Quotes About Adaptation

If a film needed an exotic backdrop… Chinatown could be made to represent itself or any other Chinatown in the world. Even today, it stands in for the ambiguous Asian anywhere.

Learning to swim meant learning how to relinquish control, to thrive in a space of uncertainty.

Carl Jung observed that the very things that made you successful in the first half of your life not only no longer

that's no longer necessary.

Our work is borders, crossing them. Borders are a big attraction for me, leaving one country on the way to another, leaving one thought on the way to another, leaving our teens for our twenties, leaving East for West Germany. The liminal is the place to be. The bleeding edge. The demilitarized zones of the psyche, the gray ones of the heart. No-man's-land is yes-man's-land.

We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.

Too often, it seems to me, in missionary and educational work among underdeveloped races, people yield to the temptation of doing that which was done a hundred years before, or is being done in other communities a thousand miles away. The temptation often is to run each individual through a certain educational mould, regardless of the condition of the subject or the end to be accomplished.

If you are milking cows and feel that you know all that there is to be known about it, you have simply reached the point where you are useless and unfitted for the work.

We are the Borg lower your shields and surrender your weapons!

He used to be a German, but he completely recovered.

Be so kind as not to Frenchify. It really is a stupid habit to stick half of a French phrase into Russian speech," Zurov said irritably, glancing around at the speaker, although he himself interpolated French expressions now and again.

People don't change. Things do.

But why bother?" asked Weng Kim. "That is exactly the point, Weng Kim. We are Chinese, and Chinese people do bother. Thais were still eating rice with their fingers fifty years ago, and now they use whatever the foreigners use. We have used chopsticks since ancient times; they worked better for the purpose intended than fingers did then, and better than forks and spoons do now.

It is of little use to quarrel with particular fashions, however absurd. Fashionable follies seldom stand their ground long enough to be made the objects of serious attack. And where they give way to it, it is only to reappear in some new guise.

What is true changes, so we can't tell the truth once and be done with it. It's an ongoing game.

Haven't you ever played Uno?... Sometimes you have to lose all your cards to win.

a gentleman today—however we may characterize him—may find his environment less congenial to his temperament.

To be close to me is also to learn how to cope--to cope with how I cope.

Technology innovation is not going to slow down. The work to manage it needs to speed up

Amazon isn't happening to the book business," he likes to say to authors and journalists. "The future is happening to the book business.")

Bezos ultimately concluded that if Amazon was to continue to thrive as a bookseller in a new digital age, it must own the e-book business in the same way that Apple controlled the music business. "It is far better to cannibalize yourself than have someone else do it," said Diego Piacentini

It's about a crucial era during which old regimes fell, new leaders emerged, new social contracts were forged between strangers, the topography of cities changed, and the upstarts roamed the earth.

If you want to build a truly great company you have got to ride a really big wave. And you've got to be able to look at market waves and technology waves in a different way than other folks and see it happening sooner, know how to position yourself out there, prepare yourself, pick the right surfboard—in other words, bring the right management team in, build the right platform underneath you. Only then can you ride a truly great wave.

It is far better to cannibalize yourself than have someone else do it," said Diego Piacentini in a speech at Stanford's Graduate School of Business a few years later. "We didn't want to be Kodak." The reference was to the century-old photography giant whose engineers had invented digital cameras in the 1970s but whose profit margins were so healthy that its executives couldn't bear to risk it all on an unproven venture in a less profitable frontier.