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Survival of the fittest   /sərvˈaɪvəl əv ðə fˈɪtəst/   Listen
Survival of the fittest

noun
1.
A natural process resulting in the evolution of organisms best adapted to the environment.  Synonyms: natural selection, selection, survival.






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"Survival of the fittest" Quotes from Famous Books



... vision lay that Elysium, untouched by passion or extremes of any kind, autocratic; complacent, possessive, and well-kept as any Midland landscape. Healthy, wealthy, wise! No room but for perfection, self-preservation, the survival of the fittest! "The part of the good citizen," he thought: "no, if we were all alike, this would n't be ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... 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, ...
— Roden's Corner • Henry Seton Merriman

... 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, ...
— "Imperialism" and "The Tracks of Our Forefathers" • Charles Francis Adams

... also in getting rid of it. It is a return toward the primitive condition—the survival of the fittest. There must be losers as ...
— In Her Own Right • John Reed Scott

... 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

... which could attack this great race at such a defenseless point would be rapidly followed by its extinction. We must accordingly be on the alert for all possible theories of extinction; and these theories themselves will fall under the universal principle of the survival of the fittest until we approximate or actually ...
— Dinosaurs - With Special Reference to the American Museum Collections • William Diller Matthew

... 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

... Christopher Wren, whose epitaph 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 ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 647, May 26, 1888 • Various

... deathward tendency is what I may call the self-ward tendency in the upward struggle of all organic forms, that is, one organism only exists at the expense of other organisms. Yet at a certain stage in evolution this principle of the survival of the fittest at the expense of the rest gives way to a counter principle, that of the fitting of as many as possible to survive. The thief tendency gives way to the shepherd tendency, self-love to mother-love, the struggle to survive ...
— The New Theology • R. J. Campbell

... would settle in Ireland, they would soon get their Three acres and a cow. The people who can and will do the best with the land ought to have it, that's my theory. Ireland everywhere illustrates the principle of the survival of the fittest. The only way to succeed is by work. The Catholic Irish are so accustomed to leave everything to the priest that they have no self-reliance, and in worldly matters they always ask, who will help us? They are all beggars by nature. The Duchess of Marlborough and other kind but mistaken ladies ...
— Ireland as It Is - And as It Would be Under Home Rule • Robert John Buckley (AKA R.J.B.)

... gravel of the pathway scattered upon the verges. This neglected condition of the garden was, I afterwards found, humorously charged upon Mr. Watts's "reluctance to interfere with nature in her clever scheme of the survival of the fittest," but I suspect it was due at least equally to the owner's personal indifference to everything of ...
— Recollections of Dante Gabriel Rossetti - 1883 • T. Hall Caine

... the tendency to diverge from that type. 4. Over-population: the tendency to multiply offspring beyond the food supply. 5. Struggle for life: the effort to exclude others or to consume others. 6. Consciousness of kind: the tendency to spare and cooperate with offspring and others of like type. 7. Survival of the fittest: the victory of those best fitted to their environment by heredity, variation, numbers, and consciousness ...
— The Arena - Volume 18, No. 92, July, 1897 • Various

... or Nationalists, or any of the various schools of though in the great field of social economics— excepting only those anti-christian economists who hold that it is an offence against the doctrine of the survival of the fittest to try to save the weakest from going to the wall, and who believe that when once a man is down the supreme duty of a self-regarding Society is to jump upon him. Such economists will naturally be disappointed with this book I venture to believe that ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth

... suggested that university course lectures should have a presiding chairman would get no serious hearing. All the course lecturers now before the public dispense with chairmen. It is a case of survival of the fittest; the course lecturers who had chairmen didn't know their business and they disappeared. This does not apply to a series of three or four lectures, for in that case when the speaker has become familiar with his audience, and the chairman should ...
— The Art of Lecturing - Revised Edition • Arthur M. (Arthur Morrow) Lewis

... 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

... see, 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 ...
— The Short Cut • Jackson Gregory

... the 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 number ...
— Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War • Frederick A. Talbot

... secretly and as far as he dared, 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 Theory of Social Revolutions • Brooks Adams

... 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 repudiate ...
— The Wild Olive • Basil King

... New processes are devised, improved machines are invented, cheap motive powers are utilized, and cheap and available raw materials are discovered, and these changes continually disturb the static state. There are certain to be improvements on the older methods of production, for a law of the survival of the fittest insures this. ...
— Essentials of Economic Theory - As Applied to Modern Problems of Industry and Public Policy • John Bates Clark

... anger now. What 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 ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson

... with their legs hanging down in the water, and if they cannot find any branches capable of being used as oars, they paddle with their hands. The Nouers, who inhabit this region of marsh and morass, seem to offer an illustration of the Darwinian theory of the "survival of the fittest." By a process of natural selection, they have become thoroughly adapted to the conditions of the soil and climate, the weaker of the race having been killed off. Their physical strength is remarkable; they ...
— Celebrated Women Travellers of the Nineteenth Century • W. H. Davenport Adams

... The fact that religiously he adhered to the time-honoured evangelical 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 Special Creations is ...
— The Last Leaf - Observations, during Seventy-Five Years, of Men and Events in America - and Europe • James Kendall Hosmer

... 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 ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd

... 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 the conditions ...
— Cosmic Consciousness • Ali Nomad

... in the broadest sense of the term "evolution," there neither is, nor can be, any such thing. The notion that the doctrine of evolution can furnish a foundation for morals seems to me to be an illusion which has arisen from the unfortunate ambiguity of the term "fittest" in the formula, "survival of the fittest." We commonly use "fittest" in a good sense, with an understood connotation of "best"; and "best" we are apt to take in its ethical sense. But the "fittest" which survives in the struggle for existence may be, and often is, the ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley

... his conflict with the animal world, ending in his mastery of the brute creation; the second that of his conflict with nature, ending in his mastery of the resources of the earth. Overlapping and succeeding the second there has been a third, that of the conflict of man with man, ending in the survival of the fittest of the human race. In the discussion of this problem, as hitherto made, these distinct stages of evolution, with their intermediate resting stages, have not been recognized; argument being based on man as a whole, and no thought directed to the ...
— Man And His Ancestor - A Study In Evolution • Charles Morris

... and that hatred of sham and pretence which fill his writings from beginning to 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, ...
— Mark Twain • Archibald Henderson

... virtue in a thing that is so immortal. If the doctrine of the survival of the fittest applies to dress, it is the fittest thing we have. Trousers are a thing of yesterday with us, but our top-hat carries us back to the Wars of the Roses and beyond. It is not its beauty that explains it. I have never heard any one deny that it is ugly, though custom may have blunted our ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)

... altruistic elements in nature, arising from the struggle for existence, to a sermon of Dr. Abbott's called The Manifestation of the Son of God, now, I fear, out of print. Of course Darwin recognized these factors as a necessary complement to the survival of the fittest, else had there been no fittest to survive; but the exigencies of proving his theory of the origin of species necessitated his dwelling on the destructive and weeding-out elements of Nature—"Nature red in tooth and claw," rather than the equally pervasive Nature of the brooding ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins

... to such a woman if she had concentrated by absent 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, forsooth, chocolate creams are preferred ...
— Cupid's Middleman • Edward B. Lent

... think that the Indian has been absurdly pampered by the Government, and that it would be as sensible to try to change the arrangement of seasons as to attempt to prevent the survival of the fittest, or, in other words, to interfere with the gradual, but in their opinion inevitable, extermination of ...
— My Native Land • James Cox

... The survival of the fittest is one of Darwin's emphasized laws of natural selection. He says: "In all cases the new and improved forms of life tend to supplant the old and unimproved forms. New varieties continually take the place ...
— The Christian Foundation, Or, Scientific and Religious Journal, Volume 1, January, 1880 • Various

... 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 fire: tales that are singularly apposite and characteristic, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson

... Pennsylvania took almost no part in the Philadelphia 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 in the same project ...
— The United States of America Part I • Ediwn Erle Sparks

... and acted generally as though he had bats in his belfry. I thought sure the place would be pinched. It reminded me of Thirsty Thornton's dance-hall out in Merrill, Wisconsin, when the Silent Swede used to start a general survival of the fittest every time Mamie the Mink danced twice in succession with the young fellow from Albany, whose father owned the big mill up Rough River. Of course, this audience was perfectly orderly, and showed no intention whatever of cutting in, ...
— Billy Baxter's Letters • William J. Kountz, Jr.

... fortune upon the eldest son is attended with grave evils, not only among our nobility, but in our royal successions. The Almighty does not follow such a law in endowing his children, and it is contrary to Nature's dictum 'the survival of the fittest.'" ...
— The Further Adventures of Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks • Charles Felton Pidgin

... expression often used by Mr. Herbert Spencer of the Survival of the Fittest is more accurate, and is sometimes ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett

... of organic evolution the various obscure physiological alterations which produce variations of type are all overruled and guided in a few directions of value to the species by the law of natural selection, so in the evolution of in all directions are subject to the law of the survival of the fittest. It is really of comparatively little importance to discover how a given moral habit first arose; it may have arisen in a hundred different ways in a hundred different places; indeed, the precise origin ...
— Problems of Conduct • Durant Drake

... competition, in the sense which we use the word in this volume, but was a struggle for existence and a gratification of the baser desires, of the same sort as that which now prevails in the brute creation, resulting in a "survival of the fittest." With the introduction of the family relation, the principle of the "division of labor" was utilized, the female doing the hard and menial work, while the male devoted himself to hunting and fishing, or subsisting ...
— Monopolies and the People • Charles Whiting Baker

... 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

... 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 normal proportion of the race. But at the other end of the scale, reproduction ...
— The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science • Thomas Troward

... cut glass mirrors, and cards made man the master of his environment rather than its slave. Now that liquor is gone all the other factors are mockery. Card playing has become merely an extension of the cruel and logical process of the survival of the fittest. The fellow with the best hand wins, instead of the one with the best head. Nobody draws four cards any more or stands for a raise on an inside straight. The thing is just cut-throat ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam

... is the first hint of the Poe hieroglyphic we have had except the black patch over the eye of the uncle, along with his jaundiced, cadaverous face. The boy meditates on how all nature turns on cruelty and the survival of the fittest. ...
— The Art Of The Moving Picture • Vachel Lindsay

... 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 ...
— France and the Republic - A Record of Things Seen and Learned in the French Provinces - During the 'Centennial' Year 1889 • William Henry Hurlbert

... of survival of the fittest, don't you know, as somebody or other says. Was it Shakespeare? He really seems to have written all the ...
— The Henchman • Mark Lee Luther

... Creative Force. The Creator who inspired man with love—love for his fellow beings and love of the beautiful—could not be the same Creator who framed that irredeemably cruel principle observable throughout nature, i.e., the survival of the fittest; the preying of the stronger on the weaker—of the tiger on the feebler beasts of the jungle; the eagle on the smaller birds of the air; the wolf on the sheep; the shark on the poor, defenceless fish, and so on; neither could He be the Creator that deals ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell

... 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

... 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 of the variations that are supposed to be selected from and thus accumulated. Are ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler

... white and silent before him, stretched that endless desolation of romance and mystery which he had grown to love, a world of deep snows, of silent-tongued men, of hardship and battle for life where the law of nature was the survival of the fittest, and that of man, "Do unto others as ye would that they should do unto you." Never did Philip Steele's heart throb with the wild, free pulse of life and joy as in such moments as these, when his fortune, his clubs, and his friends were a thousand miles away, and he stood on the ...
— Philip Steele of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police • James Oliver Curwood

... the weak would have less protection than even now, for all the restraints of morality, which are bound up inseparably with rights of property, would have been thrown aside. Marx and Lasallis and Bradlaugh, clever as they are, can't prevent the survival of the fittest. You knock your head against a stone wall, Mr. Bailey, when you fight society. You have been knocking it all your life, and now you are angry because your head is hurt. If you had never tried to strip other men of their earnings because ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Volume 22. October, 1878. • Various

... and forward between shrewd, beady eyes, betraying the slow heritage of time, of survival of the fittest, of evolution. He could think and dream and invent, and the civilization of his kind was already far beyond that of the ...
— The Eternal Wall • Raymond Zinke Gallun

... 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 old bull's widespread hoofs the snow was no longer white—but red. A thousand times before this unseen tragedy of the wilderness had been enacted. It was an epoch of that life where life itself means the survival of the fittest, where to live means to kill, and to die means to perpetuate life. At last, in that steady and deadly circling of Gray Wolf and Kazan, there came a time when the old bull did not turn—then a second, a third and a fourth time, ...
— Kazan • James Oliver Curwood

... [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: Principles of ...
— Familiar Quotations • John Bartlett

... evolved. Emerson, of course, had no definite hypothesis of this sort, nor did he possess any of the knowledge necessary to give it value. But it was his good fortune that some of his strongest propositions harmonise with the scientific theory of the survival of the fittest in the struggle for material existence. He connects his exhortation to self-reliance with the law working in nature for conservation and growth,—to wit, that 'Power is in nature the essential measure of right,' and that 'Nature suffers nothing to remain in ...
— Critical Miscellanies, Vol. 1, Essay 5, Emerson • John Morley

... 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 ...
— God and my Neighbour • Robert Blatchford

... Selection and Survival of the Fittest as Agents in Naturalization. —-We may now take it as an established fact that varieties of animals and plants occur, both in domesticity and in a state of nature, which are better or worse adapted to special climates. There is no positive ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... 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 greater or less function, inherited through successive ...
— Essays: Scientific, Political, & Speculative, Vol. I • Herbert Spencer

... him,' said the Owl, when they had reached the outside of the building at last, and were perched on the roof, enjoying the fresh air. 'He will get all he can for his money. In him you may see a typical and beautiful example of the Survival of the Fittest. He worked his way, by means of native moral superiority and pure chocolate composed of mortar and molasses tinted with sepia, right from the gallery into one of the very best reserved seats, and now has little books written on himself, as exemplifying the reward of virtue, and exhorts everybody ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang

... law 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 louse, ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge

... embracing those theories of evolution which in those days exercised such a potent influence on our young men of intelligence and education. Is not life itself an unending battle? Does not all nature owe its being to a series of relentless conflicts, the survival of the fittest, the maintenance and renewal of force by unceasing activity; is not death a necessary condition to young and vigorous life? And he remembered the sensation of gladness that had filled his heart when first the thought occurred to him that he might expiate ...
— The Downfall • Emile Zola

... race; maddened by the difficulties and obstacles of the way, men became demons of cruelty and aggression, ruthlessly thrusting aside and trampling down the weaker ones who thwarted their progress. Of pity, humanity, love, there was none, only the gold-lust, triumphant and repellent. It was the survival of the fittest, the most tenacious, the most brutal. Yet there was something grandly terrible about it all. It was a barbaric invasion, an army, each man fighting for his own hand under the banner of gold. It was conquest. Every day, as I watched that human torrent, ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service

... science, "the struggle for existence" is the dominant law—to the male mind, with the "survival of the fittest" and "the elimination of ...
— The Forerunner, Volume 1 (1909-1910) • Charlotte Perkins Gilman

... seaman, taken mainly by gangs operating on the water, who was often content, when brought into contact with loyal men, to settle down and do his best for king and country. Amongst the pressed men, again, desertion and death made for the survival of the fittest, and in this residuum there was not wanting a certain savour. Subdued and quickened by man-o'-war discipline, they developed a dogged resolution, a super-capacity not altogether incompatible with degeneracy; ...
— The Press-Gang Afloat and Ashore • John R. Hutchinson

... cannibals, bein' left alone on the desert island, naturally bumps up agin the old question of the survival of the fittest. They get scrappin' among themselves, and one eats the ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne

... object of systematic and proper exercise is not for the production of a race of soldiers, though a certain proportion of the population will always be required for military service. With the great majority of men the struggle for existence is keen, and it is simply a question of the survival of the fittest, and of the weakest going to the wall. The requirements of the present time are therefore a capacity for endurance and an ability to withstand the effects of work day after day. We do not require athletes who are capable of performing wonderful feats of ...
— The Art of Living in Australia • Philip E. Muskett (?-1909)

... 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 ...
— Klondyke Nuggets - A Brief Description of the Great Gold Regions in the Northwest • Joseph Ladue

... fact 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 under any law, and under any conditions, ...
— One Thousand Secrets of Wise and Rich Men Revealed • C. A. Bogardus

... had a deeper significance. It was an example of the great law of human progress and civilization. There has been much talk in recent years of the survival of the fittest and of efficiency. We are beginning to hear of the development of the super-man and the claim that he has of right dominion over the rest of his inferiors on earth. This philosophy denies the doctrine of equality and holds that government is not based on consent but on compulsion. ...
— Have faith in Massachusetts; 2d ed. - A Collection of Speeches and Messages • Calvin Coolidge

... were doubly conspicuous in a pair of red-topped, high-heeled boots which, unfortunately, met the trousers halfway and swallowed up much of their glory. But as both could not be exposed, Jimmie, evidently believing in the survival of the fittest, had allowed the boots ...
— The Silver Maple • Marian Keith

... the writings of Empedocles do not enlighten us as to the precise way in which final evolution was supposed to be effected; although the idea of endless experimentation until natural selection resulted in survival of the fittest seems not far afield from certain of the poetical assertions. Thus: "As divinity was mingled yet more with divinity, these things (the various members) kept coming together in whatever way each might chance." Again: "At one time all the limbs which form the body united into one by love ...
— A History of Science, Volume 1(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams

... 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 survival of ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe

... 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

... law of Natural Selection, or the Survival of the Fittest. That is, if any individual of a given species of plant or animal happens to have a slight deviation from the normal type, favorable to its success in the struggle for life, it will survive. This variation, by the law of heredity, will be transmitted to its ...
— What is Darwinism? • Charles Hodge

... worst stock in it is cut off before it has a chance 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 divided as in the above diagram, into sustentative ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson

... 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

... promotion of the enterprise into the back room of the bank and told them of the situation. "We're up against something here," he said. "If we let word of the failure of this machine get out, where'll we be? It is a case of the survival of the fittest." ...
— Poor White • Sherwood Anderson

... 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

... Natural selection, 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 rates of ...
— The Fertility of the Unfit • William Allan Chapple

... that after they've run everything down to that plasma they're so fond of beginning and ending with, there is still something behind it all their theories can't explain away? Protoplasm doesn't explain Life any more than the battery explains electricity. Instinct? Evolution? The survival of the fittest? Well, nothing is tagged for fair, and I'm more than willing to be shown. For the more I find out from the living things themselves,—you can't get truth from death, you've got to get it from life—the more self-evident ...
— Slippy McGee, Sometimes Known as the Butterfly Man • Marie Conway Oemler

... 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 ...
— The Farringdons • Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler

... opportunities for early education. Their children, rising through the generations, had returned from the state universities of Texas or Ohio or Mississippi, talking of Browning, and the binominal theorem, and the survival of the fittest, and the grandeur and decadence of the Romans, and the entassus of Ionic columns, and the doctrine of laissez faire; and now their elders had set out to endeavor to catch up with them. This discovery touched me with both reverence and pathos. ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various

... that ever breathed. His Radicalism, it is true, is of the antique pattern. He is an individualist without compromise or concession. Life to him is to the strongest; he has no faith save in the gospel of the survival of the fittest. Equable and even cheery, he does not take a particularly joyous view of human existence. I have heard him speak of the emptiness and futilities of human existence in tones, not of gloom, for he is too much of a philosopher to indulge in regrets, but with a hearty sincerity ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor

... 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 ...
— Sex and Society • William I. Thomas

... 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 ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VI (of X)—Great Britain and Ireland IV • Various

... certain forms of animal life. After twenty-two years of uninterrupted labor he published a work in 1859, entitled "The Origin of Species," in which he aimed to show that life generally owes its course of development ot the struggle for existence and to "the survival of the fittest." ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery

... 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 expanding." Searching for a camping-place in which to pass the coming hours, they saw lights flitting ...
— A Journey in Other Worlds • J. J. Astor

... innate characteristics and tendencies of the feeble-minded is to be found in the effect upon them of the biological law of natural selection, resulting from the universal struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest. We need not discuss here its profound influences, economic and otherwise, upon the lives of the mentally defective in general, but it will be profitable to review briefly the effect of natural selection ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... now and again he'd do a little dustin'; but 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 I could get out of him. He was some like other ...
— Happy Hawkins • Robert Alexander Wason

... 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 summary of ...
— Women Wage-Earners - Their Past, Their Present, and Their Future • Helen Campbell

... they are nothing more or less than the results of evolution, natural selection and the survival of the fittest. All we require for the demonstration of our theory, is a little bit of protoplasm at the beginning of things and a mass of elemental ...
— Heart and Soul • Victor Mapes (AKA Maveric Post)

... he believed therefore that the ultimate fate of nations, whether it be good or bad, was very much what they deserved. It is curious to observe the analogy between this teaching and the doctrine of the survival of the fittest, which a very different teacher—Charles Darwin—has ...
— Historical and Political Essays • William Edward Hartpole Lecky

... smart enough, that's all; if he had been, he might have turned round and served Boyne the same way. It's the kind of thing that happens every day in business. I guess it's what the scientists call the survival of the fittest," said Mr. Parvis, evidently pleased with the aptness ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 2 (of 10) • Edith Wharton

... physician 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 ...
— Life in a Thousand Worlds • William Shuler Harris

... without remarking on the satisfactory change of sentiment which has taken place in regard to this deplorable class. There may be times when, desiring to see "the survival of the fittest," we may be tempted to wish that idiots and imbeciles were stamped out of society. But, as Mr. Darwin has somewhere said, there is a compensation for the continued existence of so pitiable a population in our midst, in the circumstance that our sympathies are ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke

... succeeds, that has a long run, that has money in it!" I accept the answer for what it is worth. This potentiality of money is, like "literature," an added grace: and it certainly, in a sense, marks the survival of the fittest. But there are other standards in the great workshop of the artist, Nature. Even the plant or play that lives but a short time may cast its seed into the soil, or imagination, of its day, and, like Banquo, beget a royal race, ...
— The Black Cat - A Play in Three Acts • John Todhunter

... selection according to the laws of nature of those varying in conformity with their environment. And this Mr. Darwin called natural, in contrast with the breeder's artificial, "selection," arising from the "struggle for existence," and resulting in what Mr. Spencer has called the "survival of the fittest." ...
— The Whence and the Whither of Man • John Mason Tyler

... planet. The exact manner in which these alterations were produced is not yet determined, but in large part it has evidently been brought about by the method indicated by Mr. Darwin, through the survival of the fittest individuals in the ...
— Outlines of the Earth's History - A Popular Study in Physiography • Nathaniel Southgate Shaler

... system in insuring the survival of the fittest was seen in its results. Heriot's elder brother passed away at the age of two in the course of a severe winter. Clearly he would never have been a credit to oatmeal. His younger brother broke loose at nineteen, pained his relatives exceedingly, ...
— The Prodigal Father • J. Storer Clouston

... 'Ham', however, suggested 'Piggy'. This might have done had there not already existed a 'Piggy' with a prior right. 'Piggy' suggested 'Pork', but 'Pork' isn't a name. 'Pork' suggested 'Beans'. And once more behold the survival of the fittest." ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay

... plants, or foreign diseases attacking native plants. I will take that up in detail. Nature has fought the battle all out with the native parasites against the native host plants, so we don't have to do it. It's a case of the survival of the fittest. They have won, so when we are dealing with native plants against our native diseases, we have a condition that has been fought out in nature for nobody knows how many thousand years. The result is that unless we disturb the balance too much by cultivating great orchards ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Fourth Annual Meeting - Washington D.C. November 18 and 19, 1913 • Various

... and strive, to spend his life in striving, and then in the working out of destiny, in the survival of the fittest, of the stronger over the weaker, of those who are able to devour over those destined to be devoured, fall prey to the fangs of animals hungrier than ...
— The Way of the Wind • Zoe Anderson Norris

... trees, as with vegetables and flowers, the most important precaution to be taken against insects and disease is to have them in a healthy, thriving, growing condition. It is a part of Nature's law of the survival of the fittest that any backward or weakling plant or tree seems to fall first prey to the ravages ...
— Home Vegetable Gardening • F. F. Rockwell

... 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 ...
— Socialism: Positive and Negative • Robert Rives La Monte

... adaptation and inheritance. The difference between the two forms of selection is that, in the first case, the will of man makes the selection according to a plan, whereas in natural selection the struggle for life and the survival of the fittest acts without a plan other than that the most adaptable organism shall survive which is most fit to contend with the circumstances under which it is placed. Natural selection acts, therefore, much more slowly than artificial selection, ...
— Was Man Created? • Henry A. Mott

... from lower to higher that no one ought to doubt the benevolence of the Power moving upward through all things. Evolution is, indeed, full of promises to one who already trusts in the goodness of God; but the progress from lower to higher is not always unmistakable. Often the survival of the fittest is just a survival of those fittest to survive, and not the survival of those who ought to survive. There are too many things which survive which ought to be killed off. Simple good can give way to complex evil without at all violating the requirements ...
— Understanding the Scriptures • Francis McConnell

... 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

... General Brown, with his reinforced army of over 4,000 men, was within 600 yards of the British 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 ...
— The Story of Isaac Brock - Hero, Defender and Saviour of Upper Canada, 1812 • Walter R. Nursey

... to human weaknesses. Men like Colonel Jolson, who form a part of it, are down here to make reputations for themselves. They are handicapped and vexed by constant interference, constant jealousy. It is a survival of the fittest, and I suppose they feel that they must protect themselves even if they use underhand means to do so. It is so in all big work of this character, where the individual is made small. You would find the same condition in your father's ...
— The Ne'er-Do-Well • Rex Beach

... men should be as pure as women, with what success, every one knows. A more powerful agency in effecting a reform was the loathsome disease which in the fifteenth century began to sweep away millions of licentious men, and led to the survival of the fittest from the moral point of view. The masculine standard is still low, but immense progress has been made during the last hundred years. The number of prostitutes in Europe is still estimated at seven hundred thousand, yet that ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck

... "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

... 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

... survival of the fittest. Mr. Darwin invented the theory that goes by that name, but the Ornithorhynchus was the first to put it to actual experiment and prove that it could be done. Hence it should have as much of the credit as Mr. Darwin. It was never in the Ark; you will find ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... forces ensures progress. Occasional advance is the outcome, but so also is frequent retrogression. There is no scientific basis for the belief in a natural order that everywhere and always makes for progress. Competition or the struggle for existence ensures at most merely the survival of the fittest; but survival of the fittest does not always mean survival of the best. Competition is nature's means of adapting life to its environment. If the environment is such as to give the more highly organized individuals the ...
— The Spirit of American Government - A Study Of The Constitution: Its Origin, Influence And - Relation To Democracy • J. Allen Smith

... really a public question nowadays. Oh, and there was a quite lovely clipping last week I forgot to show you—all about Electra, as contrasted with Jonas Chuzzlewit, and my fine impersonal attitude, and the survival of the fittest, and so on." ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al

... we 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

... the parable has it, brings 'forth no fruit to perfection.' There are two crops fighting for the upper hand on the one ground, and the earlier possessor wins. The 'struggle for existence' ends with the 'survival of the fittest'; that is, of the worst, to which the natural bent of the desires and inclinations of the unrenewed man is more congenial. The 'cares of this world' and the 'deceitfulness of riches' are but two sides of one thing. The poor man has cares; the rich man has the illusions of his wealth. ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Mark • Alexander Maclaren

... catholicity so catholic as this, public opinion is not yet ripe, and perhaps may not be ripe for centuries to come. Those who believe in the excellency of liturgies, while not believing in them as jure divino, would be well content in such a case to wait the working of the principle of the survival of the fittest. ...
— A Short History of the Book of Common Prayer • William Reed Huntington

... Principles of Philosophy," showing the application of evolution in the facts of life, in 1852. In 1859 appeared Darwin's "Origin of Species." The hypothesis of the latter was that different species originated in spontaneous variation, and the survival of the fittest through natural selection and the struggle for existence. This theory was further elaborated and applied by Spencer, Darwin, Huxley, and other writers in Europe and America, and though to-day by no means all the ideas upheld by these early advocates of the theory are still accepted, evolution ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens

... animal life, from which they are lineally descended. Their present forms and structures are modifications from the common forms possessed by their remote ancestors. These modifications are, in the stricter forms of Darwinian evolution, explained in mechanical terms by the theory of the "survival of the fittest." That is, those animals with variations adapted to their environment survive; those without, perish. In consequence when any individual in a species happens to be born with a variation specially adapted to its environment, in the sharp "struggle for existence" that characterizes animal life ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman

... the ambitious and conscientious girls, those who have in them the stuff of which the noblest women are made, that suffer, not the romping or lazy sort; and thus our modern ways of education provide for the "non-survival of the fittest." A speaker told an audience of women at Wesleyan Hall not long ago, that he once attended the examination of a Western college, where a girl beat the boys in unravelling the intracacies of Juvenal. He did not report the consumption of blood and wear of brain tissue that in her college way of ...
— Sex in Education - or, A Fair Chance for Girls • Edward H. Clarke

... floating in a sunbeam be indestructible, existing in some shape from everlasting to everlasting, it is inconceivable that mind, the lord of matter, should perish utterly—should fade like an echo into the great inane. That were a reversal of the law of the survival of the fittest—casting away a priceless jewel while preserving its tawdry setting. That the lesser should survive the greater; that the case of Anaxarchus should continue and Anaxarchus' proud self become nonexistent, were to leave matter without law and wreck the universe, for law ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann

... Americans are not proud of. In less than four hundred years they have almost literally been wiped from the face of the earth; the whites have waged a war of extermination, and the pitiful remnant now left is fast disappearing. In no land has the survival of the fittest found a more remarkable illustration. But the Indians are having their revenge. The Americans long ago brought over Africans as slaves; then, as the result of a war of words and war of fact, suddenly released them all, and, at one fell move, in obedience to the ...
— As A Chinaman Saw Us - Passages from his Letters to a Friend at Home • Anonymous

... world's beginning 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 because it was ...
— Myth, Ritual, and Religion, Vol. 1 • Andrew Lang

... the consideration of the first of Mr. Darwin's supposed agencies—"Natural Selection," or, "Survival of the fittest." The results produced by this process must be ascribed to one of two causes: either they are the work of a Superintending Providence, watching over and directing every separate detail; or they are the result of pure chance and accident. There is ...
— The Story of Creation as told by Theology and by Science • T. S. Ackland

... that she was fading daily he exhausted himself in long expositions of the illness and injury and death common to armies in the making. More deaths came from these causes than from war. It was the elision of the weaker element—the survival of the fittest; and some, indeed very many, mothers must lose their sons that way. The government was sound at the core, he claimed; and his own rage was at the few incompetents and profiteers. These must be weeded out—a process that was going on. The gigantic task ...
— The Desert of Wheat • Zane Grey

... 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 acknowledged the republic ...
— History of the Negro Race in America From 1619 to 1880. Vol 1 - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George W. Williams

... by the middle of the last century, it had reached man's estate, they proved inadequate; something else was necessary, and this was furnished to admiration by evolutionism. Through its doctrine of the survival of the fittest, it appeared to justify in the fullest degree the gospel of force as the final test, and "enlightened self-interest" as the new moral law; through its lucid demonstration of the strictly physical basis of life, the "descent of man" from primordial ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram

... which is supposed to be the brotherhood of man. But if that were really your creed, you would work for it politically and financially. You would see that your Church is trying to do infinitesimally what the government, but for your opposition, might do universally. Your true creed is the survival of the fittest. You grind these people down into what is really an economic slavery and dependence, and then you insult and degrade them by inviting them to exercise and read books and sing hymns in your settlement house, and give their children crackers and milk and kindergartens and sunlight! I don't ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill

... the whole field of labor among the colored people, while there are very many disheartening conditions and situations, especially to one who is looking for the worst, yet a fair application of the rule of science known as the survival of the fittest, must inevitably and surely work out the conclusion that these efforts of school and of church for the upbuilding and evolution of a race are to have their final reward in the accomplishment of the great work, whereunto in the manifest providence ...
— The American Missionary - Volume 52, No. 3, September, 1898 • Various

... 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 ...
— Adventures and Letters • Richard Harding Davis

... destruction of the rights of the many has threatened the very foundations of human happiness and compelled the recognition of the fact that the weakness and injury of one are the weakness and injury of all. Ours is a world in which the law of the survival of the fittest not only works, but works very rapidly. Thus the more wealth a man has the more he can achieve. To-day, it is said, the various members of the Rothschild family in the different capitals of Europe control nine billions of dollars. ...
— A Man's Value to Society - Studies in Self Culture and Character • Newell Dwight Hillis

... spot where for a few weeks every winter the bird dog is undisputed king. Down the sunlit village streets pointers and setters were out with their handlers. They came from every section of the country, from Canada, from England. Each dog represented in himself the survival of the fittest. There was not one who had not gained a victory in some trial. Now they were to try for the ...
— Frank of Freedom Hill • Samuel A. Derieux

... 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

... evolution, and partly pure economic determinism. They believe in a Supreme Being, whom they call the First Cause—that is the nearest English equivalent—and they recognize the existence of an immortal and unknowable life-principle, or soul. They believe that the First Cause has decreed the survival of the fittest as the fundamental law, which belief accounts ...
— The Skylark of Space • Edward Elmer Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby

... 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 vain ...
— The Jewel City • Ben Macomber

... the battle for life, of varieties which possess any advantage in structure, constitution, or instinct, I have called Natural Selection; and Mr. Herbert Spencer has well expressed the same idea by the Survival of the Fittest. The term "natural selection" is in some respects a bad one, as it seems to imply conscious choice; but this will be disregarded after a little familiarity. No one objects to chemists speaking of "elective affinity;" and certainly ...
— The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, Vol. I. • Charles Darwin

... resisting power and vigor of the human organism, which we had gravely underestimated. The second, that power of adaptation to new circumstances, including even the attack of infectious diseases, which we call "survival of the fittest." The third, that great, sustaining, conservative power of nature—heredity. More cheering yet, these forces came, not merely fully armed, but bearing new weapons fitted for our hands. The vigor and unconquerable toughness of the human animal ...
— Preventable Diseases • Woods Hutchinson

... the 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

... "survival of the fittest" was the rule, and if that survivor happened to live to a good old age, no one inquired about ...
— The Education of American Girls • Anna Callender Brackett

... northern lakes under Charles Langlade, the same bold partisan who had led them, three years before, to attack the Miamis at Pickawillany; Shawanoes and Mingoes from the Ohio; and Ottawas from Detroit, commanded, it is said, by that most redoubtable of savages, Pontiac. The law of the survival of the fittest had wrought on this heterogeneous crew through countless generations; and with the primitive Indian, the fittest was the hardiest, fiercest, most adroit, and most wily. Baptized and heathen alike they had just enjoyed a diversion greatly to their taste. ...
— Montcalm and Wolfe • Francis Parkman

... to us, in which he said: "I do now know much about books; I have not read very much; but I have travelled a good deal and observed men and things, and I have made up my mind after all my experience that the members of the Senate are the survival of the fittest." Senator Hearst died while serving as a ...
— Fifty Years of Public Service • Shelby M. Cullom

... 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



Words linked to "Survival of the fittest" :   natural action, action, activity, natural process



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