We do not choose survival as a value, it chooses us.
Interpretation
Survival is not a conscious choice but a fundamental instinct that drives us.
The quote by B. F. Skinner suggests that the instinct for survival is an inherent part of our nature and is not something we actively decide upon. Instead of viewing survival as a conscious value or goal, it emphasizes that it is an instinctual drive that emerges in challenging situations, shaping our behavior and decisions without a deliberate choice.
In practice
This quote can be used in a discussion about human resilience during crises.
Each of us has interests which conflict the interests of everybody else... 'everybody else' we call 'society'. It's a powerful opponent and it always wins. Oh, here and there an individual prevails for a while and gets what he wants. Sometimes he storms the culture of a society and changes it to his own advantage. But society wins in the long run, for it has the advantage of numbers and of age.
No theory changes what it is a theory about; man remains what he has always been.
I am opposed to the military use of animals. I am also opposed to the military use of men.
The ideal of behaviorism is to eliminate coercion: to apply controls by changing the environment in such a way as to reinforce the kind of behavior that benefits everyone.
Unable to understand how or why the person we see behaves as he does, we attribute his behavior to a person we cannot see, whose behavior we cannot explain either but about whom we are not inclined to ask questions.
Fame is also won at the expense of others. Even the well-deserved honors of the scientist or man of learning are unfair to many persons of equal achievements who get none. When one man gets a place in the sun, the others are put in a denser shade. From the point of view of the whole group there's no gain whatsoever, and perhaps a loss.
The Iraq war was fought by one-half of one percent of us. And unless we were part of that small group or had a relative who was, we went about our lives as usual most of the time: no draft, no new taxes, no changes. Not so for the small group who fought the war and their families.
She starched and ironed her face, forming it into just what people wanted to see.
Every criticism, judgment, diagnosis, and expression of anger is the tragic expression of an unmet need.
Can there be in our age any peace that is not honorable, any war that is not dishonorable?
Near the gates and within two cities there will be scourges the like of which was never seen: famine within plague, people put out by steel, crying to the great immortal God for relief.
Violence is man re-creating himself.
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