Quotes About Adaptation

Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.

Success does not consist in never making mistakes but in never making the same one a second time.

This was yet another one of those things that school failed to prepare you for: how to deal with the unpredictable behavior of real people in the real world.

If we accept the unacceptable today, what's the outlook for tomorrow going to be?

It's hard for me to get used to these changing times. I can remember when the air was clean and sex was dirty.

The difference in golf and government is that in golf you can't improve your lie.

Sixty-some years ago, biochemical organisms began to assemble digital computers. Now digital computers are beginning to assemble biochemical organisms. Viewed from a distance, this looks like part of a life cycle. But which part? Are biochemical organisms the larval phase of digital computers? Or are digital computers the larval phase of biochemical organisms?

Humans were still in the loop but no longer in control.

Software was born. Numerical codes would be granted full control—including the power to modify themselves.1

It's but little good you'll do a-watering the last year's crops.

The best thing we can do if we want the Russians to let us be Americans is to let the Russians be Russian.

When you aim for perfection, you discover it's a moving target.

America is a country in which the storm is essential to clear the way for the calm. Because Americans, obsessed with the present and future, have difficulty remembering the past, they will all believe that there has never been a time as uncivil and tense as this one.

At the end and beginning of each cycle, there is the sense of failure and disaster. Yet each time the United States has re-created itself, perhaps imperfectly, but with a rebirth of startling superiority.

The United States periodically reaches a point of crisis in which it appears to be at war with itself, yet after an extended period it reinvents itself, in a form both faithful to its founding and radically different from what it had been.

Japan will need to foster deep

the idea that the past is obsolete is always resisted at an era's end.

One sometimes feels a guest of one's time and not a member of its household.

They're like beasts of the jungle," a woman said to Edge. "But it was their jungle first," he answered

To put it crudely but graphically, the monkey who did not have a realistic perception of the tree branch he jumped for was soon a dead monkey—and therefore did not become one of our ancestors.

Species evolve exactly as if they were adapting as best they could to a changing world, and not at all as if they were moving toward a set goal.

It is mankind that has survived, not any one man. The fitness includes and depends on social organization, cooperation.

Shaul is sure that Israel's test of survival, daily undergone, is the secret of Israeli enterprise. "When you're concerned about your survival, every day, you think outside of the box

Life is full of surprises," he said. "Try to cope with grace.