Quotes About Adaptation

As Halsey looked over his shoulder from his campaigns across the Pacific, "the old battlefields were already disappearing into the jungle or under neat, new buildings. Where 500 men had lost their lives in a night attack a few months before, eighteen men were now playing baseball. Where a Jap pillbox had crouched, a movie projector stood. Where a hand grenade had wiped out a foxhole, a storekeeper was serving cokes. Only the cemeteries were left."20

Thou hast had thty day, old dame, but thy sun has long been set. Thou art now the very emblem of an old warhorse turned out on the barren heath; thou hast had thy paces in thy time, but now a broken amble is the best of them.

It will be just like Duncan Mac-Girdie's mare,' said Evan, 'if your ladyships please, he wanted to use her by degrees to live without meat, and just as he had put her on a straw a day the poor thing died!

Since you can't change the past, you may as well make the best of the present.

What the human being is best at doing is interpreting all new information so that their prior conclusions remain intact.

If you wait till you know everything it's too late

While investors and managers must place their feet in the future, their memories and nervous systems often remain plugged into the past. 

Predicting the long-term economics of companies that operate in fast-changing industries is simply far beyond our perimeter.

Our basic principle is that if you want to shoot rare, fast-moving elephants, you should always carry a loaded gun. p217

It's good to learn from your mistakes. It's better to learn from other people's mistakes.

These things are going to look primitive to you, but you have to remember that we're not stupid. We have the same intelligence as you. We simply don't have the same cumulative knowledge you do. So we apply our intelligence to what we have.

How are we supposed to live in the future when the future just abandons us to the night?

Science fiction didn't see the mobile phone coming. It certainly didn't see the glowing glass windows many of us carry now, where we make things amazing happen by pointing at it with our fingers like goddamn wizards.

an environment becomes fully visible only when it has been superseded by a new environment; thus we are always one step behind in our view of the world. The present is always invisible because it's environmental and saturates the whole field of attention so overwhelmingly; thus everyone is alive in an earlier day.

The future sneaks up on us. It leaks in through the small, ordinary things.

Time was this place didn't make sense and I could live with it. Either it's changed, or I have.

Okay. I've either reinvented the solar panel or I've made something for seagulls to fuck in.

That's how the future always arrives: you don't realize it's here until you bump into it.

In his other hand is a spear made from duct tape, a smashed Nokia phone from 1998 and a selfie stick. Welcome to the future.

Peace is the result of retraining your mind to process life as it is, rather than as you think it should be.

Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything. — George Bernard Shaw

When we change the way we look at things the things we look at will change

In today's overpopulated world, we simply cannot continue to live with those old styles of closed-mindedness.

Changing the way you think, or feel, or live is possible but never easy.