Quotes About Stability

The earliest form of natural selection was simply a selection of stable forms and a rejection of unstable ones. There is no mystery about this. It had to happen by definition.

The welfare state is perhaps the greatest altruistic system the animal kingdom has ever known. But any altruistic system is inherently unstable, because it is open to abuse by selfish individuals, ready to exploit it. Individual humans who have more children than they are capable of rearing are probably too ignorant in most cases to be accused of conscious malevolent exploitation. Powerful institutions and leaders who deliberately encourage them to do so seem to me less free from suspicion.

Genetically speaking, individuals and groups are like clouds in the sky or dust- storms in the desert. They are temporary aggregations or federations. They are not stable through evolutionary time. Populations may last a long while, but they are constantly blending with other populations and so losing their identity.

Darwin's 'survival of the fittest' is really a special case of a more general law of survival of the stable. The universe is populated by stable things. A stable thing is a collection of atoms that is permanent enough or common enough to deserve a name.

The earliest form of natural selection was simply a selection of stable forms and a rejection of unstable ones.

A colleague points out to me that immigrants, uprooted from the stability and comfort of an extended family in Europe, could well have embraced a church as a kind of kin-substitute on alien soil. It is an interesting idea, worth researching further.

Darwin's 'survival of the fittest' is really a special case of a more general law of survival of the stable.

Houses can have this almost authorial power over us, seeming to ruin or make perfect our lives just by persisting in one place longer than we can. (In either case it's a power worth defeating.)

the existing market economy has no "stable" or "neutral" setting: there is only growth or contraction.

Just as a primitive sextant functions on the illusion that the sun and stars rotate around the planet we are standing on, our senses give us the illusion of stability in the universe, and we accept it, because without that acceptance, nothing can be done. Virginia

Be strong then, and enter into your own body; there you have a solid place for your feet. KABIR

Perhaps I just feel safer with the history that's been more or less agreed upon.

Being and stability are regarded by our contemporaries as akin to death; they cannot live unless they act, fret, or distract themselves with this or that. Their spirit (provided we can still talk about a spirit in their case) feeds only on sensations and on dynamism, thus becoming the vehicle for the incarnation of darker forces.

The substance of every true and stable political organism is something resembling an Order, a Männerbünd in charge of the principle of the imperium, comprising men who see loyalty as the basis of their honor.

Above all, her transformation of China was carried out without her engaging in violence and with relatively little upheaval.

It was all too clear that Cixi was the only person who could hold the empire together.

In a conservative society, stability and order were far more important than freedom of expression.

And that was love. True love. The kind that carried on and lasted through the good days and the difficult days. The kind of love that always gave, and never hurt. It might not be the kind of mad love poets wrote about, but it was the kind of love strong enough to build a home upon, secure in the knowledge that this man would be there when things went wrong and would do everything in his considerable power to make things right again.

You might change and your reading might change as a result, but the book remained whatever it had always been

At first I craved the stability of the regimen, but it became mundane, and all of a sudden I wanted chaos.

Men come and go but bills are forever.

A great Nation should have a fixed Government, so that the death of one man should not overturn it.

He [Winston Churchill] is a man suffering from petrified adolescence.

Instability of temper ought to be checked when it disposes men to wander from one scheme to another: since such a fickleness cannot but be attended with fatal consequences.