A Quote by Elihu Root

The law of the survival of the fittest led inevitably to the survival and predominance of the men who were effective in war and who loved it because they were effective.

Elihu Root

Quote Topics

Because Effective Fittest Inevitably Law Led Loved Men Survival Survival Of The Fittest War Were

Quote Author

Elihu Root
American - Lawyer
February 15, 1845 - February 7, 1937

The law is the survival of the fittest.... The law is not the survival of the 'better' or the 'stronger,' if we give to those words any thing like their ordinary meanings. It is the survival of those which are constitutionally fittest to thrive under the conditions in which they are placed; and very often that which, humanly speaking, is inferiority, causes the survival.

Herbert Spencer

The survival of the fittest is the ageless law of nature, but the fittest are rarely the strong. The fittest are those endowed with the qualifications for adaptation, the ability to accept the inevitable and conform to the unavoidable, to harmonize with existing or changing conditions.

Dave Smalley

Carnegie believed in the survival of the fittest. He believed in Social Darwinism. He believed that you had to give an opportunity to the fittest, who were going to survive, to the fittest to rise themselves as high as they could.

David Nasaw

A drunkard in the gutter is just where he ought to be...The law of survival of the fittest was not made by man, and it cannot be abrogated by man. We can only, by interfering with it, produce the survival of the unfittest.

William Graham Sumner

Nature abhors a hero. For one thing, he violates the law of conservation of energy. For another, how can it be the survival of the fittest when the fittest keeps putting himself in situations where he is most likely to be creamed?

Solomon Short

The Darwinian concept of the survival of the fittest has been substituted by a philosophy of the survival of the slickest.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

And while the law of competition may be sometimes hard for the individual, it is best for the race, because it ensures the survival of the fittest in every department.

Andrew Carnegie

What women have done is developed a survival mechanism, and it's a fascinating one and it's been effective and justified, in my opinion. That is the ability to manipulate men sexually.

Frederick Lenz

Survival of the fittest led to "nature red in tooth and claw" and this is not sufficiently wishy-washy for modern scientists.

Anthony Standen

Traditional folk music is about survival of the fittest song just like evolution is about survival of the fittest organism and generally the more times a song has been passed down the generations the more brilliant and concise it becomes as every link in that chain can add something good or remove something unnecessary.

John Spiers

There's no such things as survival of the fittest. Survival of the most adequate, maybe. It doesn't matter whether a solution's optimal. All that matters is whether it beats the alternative.

Peter Watts

Instead of working for the survival of the fittest, we should be working for the survival of the wittiest - then we can all die laughing.

Lily Tomlin

We are not the survival of the fittest. We are the survival of the nurtured.

Louis Cozolino

If evolution was worth its salt, by now it should've evolved something better than survival of the fittest. I think a better idea would be survival of the wittiest.