Quotes About Adaptation

You can't expect the wolf to turn vegetarian because of one Pup.

She and the writer got together to change this story for the better.

War is the great auditor of institutions

Somewhere, in a distant land he barely knew the name of, people had stopped buying washing machines, and so his city had died.

Anything invented before you were eighteen was there all along. Anything invented before you're thirty is exciting and will change the world forever. Anything invented after that is an abomination and should be banned.

It was so easy for an old normal to make way for a new one, so easy to blot the memories of that old normal. That was a skill that had served her well, but in that bite and its honey, she'd counted the cost for the first time.

The way out of a crisis was to deal with it as it was, not as you wished it were.

you want to double your success rate, triple your failure rate.

When I was an activist in the 1980s, ninety-eight percent of my time was spent stuffing envelopes and writing addresses on them. The remaining two percent was the time we spent figuring out what to put in the envelopes. Today, we get those envelopes and stamps and address books for free. This is so fantastically, hugely different and weird that we haven't even begun to feel the first tendrils of it.

There are some factors you can control, and some you can't. Wishing things were different won't make them different.

The network interprets censorship as damage and routes around it

If you installed something wrong, the system tried to find a way to work around your stupid mistake.

You're going to hate to hear this, but you're too young to get it. Anything invented before you were eighteen was there all along. Anything invented before you're thirty is exciting and will change the world forever. Anything invented after that is an abomination and should be banned. You don't remember what life was like twenty years ago, before walkaways. You don't understand how different things are, so you think things don't change that much.

Because evolution isn't directed. It's not streamlined. We're an attic stuffed with everything our ancestors found useful, even if it stopped being useful thousands of years ago. Unless it makes you have fewer babies, it hangs around in the genome. Being out of control of your rational priorities certainly increases the number of babies you'll make.

End of the day, anything that made you discount objective reality and assign a premium to some kind of internal mental state was going to be both pro-survival and pro–status-quo.

People can numb themselves, get used to anything.

When the well runs dry, the nomad migrates. But if the barren landscape is within, where can one turn?

February turned into March and Hiccup was still thinking. A few flowers made the mistake of appearing and were immediately blasted out of existence by a couple of hard frosts that had kept themselves back for this very purpose.

Imagine if you had spent the whole first part of your life trying to walk on your hands. The clumsiness of it, always falling over, always stumbling, always the last at everything. Imagine the joy of discovering that in fact you could walk on your feet after all.

How can you make a fresh start in a new world when you are carrying with you on your boat all the same problems, the same frustrations and inequalities of the old world

She ponders the transmigrations from southern latitudes. the millions moving north. What happens to their languages? The warm burial grounds they leave behind? What of their passions lying stiff and untranslated in their breasts?

When the end of the world comes, I want to be in Cincinnati because it's always twenty years behind the times. —Mark Twain

She felt funny, strange, making up lies as quickly and smoothly as if she'd been doing it all her life.

Man has made such a mighty struggle to feel at home on the face of the earth, without even yet succeeding.