Quotes About Adaptation

We must all obey the great law of change. It is the most powerful law of nature.

We must all obey the great law of change. It is the most powerful law of nature, and the means perhaps of its conservation. All we can do, and that human wisdom can do, is to provide that the change shall proceed by insensible degrees. This has all the benefits which may be in change, without any of the inconveniences of mutation.

When ancient opinions and rules of life are taken away, the loss cannot possibly be estimated. From that moment we have no compass to govern us; nor can we know distinctly to what port we steer.

Custom reconciles us to every thing.

I know there is an order that keeps things fast in their place: it is made to us, and we are made to it. Why not ask another wife, other children, another body, another mind?

The greatest statesmen are those able at once to preserve and reform.

Conservatives, he said, "are taught to believe that change means destruction. They are wrong.… Life means change; where there is no change, death comes.

As you can hear, it's difficult to learn another language after forty.

A closed mind is a dying mind.

One might well think of [Going Mobile by Glen Engel-Cox] as a Carol Emshwiller or Connie Willis story...with balls.

In an atomic pile an explosion is prevented by inserting rods of cadmium, which mop up the particles that are shooting around. In this way the energy in the pile is controlled. If there are too many rods, the chain reaction stops and the pile can no longer produce any energy. People who are unable to appreciate new ideas are like the rods: some of them are necessary to prevent a destructive explosion, but too many make it impossible for the pile to produce any energy.

That was my lesson. I needed to act differently.

We expected to find aliens who were different from us, really different. We didn't expect to find aliens who are very similar with some striking differences. It has us off balance'.

In my youth I loved climbing and scrambling up rocks and mountains: now I seldom intrude on the dweller of a second story, and my greatest enemy or friend may avoid me altogether on the third; so humbled is the aspiring spirit of my youth.

A rusty bolt is the most difficult to withdraw; but once removed, though replaced, it will never hold securely.

Today's common sense had a habit of turning into tomorrow's utter nonsense.

A man does not learn very well, Mr. Robbins. Women, yes, because they are used to bending with whatever wind comes along. A woman, no matter the age, is always learning, always becoming.

Supongo que la gente no ha parado de alterar las normas desde que los griegos inventaron la democracia o, incluso, desde que el hombre inventó la rueda.

We have to deal with the world as it is, not as it should be," he would gently point out.

One of the advantage of being an immigrant is that two very different countries are forced to merge within you. The language you were born speaking and the one you will probably die speaking have no choice but to find a common place in your brain and regularly merge there.

I want to figure out how people can go on with their lives when mine has changed so much. I want to relearn how to breathe without carrying this big, empty cave inside me.

Still, she heard herself say, "Sometimes you take detours to get where you need to go.

Sometimes you take detours to get where you need to go.

the key to survival is the ability of the "host" to recognize and limit the invasiveness of its viral or malignant components.