Tillie Olsen Quotes

The idealists will always be in society, and we will survive.

There is nothing to which men, while they have food and drink, cannot reconcile themselves.

It is astonishing how the human animal survives its misfortunes.

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

Human beings will make the best out of any situation.

I think that human beings were incredibly resilient; otherwise, we wouldn't keep going.

What is amazing to me as an archaeologist is that the more and more I study, I realize we are resilient, we are creative, we are brilliant, and this is what makes us human, and that hasn't changed since we've been human.

We've almost been wiped out as a species many times, going back millions of years, and we've survived by reinventing ourselves and enlarging our circles of awareness, inventing new technologies and social structures.

No, no! I do nature injustice. She gave us inventive faculty, and set us naked, and helpless on the shore of this great ocean,--the world; swim those who can, the heavy may go to the bottom.

Human creatures have a mervellous power of adapting themselves to necessity.

What does not change is the will to change

We are made to persist. that's how we find out who we are.

All of you, wherever you are: in your spiny cities, or your one-bump towns. Find it, the hard stuff, the links of metal and chink, the fragments of stone filling your stomach. And pull, and pull, and pull. I will make a pact with you: I will do it if you will do it, always and forever. Take down the walls.

Folly is perennial and yet the human race has survived.

In the greater part of humankind there resides an instinct for survival. It is this which can clutch at straws and effect a rescue from them. It is this which can, now and then, outwit fate.

I think that the glorious thing about the human race is that it does change the world -- constantly. The world or 'life' may seem to more often overwhelm the human being's capacity for struggling against being overwhelmed which is remarkable and exhilarating.

People will do amazing things to ensure their survival.

Man adapts himself to everything, to the best and the worst.

No matter how you get here or where you end up, human beings have this miraculous gift to make that place home.

If there's a world here in a hundred years, it's going to be saved by tens of millions of little things. The powers-that-be can break up any big thing they want. They can corrupt it or co-opt it from the inside, or they can attack it from the outside. But what are they going to do about 10 million little things? They break up two of them, and three more like them spring up!

Adaptability is not imitation. It means power of resistance and assimilation.

It is not easy for us to change. But it is possible and it is our glory as human beings

Man is a creature that can get accustomed to anything, and I think that is the best definition of him.

The human race never solves any of its problems, it only outlives them.