Quotes About Adaptation

Organizational theorists, at least since Burns and Stalker, 1961 and Joan Woodward, 1965 in what came to be called the contingency school, have recognized that centralization is appropriate for organizations with routine tasks, and decentralization for those with nonroutine tasks.

We can laugh all we like at Micromaniacs, but they will have the last laugh - because they are designing the future that the rest of us will have to live in.

We cannot change our past. We can not change the fact that people act in a certain way. We can not change the inevitable. The only thing we can do is play on the one string we have, and that is our attitude.

the management of a polity, there needs to be an end of things.

A hairy quadruped, furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in its habits.

Man with all his noble qualities… with his godlike intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system… still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.

I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term Natural Selection.

I never dreamed that islands, about fifty or sixty miles apart, and most of them in sight of each other, formed of precisely the same rocks, placed under a quite similar climate, would have been differently tenanted.

Man is descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in its habits.

To appreciate a new and difficult style, as I have said, takes an act of will, a decision to experience it again.

I think I've discovered the secret of life -- you just hang around until you get used to it.

Life is like a 10-speed bike. Most of us have gears we never use.

You do have to change things as warfare changes.

The best place to succeed is where you are with what you have.

If the sky falls they shall have clouds for supper.

It is not well to make great changes in old age.

They can put the code monkey in a suit but they can't take the code out of the monkey.

Acquire worldly wisdom and adjust your behavior accordingly. If your new behavior gives you a little temporary unpopularity with your peer group…then to hell with them.

We all are learning, modifying, or destroying ideas all the time. Rapid destruction of your ideas when the time is right is one of the most valuable qualities you can acquire. You must force yourself to consider arguments on the other side.

If something is too hard, we move on to something else. What could be simpler than that?

Pain-Avoiding Psychological Denial One should recognize reality even when one doesn't like it.

Never solve a problem from its original perspective.

Maybe some find that so, but Joseph Sobran better expresses my feelings: "It can be exalting to belong to a church that is five hundred years behind the times and sublimely indifferent to fashion; it is mortifying to belong to a church that is five minutes behind the times, huffing and puffing to catch up."1

Change is inevitable; but progress depends on what we do with that change.