Top 75 Survivors Quotes

I want survivors to know that healing is possible.

I voted against H.R. 4712, the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act, which is nothing more than a shameless attempt to intimidate doctors, spread misinformation about abortion, and decrease women’s access to healthcare.

If you want proof of what the country is really all about, just walk through the National September 11 Memorial Museum. Here it is, in the faces of the victims, in the stories of bravery, in the souls and memory of the survivors, the next of kin.

The so-called lessons of history are for the most part the rationalizations of the victors. History is written by the survivors.

Many of my favorite survivors in fiction show that it may not be the most muscled, macho or mighty people who pull through. A strong mind and body aren’t always enough. You might also need a resilient heart.

Both my father and mother were survivors of the Warsaw Ghetto and the Nazi concentration camps. Apart from my parents, every family member on both sides was exterminated by the Nazis.

One can’t live with a child of Holocaust survivors without absorbing some of the same sensibilities that her parents transmitted to her as a young girl. It is an unspoken dread, a sense of fragility, an anxious anticipation of unseen horrors.

You see, ‘The Look of Silence’ is the first film ever made where survivors confront perpetrators who still hold a monopoly on power. It’s normally never done because it is too dangerous.

During the lockdown, I saw many videos on social media which showed how COVID survivors were being attacked, doctors were being mistreated while they returned home, police officers were not welcome anywhere, I realized how disheartening it was!

I personally know women who are Breast Cancer survivors and will do all I can to support the cause. Besides, I love boobies!

The courage and leadership March for Our Lives has shown is a testament to the power our young people have in this country, to make our country stronger while protecting our friends, families, and loved ones. The work survivors and advocates across the country have done to keep families safe matters.

The building in the Bronx where I grew up was filled with mostly Holocaust survivors. My two best friends’ parents both survived the camps. Everyone in my grandparents’ building had tattoos. I’d go shopping with my grandparents, and the butcher, the baker, everybody in the whole neighborhood had tattoos.

I didn’t start Me Too as a hashtag, and had I had the opportunity to, I probably wouldn’t have done it that way. I think that what has happened subsequently has been beautiful to watch, but what concerns me is what all of these survivors are going to do now.

If you really want to see the face of war, see the faces of survivors.

My novella, ‘The Lucky One,’ is inspired in part by my dad and also by a Holocaust survivor I interviewed for the Steven Spielberg Survivors of the Shoah Foundation.

And I’ll tell you, honestly, folks that I talk to, the 2.5 million breast cancer survivors in America, that I am one of, understand that we’re done with insurance companies dropping us or denying us coverage because of – because we have a preexisting condition.

I wanted to resist in ‘The Look of Silence’ making a film that ends with any kind of positive hope I feel in human rights documentaries dealing with human survivors.

The work is more than just about the amplification of survivors and quantifying their numbers. The work is really about survivors talking to each other and saying, ‘I see you. I support you. I get it.’

I was actually very pleased that they let me do it, because I feel very deeply for breast cancer survivors. I don’t have it, but it is in my family. I’ve always been very aware of it. I go for mammograms and checkups.

It’s interesting when people say, ‘You always play strong women,’ because as far as I’m concerned, women are strong. I think that’s what women are. We have got that vulnerability, but we have got that strength. We are survivors.

My sister and mom are both cancer survivors. If they’re going to whip it, so am I.

If we fetishize trauma as incommunicable, then survivors are trapped – unable to feel truly known by their nonmilitary friends and family.

In many regards, Me Too is about survivors talking to survivors.

Trauma survivors have a deficiency in their capacity to regulate emotions – they’re too prolonged and too intense and too negative. As a corollary to affect regulation, self-esteem, sense of self and inter-personal functioning all goes downhill. And that’s a chronic thing that’s solved in an-inter personal context.

I have worked on behalf of storm survivors for 10 years, and compared to historic hurricanes on the mainland, Hurricane Maria is the worst recovery I’ve ever witnessed.

Black people are achievers; we’re survivors.

I would never call myself a cancer survivor because I think it devalues those who do not survive. There’s this whole mythology that people bravely battle their cancer and then they become survivors. Well, the ones who don’t survive may be just as brave, you know, just as courageous, wonderful people.

Air India happened when I was about five years old but… I’ve attended memorials with respect to the victims and the families, the survivors of this horrible and heinous act. I’ve talked about how everyone denounces it.

I’m no hero. Heroes don’t come back. Survivors return home. Heroes never come home. If anyone thinks I’m a hero, I’m not.

You can’t take our people from Africa and put us in a diaspora and spread us all over the world. And we survived slavery – and we can’t pass a test? … And you’re gonna tell me we can’t learn how to write? Have you lost your mind? We are survivors. That’s all we do is survive.

Disasters such as earthquakes, tsunamis, volcanoes, floods, oil spills and radioactive fallout cause massive death of people, pigs, bats and birds. These disasters also impact the immune health of survivors. All harbor viruses.

The sea always offers up incredible stories of survivors’ fortitude. Myths of a lot of countries have variations on that.

I think it is selfish for me to try to frame Me Too as something that I own. It is bigger than me and bigger than Alyssa Milano. Neither one of us should be centered in this work. This is about survivors.

In terms of ‘Saving Face,’ I was inspired by the stories of survivors who didn’t let their attacks stop them from pursuing justice and seeking treatment.

Before I started chemotherapy treatments, I wrote down the best advice from doctors, family, friends, books, and survivors and created an ‘Owner’s Manual’ to help me take care of myself. It would remind me that cancer is doable.

There are a lot of recent pics of me rocking silk strings of beads. They’re made by survivors of the sex trade in Cambodia who were rescued by one of the organizations I support.

The hope of ISIS was to break the Yazidi community. But for survivors especially, going back to their lives and getting married and making a life and working, it’s basically making sure ISIS did not succeed.

‘Me too’ became a term that was both succinct and powerful, and it was a way to ring up immediate empathy between survivors.

Trauma creates one of four types of people: victims, rescuers, or perps – and if you’re really lucky and really strong and very willing and brave, survivors.

The kinds of people you meet on political campaigns are some of the best human beings. They’re survivors, and they’re spunky, and they have personalities, and they spend months sleeping on couches and living on, whatever, pizza and coffee and bad beer.

The Minnesota spirit of compassion and help for people in need has moved countless Minnesotans to step forward to provide relief for the survivors of Hurricane Katrina.

We are so used to seeing women as victims of war to be pitied rather than survivors of war to be respected.

The survivors of Hurricane Harvey do not need empty tweets and platitudes from people like Donald Trump and Joel Osteen. They have shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that, as we say in Texas, they are all hat and no cattle.

Victims and survivors deserve more than a person seeking a headline.

I think that women are powerful and they’re multifaceted and they’re survivors; they don’t have to depend on a man to do the things they needed them to do, whether it was hunting or lifting heavy things, so what’s a man’s place now? Who knows!

We must remain committed to rebuilding communities ravaged by genocide. Survivors deserve a safe and secure pathway home or safe passage elsewhere.

As a single mother, I qualified for Pell Grants, and received a scholarship from a small organization for domestic violence survivors.

Dictators are allergic to reform, and they are cunning survivors. They will do whatever it takes to preserve their power and wealth, no matter how much blood ends up on their hands. They are master deceivers and talented manipulators who cannot be trusted to change.

Some of the greatest survivors have been women. Look at the courage so many women have shown after surviving earthquakes in the rubble for days on end.

One of the facts about sexual assault is that it is a very underreported offense, and there are a whole lot of reasons why individuals don’t report to law enforcement. Uber shouldn’t make that choice for survivors. Survivors should make that choice for themselves.