Quotes About Adaptation

Economics has never been a science - and it is even less now than a few years ago.

That's the secret of creativity. You have to steal around. If you keep going back to that same 7-Eleven, they're going to catch you. So you go over to the floral shop, the gas station that nobody ever goes to, and you steal all this shit, and you put it together and people say, "Wow." They think it's yours.

The permutations of English corruption in India were endless

How are we to become native to this land?" (as quoted in Trespass: Living at the Edge of the Promised Land by Amy Irvine)

The innovative leader has to be an arsonist and a firefighter.

Fail often and fail cheap.

The main benefit of innovation for your organization is not competitive advantage. It is survival.

We face the possibility of being rejected by the biosphere as a virulent organism. But

I knew from rock concerts that people notice your reaction to mistakes more than they notice the actual mistakes, so I just kept singing—in gibberish. Eventually my mind cleared.

You can't change a tiger by whitewashing its stripes.

Remaining hopeful is essential. And it's true that everyone has good and bad qualities. But hope must be tempered with a realistic view of the situation and an assessment of the likelihood of change.

Once you begin to accept that a mentally ill person will sometimes behave irrationally, you alleviate some of your own internal stress and strain… [O]nce you do so you can begin to develop more effective coping mechanisms. No longer burdened by the "what-ifs" and "shoulds" in your mind, you can deal with the way things really are. And you seek out what works.

When I was in the Peace Corps I never made a phone call. I was in Central Africa I didn't make a phone call for two years. I was in Uganda for another four years and I didn't make a phone call. So for six years I didn't make a phone call, but I wrote letters, I wrote short stories, I wrote books.

You go away for a long time and return a different person - you never come all the way back

It felt like the first thing, but when I first started out, I got a job adapting a book by Russell Banks called 'Rule Of The Bone.' I didn't do a very good job. I didn't really know what I was doing in general, let alone how to adapt a book.

The typical American, after he has lost the foundations of his existence, works for new foundations.

The future, like everything else, is not what it used to be.

Whether in science or the arts, if we look for the source of an achievement we can observe that what a man does either repeats or refutes what someone else has done — repeats it in other tones, refines or amplifies or simplifies it, loads or overloads it with meaning; or else rebuts, overturns, destroys, and denies it, but thereby assumes it and has invisibly used it. Opposites are born from opposites.

The trouble with our times is that the future is not what it used to be.

Ja, we zijn bevrijd van pastoren en hun dwingende moraal, maar nee, we zijn niet vrij, integendeel. Er is een nieuwe moraal met haar eigen hogepriesters, die bovendien meer dwang uitoefenen dan de vorige, omdat ze zich als wetenschappelijk en dus als niet voor discussie vatbaar voordoen. Het enige gebod van die moraal is systematic effectiveness, meteen de mantra van de eerste hogepriester, de manager. De tweede pastoor is de nieuwe psychotherapeut, wiens mantra 'aanpassing' luidt.

Intelligence is the ability of a species to live in harmony with its environment.

Climate Change - "We cannot stop it but we can slow it down

Gradually, we have become each other's weather.

Although we usually fail to think of it in this way, the world around us today is just one of countless possible worlds. The millions of species of plants, animals, and insects we see around us are the expression of myriad interacting processes, including chance -- perhaps especially chance. At any point in its prehistory, a species might just easily have taken a different direction, given a slightly altered confluence of events, thus leaving today's world a slightly different place.