We will now discuss in a little more detail the Struggle for Existence.

I should premise that I use the term Struggle for Existence in a large and metaphorical sense, including dependence of one being on another, and including (which is more important) not only the life of the individual, but success in leaving progeny.

In former days the struggle for existence was chiefly a struggle against nature, today it is primarily a struggle against other human beings.

The struggle for existence holds as much in the intellectual as in the physical world. A theory is a species of thinking, and its right to exist is coextensive with its power of resisting extinction by its rivals.

Struggle! To struggle is to live, and the fiercer the struggle the intenser the life. Then you will have lived; and a few hours of such life are worth years spent vegetating.

I found that life was a continual struggle for most of us-and this on a plane not much above that of the struggle of wild animals-and that society dismissed this obvious truth as a negligible factor in determining human conduct as well as our mental and physical well-being. I began to see that this economic battle persisted even in the midst of an exhaustless plenty, and that most humans lived and died trying to succeed in a material sense, in short, to reach the goal of a triumphant animalism.

The concept of the « struggle for existence » has been applied to microbial interrelationships in nature in a manner comparable to the effects assigned by Darwin to higher forms of life. It has also been suggested that the ability of a microbe to produce an antibiotic substance enables it to survive Giom. in competition for space and for nutrients with other microbes. Such assumptions ppear to be totally unjustified on the basis of existing knowledge. Before we proceed with a discussion of the formation and activities of antibiotics under natural conditions, we must consider certain fundamental aspects of the problem of antibiotic production under controlled laboratory or factory conditions... All the discussion of a "struggle for existence" in which antibiotics are supposed to play a part, is merely a figment of the imagination, and an appeal to the melodramatic rather than the factual.

Struggle is everywhere, without struggle no life, and if we want to go on living, we must be ready for further struggles.

Here and everywhere is the struggle for existence, life inextricably enmeshed with war. All life living at the expense of life, every organism eating other organisms forever.

For our nation, this (2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine) is a struggle for our very existence. We don't have a choice. We must stay, we must fight (the Russians).

To live means to struggle, the slave for freedom and the free man for perfection.

In New England the struggle for existence is visibly the struggle of plant with plant, each battling his neighbor for sunlight and for the spot of ground which, so far as moisture and nourishment are concerned, would support them all. Here, the contest is not so much of plant against plant as of plant against inanimate nature. The limiting factor is not the neighbor but water; and I wonder if that is, perhaps, one of the things which make makes this country seem to enjoy a kind of peace one does not find elsewhere.

All life is a struggle for existence. Why should it cease to be a struggle if it spreads among the stars?

In the wild struggle for existence, we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts, in the silly hope of keeping our place.