession ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... consciousness, and, instead of a divine gift, have little more to offer than formal worship, or music, or entertainments, or mere intellectual discourse, whether orthodox or 'advanced,' have no right to be; and by the law of the survival of the fittest will not long be. The one thing that warrants such a relationship as subsists between you and me is this, my consciousness that I have a message from God, and your belief that you hear such from my lips. Unless that be ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: Romans Corinthians (To II Corinthians, Chap. V) • Alexander Maclaren
... be one of those men who have reconciled science with religion," said Helen slowly. "I don't like those men. They are scientific themselves, and talk of the survival of the fittest, and cut down the salaries of their clerks, and stunt the independence of all who may menace their comfort, but yet they believe that somehow good—and it is always that sloppy 'somehow'—will be the outcome, and that in some mystical way the ...
— Howards End • E. M. Forster
... considering, after Shakespeare, and that Keats had no intellectual value whatever. But I was not looking for intellectual value. I mixed up the intellect with a kind of scientific jargon about protoplasm and natural selection and the survival of the fittest, and bathybius, which was then all the fashion; so I promptly devoted myself to ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... interests of the less skilled—often without actually intending to do so. Mr. Mitchell, for instance, concedes that the trade unions bring about "the elimination of men who are below a certain fixed standard of efficiency." This argument will appeal strongly to employers and believers in the survival of the fittest doctrine. But it will scarcely appeal to the numerous unskilled workers eliminated, or the still more numerous workers whose employment is thus lessened at every slack season. Mr. Edmond Kelly shows how the principle acts—"Where there is a minimum wage of $4 a day the ...
— Socialism As It Is - A Survey of The World-Wide Revolutionary Movement • William English Walling
... designing mind was 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 ...
— The Great Doctrines of the Bible • Rev. William Evans
... 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 rational ...
— A Trip to Venus • John Munro
... bids the reader to look around for a monument; but the whole has been a matter of slow, steady growth, advancing by hair's breadth; and, as the result of continual efforts to adapt means to ends, an inorganic evolution has been effected, resulting in the survival of the fittest, and literally pushing the weaker ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 647, May 26, 1888 • Various
... fundamental difference between mysticism and Christianity; the key to the kingdom; the interior symbolism of "wireless telegraphy;" the breeder of discord; the interior meaning of certain important words; the survival of the fittest in its interior meaning; the finer and ever finer forces at work; when the gods arrive the half gods go; sex-force at the Center of Being; when abnormalities and perversions of sex will be impossible; the radiant center of the bi-une sex-life; the primary function of sex-force vitalization, not ...
— Sex=The Unknown Quantity - The Spiritual Function of Sex • Ali Nomad
... number can survive. I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term natural selection, in order to mark its relation to man's power of selection. But the expression often used by Mr. Herbert Spencer, of the Survival of the Fittest, is more accurate, and is sometimes equally convenient. We have seen that man by selection can certainly produce great results, and can adapt organic beings to his own uses, through the accumulation of slight but useful variations, given to him by the hand of Nature. But Natural Selection, ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... few teachings of an illogical religion, few promptings of a misdirected energy, for which he had a greater scorn than the precept that the strong should suffer for the weak, or one man for another. Every man for himself and the survival of the fittest was the doctrine by which he lived; and his abhorrence of anything else was the more intense for the moment because he found himself in a situation where he might be expected to ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King
... the initial step in the rigid system of selection enforced by every detail of the manner of life in early New England. The mortality among infants was appallingly large; and the natural result—the survival of the fittest—may account for the present tough endurance ...
— Customs and Fashions in Old New England • Alice Morse Earle
... intelligence is always in the direction of narrowing down this margin of accident and taking the individual more and more out of the law of averages, and substituting the law of individual selection. In ordinary scientific language this is the survival of the fittest. The reproduction of fish is on a scale that would choke the sea with them if every individual survived; but the margin of destruction is correspondingly enormous, and thus the law of averages simply keeps up ...
— The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... of the modern 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 collect ...
— Tin Foil and Its Combinations for Filling Teeth • Henry L. Ambler
... a vivid memory of my childhood that (amongst the box-edged gardens of a family of eight), that of my eldest brother was almost inconvenienced by the luck of his fingers. "Survival of the fittest" (if hardiest does mean fittest!) kept the others within bounds; but what he begged, borrowed, and stole, survived, all of it, conglomerate around the "double velvet" rose, which formed the centrepiece. We ...
— Last Words - A Final Collection of Stories • Juliana Horatia Ewing
... 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
... physical and mental condition of the great mass of people, and to leave the people in ignorance that they may be controlled by the intelligent few who understand their needs and may have their welfare at heart, is a mistake that other nations than Russia have made. The law of the survival of the fittest has wiped out races and nations who have ignored this fundamental law, that all ...
— Three Acres and Liberty • Bolton Hall
... ends, the survival of the fittest, has arranged matters so that we're always, always striving. We think that a certain end will bring happiness, and struggle like blazes to get it, to find that satisfaction is a myth; to discover that, no sooner do we possess a thing than we weary ...
— Sparrows - The Story of an Unprotected Girl • Horace W. C. Newte
... abdicate. "The organic thing called religion has in fact the organs that take hold on life. It can feed where the fastidious doubter finds no food; it can reproduce where the solitary sceptic boasts of being barren." In short, in religion alone was Darwin justified, for Catholicism was the "spiritual Survival of the Fittest."* ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... same authority are equally distressing. They are especially fond of cattle, but without any reciprocity of affection. 'According to the general terms of the survival of the fittest and the growth of muscles most used to the detriment of others,' says the lieutenant in an unusual burst of humor, 'a band of cattle inhabiting this district, in the far future, would be all tail and no body, unless the mosquitoes should experience ...
— Klondyke Nuggets - A Brief Description of the Great Gold Regions in the Northwest • Joseph Ladue
... had never heard of the doctrine of the survival of the fittest; though it was the spring of 1812, and England and America were investigating the subject on the seas, while the nations of Europe were practically illustrating it. The "hospital tent," as the boys called an old corn-basket, covered ...
— Stories by American Authors (Volume 4) • Constance Fenimore Woolson |
