Quotes About Adaptation

The important thing is not to shout at this point, Vimes told himself. Do not…what do they call it…go postal? Treat this as a learning exercise. Find out why the world is not as you thought it was. Assemble the facts, digest the information, consider the implications. THEN go postal. But with precision.

Everyone knew there were wolves in the mountains, but they seldom came near the village - the modern wolves were the offspring of ancestors that had survived because they had learned that human meat had sharp edges.

Natural selection saw to it that professional heroes who at a crucial moment tended to ask themselves questions like 'What is my purpose in life?' very quickly lacked both.

No enemies had ever taken Ankh-Morpork. Well technically they had, quite often; the city welcomed free-spending barbarian invaders, but somehow the puzzled raiders found, after a few days, that they didn't own their horses any more, and within a couple of months they were just another minority group with its own graffiti and food shops.

The second mouse gets the cheese!

Welcome to the world," he said wearily. "You get used to it after a while.

People build something that works. Then circumstances change, and they have to tinker with it to make it continue to work, and they are so busy tinkering that they cannot see that a much better idea would be to build a whole new system to deal with the new circumstances. But to an outsider, the idea is obvious.

This is Morbidia, said Vlad. Although she's been calling herself Tracy lately, to be cool.

We may even find out why the duck-billed platypus.* *Not why is it anything . Just why it is.

That's how we survive infinity - we kill it by breaking it up into small bits.

You can think and you can fight, but the world's always movin', and if you wanna stay ahead you gotta dance.

What is normal? Normal is yesterday and last week and last month taken together

Keep your vocabulary as wide as you can. I have some difficulty with the word 'cool', and I'm not too bothered about the word 'awesome'. People like me are looking to people like you guys of the next generation to deal with this shit. It's like seeing a rock guitarist pick up a Fender Stratocaster and hold it the wrong way.

Mr Vimes, said Mrs Winkings, ve cannot help but notice that you still haf not employed any of our members in the Vatch... Say 'Watch', why don't you? Vimes thought. I know you can. Let the twenty-third letter of the alphabet enter your life.

And in this doleful mood he ventured to wonder if they ever thought back to when things were just old-fangled or not fangled at all as against the modern day when fangled had reached its apogee. Fangling was indeed, he thought, here to stay. Then he wondered: had anyone ever thought of themselves as a fangler?

If the abnormal goes on long enough it becomes the normal.

Of course, to be fair, that was a parent's job. The world was so full of sharp bends that if they didn't put a few twists in you, you wouldn't stand a chance of fitting in.

Swing, though, started in the wrong place. He didn't look around, and watch and learn, and then say, 'This is how people are, how do we deal with it?' No, he sat and thought: This is how the people ought to be, how do we change them?' And that was a good enough thought for a priest but not for a copper, because Swing's patient, pedantic way of operating had turned policing on its head.

Old gods do new jobs.

New things, new ideas arrived and strutted their stuff and were vilified by some and then lo! that which had been a monster was suddenly totally important to the world.

You don't have to chase around after creatures, Pismire had said. You watch them for long enough, and then you'll find the place to wait and they'll come to you. There's nearly always a better way of doing something.

what was once considered impossible is now quite easily achieved. Kings and lords come and go and leave nothing but statues in a desert, while a couple of young men tinkering in a workshop change the way the world works.

We—we spread out," he said. "Yes. We spread out. That's what we do." They moved carefully through the bracken. The sergeant crouched behind a handy log, and said, "Right. Very good. You've got the general idea. Now let's spread out again, and this time we spread out separately.

here is the new thing and here it is. And yesterday you never thought about it and after today you don't know what you would do without it. That was what the technology was doing. It was your slave but, in a sense, it might be the other way round.