Quotes About Adaptation

A German immersed in any civilization different from his own loses a weight equivalent in volume to the amount of intelligence he displaces.

At first we got along real well. Now... it's pretty much just a professional relationship.

Como dijo Gustav Schmoller, «la revolución puede evitarse siempre con las reformas oportunas».

El miedo al cambio social fue desde el principio la base de la solidaridad de «Occidente».

Happily, solving problems by intensifying production and increasing complexity does not always yield catastrophic results.

Wenn eine Gesellschaft nicht mit der Erschöpfung ihrer Ressourcen umgehen kann, drehen sich die wirklich interessanten Fragen um die Gesellschaft und nicht um die Ressource. Welche strukturellen, politischen, ideologischen oder wirtschaftlichen Faktoren in der Gesellschaft verhinderten eine angemessene Reaktion

Men may change their climate, but they cannot change their nature. A man that goes out a fool cannot ride or sail himself into common sense.

History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme.

I hope we don't get to the point where we have to have the cat stop chasing the mouse to teach him glassblowing and basket weaving.

Buenas noches. Don't mind the roaches.

If there is anything good about exile, it is that it teaches one humility. It accelerates one's drift into isolation, an absolute perspective. Into the condition at which all one is left with is oneself and one's language, with nobody or nothing in between. Exile brings you overnight where it would normally take a lifetime to go.

The female of species is deadlier than the male.

My story is both strange and true. I was born in the year the English call 1590. My family were leaders of the Patuxet people and I, too, was raised to lead. But in 1614 I was taken to Spain against my will. Now it is 1621 and I am again in my homeland. My name is Squanto. I would like to tell you my tale.

So it was that five days later, on the 22nd of March, I walked with Samoset back into my own village. Once Patuxet, now it was Plymouth. I looked around me. Though much was changed, I knew that I at last had returned to the land of my home.

We must be willing to let go of the life we planned so as to have the life that is waiting for us.

We are shaped by each other. We adjust not to the reality of a world, but to the reality of other thinkers.

We actually contain a built-in ability to rise above restriction, incapacity, or limitation and, as a result of this ability, possess a vital adaptive spirit that we have not yet fully accessed. While this ability can lead us to transcendence, paradoxically it can lead also to violence; our longing for transcendence arises from our intuitive sensing of this adaptive potential and our violence arises from our failure to develop it.

Let a fool be made serviceable according to his folly.

Quintilian said—"Prefer the oldest of the new and the newest of the old." Pope put this in rhyme and it still holds good: In words, as fashions, the same rule will hold, Alike fantastic, if too new or old: Be not the first by whom the new are tried, Nor yet the last to lay the old aside.

It is hard to find a butterfly in the city environment.

He'd taken to the BlackBerry right away, even though he complained that his fingers were too thick for the Lilliputian keys.

Man, I think you're actually proud of being a Luddite.

To be honest, I sort of feel like 'movie actor' isn't of this time. I love it. But it's a 20th-century art form.

More and more frequently, we will find ourselves in the position of the lower animals—with a mental apparatus that is unequipped to deal thoroughly with the intricacy and richness of the outside environment." The irony is that, "unlike the animals, whose cognitive powers have always been relatively deficient, we have created our own deficiency by constructing a radically more complex world.