Quotes About Adaptation

That very day I resolved not to save all of my change until I turned forty. I resolved to have what I termed a little midlife crisis each day of my life in the hope of avoiding a larger one once I reached forty.

Virtually all animals—single-celled organisms as well as humans—are conditioned to react in predictable ways, some of which we can modify and some of which are more difficult to change.

It's not that the worm forgives the plough; it gives it no mind. (Pain occurs, in passing.) (lines 37-39 in the poem 'Fantasia on a Theme from IKEA')

Alfred the Great] possessed the supreme military virtue of willingness to be taught by the enemy.

The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas," John Maynard Keynes famously observed, "but in escaping from the old ones.

But nothing surprises me now. I've grown used to living in a world that is out of joint, as if it has been struck by an enormous earthquake so that the roads are no longer flat, nor the building straight.

Everyone in Germany was somebody different before March 1933. And as I'm always saying, 'Who isn't a National Socialist when there's a gun pointed at his head?

Marketing is a race without a finishing line

There are three kinds of companies: those who make things happen; those who watch things happen; and those who wonder what's happened.—Anonymous

The term disorder of the self is descriptive of a personality disorder because these patients are out of touch with themselves. They identify themselves with a facade, a false defensive self that they have developed to adapt to a world that they perceive as hostile.

assumed a new role as a consequence of British membership in the European Union—changing fundamentally the traditional constitution—

destroy. Change had to take place without doing violence to the existing

they had thrived on Earth for millions of years, but their own waste killed them.

Som i det gamla ordspråket: 'På en rullande stad växer ingen mossa ...

What's your plan?" "There isn't one," said Hester. "I'm just making it up as I go along.

You know, sometimes a thing, a system, a creation grows so old, and corrupt, and weighed down by its own baggage, that all you can do is change it. Move on. Start afresh. It's frightening, but it has to be done.

To summarize: organizations are technical instruments, designed as means to definite goals. They are judged on engineering premises; they are expendable. Institutions, whether conceived as groups or practices, may be partly engineered, but they have also a "natural" dimension. They {22} are products of interaction and adaptation; they become the receptacles of group idealism; they are less readily expendable.

Revolutions, even as they destroy, build on the model of what has gone before.

And only when we are proven wrong so clearly that we can no longer deny it to ourselves will we adjust our mental models of the world—producing a clearer picture of reality. Forecast

Unpredictability and predictability coexist uneasily in the intricately interlocking systems that make up our bodies, our societies, and the cosmos. How predictable something is depends on what we are trying to predict, how far into the future, and under what circumstances.

there is no such thing as failure. Failure is just life trying to move us in another direction….Learn from every mistake because every experience, encounter, and particularly your mistakes are there to teach you and force you into being who you are." Everything happens for a reason. Everything has a purpose.

No plan of operations extends with certainty beyond the first encounter with the enemy's main strength

So many different formulas can work that there's no real formula. What's important is to learn from whomever or whatever you can, at your own rate, in your own way. How or when you learn doesn't matter, so long as the learning occurs.

Sometimes I feel like the most liberal person among conservatives, and sometimes like the most conservative among liberals.