Quotes About Adaptation

In actual practice this distinction makes no sense whatever. An enterprise, whether a business or any other institution, that does not innovate and does not engage in entrepreneurship will not survive long.

But innovation and change make inordinate time demands on the executive. All one can think and do in a short time is to think what one already knows and to do as one has always done.

The only thing we know about the future is that it will be different.

One reason why it is difficult for management to accept unexpected success is that all of us tend to believe that anything that has lasted a fair amount of time must be 'normal' and go on 'forever'. Anything that contradicts what we have come to consider a law of nature is then rejected as unsound, unhealthy, and obviously abnormal.

We can get by on land only by carrying a huge amount of salt water around with us.

The octopuses seemed to be neither friends nor enemies, but in a state of complicated coexistence.

Crabs and some shrimp, in contrast, will groom injured areas.

Legs and fins don't necessarily show that one animal was interacting with others. Claws, in contrast, have little ambiguity.

First, it gets children into the habit of explaining successes and failures in terms of strategy use.

Adoptar movimientos lentos para toda la vida.

En la habitación de la niña tuvo la sensación de despedirse de algo, no de la niña, sino de la manera de vivir que hasta ahora le había correspondido vivir. Ya no existía ninguna manera de vivir para él.

Bettering your life, getting a fresh start, the bright side. Spout these concepts daily and you will survive in Endora; you might even thrive.

a foreigner often feels most foreign while witnessing the early education of another culture.

Usually I said nothing at all; as a waiguoren I was often most comfortable when I was listening.

Look at America—children are taught to be independent and creative. In China, it's all about discipline. There isn't enough creativity, and if you don't have creativity, then you can't adapt and change. You just follow the same old patterns and you don't get any better. That

When the cadres banned his students from singing any actual Christmas carols in a stage version of ''A Christmas Carol,'' he had them substitute patriotic Communist songs -- which actually improved Dickens: ''My favorite scene was when a furious Scrooge swung his cane at a band of merry carolers who were belting out 'The East Is Red,' singing the praises of Mao Zedong while the old man shouted, 'Humbug!

In China, much of life involves skirting regulations, and one of the basic truths is that forgiveness comes easier than permission.

When Chen Meizi had chosen her specialty, she didn't expect to find a job that matched her abilities; she expected to find new abilities that matched the available jobs.

Like many Peace Corps volunteers all over the world, I found that the parent visit was a kind of revelation: suddenly I saw how much I had learned and how much I had forgotten.

The Chinese people had invented the compass, paper, the printing press, gunpowder, the seismograph, the crossbow, and the umbrella; they had sailed to Africa in the fifteenth century; they had constructed the Great Wall; over the past decade they had built their economy at a rate never before seen in the developing world. They could return a rental car with exactly three-eighths of a tank of gas, but filling it was apparently beyond the realm of cultural possibility.

First, people may vary because they inherited different genes from their parents. Second, genetically similar individuals may differ because they have lived in different environments.5 Finally, people may differ because they have acquired different beliefs, values, and skills

We divide the evolving system into two parts. One is the inertial part-the processes that tend to keep the population the same from one time period to the next.

I'd just had a review lesson in what I'd already learned over and over in a year and a half of exploring these Gulf of Mexico waters. These waters, the skies over the Gulf, the winds--they all did whatever, whenever they wanted. And we humans basically have two choices when it comes to the sea. We can either stay away from it all. Or we can be ready for anything.

Suppose the god, the goal of progress, is changing. Then progress becomes impossible. How could we progress toward a goal that keeps receding? How could a runner make progress toward a finish line if someone kept moving it as he ran?