Quotes / Survivorship Bias

"That quote, 'The only disability in life is a bad attitude'...the reason that that's bullshit...is because it's just not true, because of the social model of disability. No amount of smiling at a flight of stairs has ever made it turn into a ramp. Never. Smiling at a television screen isn't going to make closed captions appear for people who are deaf. No amount of standing in the middle of a bookshop and radiating a positive attitude is going to turn all those books into braille. It's just not going to happen."

— The late Stella Young, comedienne and disability advocate, on the Inspirationally Disadvantaged trope

"But when Diagoras, he who is called Godless, having come to Samothrace, was asked by one of his friends whether he who thought that the gods were careless of human affairs, did not perceive from so many painted tablets how many there were whose vows had enabled them to escape the fury of the storm, and to make their way safe into port, 'That is so,' he replied, 'because there are no pictures anywhere of those who have been shipwrecked and have perished in the sea'."

— Cicero, On the Nature of the Gods (trans. Francis Brooks)

"I would say don't take advice from people like me who have gotten very lucky, you know. We're very biased. Like, Taylor Swift telling you to follow your dreams is like a lottery winner saying, 'Liquidize your assets; buy Powerball tickets - it works!'"

— Bo Burnham, interview on Conan

"Adventurers who went a long time without getting killed tended to have books written about them. That doesn't mean it always went that way for everyone. Nobody wants to read about the hero who left the farm and immediately got stabbed by highwaymen."

— Father, "Path of a Hero", Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal