Quotes About Adaptation

Impossibilities are merely things of which we have not learned, or which we do no wish to happen.

We want the impossibility set: the benefits of free-flowing capital without the disruptions; the flexibility of floating exchange rates without the unpredictability; and the ability to adapt monetary policy to domestic needs without the headaches caused when other countries do the same.

You go to war with the army you have—not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.

Now we have come full circle to the subtitle of this book: children learn by unlearning other languages. Viewed in the Darwinian light, all humanly possible grammars compete to match the language spoken in the child's environment. And fitness, because we have competition, can be measured by the compatibility of a grammar with what a child hears in a particular linguistic environment. This theory of language takes both nature and nurture into account: nature proposes, and nurture disposes.

And with each new pitcher a hitter must adjust and adapt to a new repetoire of pitches.

In fact, I have reached the point where I don't see the value of switch-hitting at all.

John Laroche: You know why I like plants? Susan Orlean: Nuh uh. John Laroche: Because they're so mutable. Adaptation is a profound process. Means you figure out how to thrive in the world. Susan Orlean: [pause] Yeah but it's easier for plants. I mean they have no memory. They just move on to whatever's next. With a person though, adapting almost shameful. It's like running away.

Who knows how you should be? We simply do our best, over and over and over.

I didn`t change. The Democratic Party slid to the Left from right under me.

Circumstances are seldom right. You never have the capacities, the strength, the wisdom, the virtue you ought to have. You must always do with less than you need in a situation vastly different from what you would have chosen.

Travel Etiquette: When dealing with foreigners, pretend you are Canadian.

You start out every day with something new and different, and sometimes it looks pretty good and sometimes it doesn't, but you have to go through it anyway.

Then his real struggle would begin. Then he would try to make them understand that the old ways were no more.

Eneke the bird says that since men have learned to shoot without missing, he has learned to fly without perching.

The impatient idealist says: 'Give me a place to stand and I shall move the earth.' But such a place does not exist. We all have to stand on the earth itself and go with her at her pace.

Eneke the bird was asked why he was always on the wing and he replied: 'Men have learnt to shoot without missing their mark and I have learnt to fly without perching on a twig.'

But it was like beginning life anew without the vigor and enthusiasm of youth, like learning to become left-handed in old age.

Men of today have learnt to shoot without missing and so I have learnt to fly without perching.

The Igbo culture says no condition is permanent. There is constant change in the world.

El mundo está cambiando ?le había dicho?. No me gusta, pero soy como el pájaro eneke-nti-oba, que cuando sus amigos le preguntaron por que volaba a todas horas respondió: Los hombres de hoy han aprendido a disparar sin errar y por eso yo he aprendido a volar sin posarme en las ramas.

The young he-goat said that but his sojourn in his mother's clan he would not have learnt to stick up his upper lip.

Let no one be fooled by the fact that we may write in English, for we intend to do unheard of things with it.

Stillness is a reflection of our growing openness to the unpredictable unfolding of the world as it is, a freedom from the constant effort to bend things to our liking, to make them conform to our conditioned notions of good and bad.

Today we are even manipulating the DNA that makes us possible in the first place—a case of evolution evolving new ways to evolve.