Quotes About Adaptation

I prefer to think about problems the way engineers do. If a valve doesn't work, they don't say, "Well, we must have valves, so let's try two valves." If a valve doesn't work, they say, "Well, what would work?" Their rule is, if it doesn't work, don't do it more, do something else.

Diversity, not uniformity, is what works. Our problem is not that people are living a bad way but rather that they're all living the same way. The earth can accommodate many people living in a voraciously wasteful and pollutive way, it just can't accommodate all of us living that way.

you never really know how to handle a problem until you actually have it.

What I said in Ishmael stands: There is no One Right Way to live. What we find among Leaver peoples is that each has a way that works well for them. We may not like one particular way, we may think it atrocious and cruel, but it's their way, not ours, and the most murderous culture in human history is hardly in a position to set itself up as the moral policeman of the world.

Among the primates only humans are hunters, because among the primates only humans have the biological equipment to make hunting a mainstay of life—and that equipment is strictly intellectual.

The evolution of society is substantially a process of mental adaptation on the part of individuals under the stress of circumstances which will no longer tolerate habits of thought formed under and conforming to a different set of circumstances in the past.

Lives have a way of getting on with themselves. But in the short run it will be hard.

He was just changing, transforming himself into something new and different to carry his life forward in. All

And that's when I discovered that my father hadn't been dying after all. He was just changing, transforming himself into something new and different to carry his life forward in.

It's not always to the benefit of the story to have it so preordained.

Work need not be concentrated in offices, companies can be run from homes, newspapers can be put out with almost no one in the newsroom; time spent commuting can be reduced; business meetings can be replaced by digital connecting. These impacts will last after lockdowns are well in the past. It took three years after 9/11 and more than seven years after the 2008 financial crisis for air travel in the United States to recover to the previous levels.

On April 26, 1956, cranes at the port of Newark, New Jersey, lifted up fifty-eight truck bodies, minus their wheels and cabins, and put them on a surplus World War II tanker bound for Texas. "We are convinced that we have found a way to combine the economy of water transportation with the speed and flexibility of overland shipment," McLean announced.

Life isn't about waiting for the storm to pass…It's learning to dance in the rain.

There is no education like adversity.

Failure is not fatal, but failing to change might be.

Make new mistakes. Make glorious, amazing mistakes. Make mistakes nobody's ever made before.

There is no failure. Only feedback.

People always fear change. People feared electricity when it was invented, didn't they? People feared coal, they feared gas-powered engines… There will always be ignorance, and ignorance leads to fear. But with time, people will come to accept their silicon masters.

Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.

I was in a form of a prison: not necessarily with bars, but I was locked to that machine three days a week, and I couldn't plan work, I couldn't plan vacations, I couldn't plan dinner, I couldn't plan homework, I couldn't plan nothing because at the end of the day, Monday, Wednesday and Friday, I had to be at dialysis.

I buried my dad on a Thursday and showed up for work on Friday.

A lot of people ask me if I were shipwrecked, and could only have one book, what would it be? I always say 'How to Build a Boat.'

The greatest secret to happiness and peace is letting every life situation be what it is, instead of what you think it should be. Then, make the very best of it.

"It's not what happens to you, but how you react to it that matters."