Quotes About Adaptation

There are no perfect relationships. There are no perfect partners. Relationships by their very nature are chaotic, eventful, and challenging.

Relationships are messy and there is no way to eliminate the bumps and potholes, but we don't have to make them any more difficult than they already are.

Live and learn, or you don't live long.

English is the largest of human tongues, with several times the vocabulary of the second largest language -- this alone made it inevitable that English would eventually become, as it did, the lingua franca of this planet, for it is thereby the richest and most flexible -- despite its barbaric accretions . . . or, I should say, because of its barbaric accretions. English swallows up anything that comes its way, makes English out of it.

Logic is a feeble reed, friend. Logic proved that airplanes can't fly and that H-bombs won't work and that stones don't fall out of the sky. Logic is a way of saying that anything which didn't happen yesterday won't happen tomorrow.

Everything is theoretically impossible, until it is done. One could write a history of science in reverse by assembling the solemn pronouncements of highest authority about what could not be done and could never happen.

Like every living thing its prime characteristic is a blind, unreasoned instinct to survive.

We're simply trying to survive—and the first principle of survival is not to worry about the impossible and concentrate on what's possible.

Morals — all correct moral laws — derive from the instinct to survive. Moral behavior is survival behavior above the individual level.

When it don't rain, the roof don't leak; when it rains, I can't fix it nohow.

That was smart, that was engineering: never reinvent something that you can buy down the street.

But one way or another competing and weeding takes place . . . or a race goes downhill.

in a matter of some generations all the stupid ones will die out and those with your discipline will inherit the Earth

Time was when I was immune to emotional shocks. But as I get older, I don't get tougher; I get softer.

If you load a mud foot down with a lot of gadgets that he has to watch, somebody a lot more simply equipped—say with a stone ax—will sneak up and bash his head in while he is trying to read a vernier.

government is a living organism. Like every living thing its prime characteristic is a blind, unreasoned instinct to survive. You hit it, it will fight back.

Women and cats do what they do; there is nothing a man can do about it

But, whatever you do, do not let the past be a straitjacket!

Logic is a feeble reed, friend. "Logic" proved that airplanes can't fly and that H-bombs won't work and that stones don't fall out of the sky. Logic is a way of saying that anything that didn't happen yesterday won't happen tomorrow.

Anyone who cannot cope with mathematics is not fully human. At best he is a tolerable subhuman who has learned to wear shoes.

But their refuge had been a dead end; all that inflexible old guard could do was to die and let younger minds, still limber, take over.

English swallows up anything that comes its way, makes English out of it. Nobody tried to stop this process, the way some languages are policed and have official limits . . . probably because there never has been, truly, such a thing as 'the King's English'—for 'the King's English' was French. English was in truth a bastard tongue and nobody cared how it grew . . . and it did!—enormously.

That's what I was trying to find out when we were rushed off on this damned safari. They have unusual intestinal flora and it may have something to do with that. But I think it has to do with the fact that they never stop growing.

Freedom is a hard habit to break.