Quotes About Adaptation

Could dump two Chinee down in one of our maria and they would get rich selling rocks to each other while raising twelve kids. Then a Hindu would sell retail stuff he got from them wholesale--below cost at a fat profit. We got along.

Man is what he is, a wild animal with the will to survive, and (so far) the ability against all competition...The Universe will let us know-later-whether Man has any right to expand through it.

A verbalizing race has words for every old concept . . . and creates new words or new definitions for old words whenever a new concept comes along. Always! A nervous system that is able to verbalize cannot avoid verbalizing; it's automatic.

The only constant thing in these shifting, fairy-chess worlds is human love.

It is almost impossible to shake of one's earliest training. Duke, can you get it through your skull that had you been brought up by Martians, you would have the same attitude toward eating and being eaten as Mike has.

He's a man by ancestry, a Martian by environment.

I needed a space suit the way a pig needs a pipe organ.

But the physical danger was judged to be less important than the psychological stresses. Eight humans, crowded together like monkeys for almost three Terran years, had better get along much better than humans usually did.

The weak ones died, and the bad ones died or were killed; the stock that survived was always stronger, smarter, more decent. New Beginnings was a planet to be proud of, and it would get better and better and better for a long time.

Dress yourself in heavy fishing waders, put on an overcoat and boxing gloves and a bucket over your head, then have somebody strap two sacks of cement across your shoulders and you will know what a space suit feels like under one gravity.

He ate what was set before him

Don't bang your head against a stone wall." He might add: "Climb over, go around, tunnel under, knock a hole in it—and if nothing works, forget it! Change your plans. Or take a nap. But don't get ulcers.

The first principle in riding a tiger is to hang on tight to its ears.

To stay young requires unceasing cultivation of the ability to unlearn old falsehoods.

The world steadily grows better because the human mind, applying itself to environment, makes it better... with hands... with tools... with horse sense and science and engineering.

Ale mám na mysli pÃ…â"¢ípad, kdy byly smeteny ?tyÃ…â"¢i úrovnÄ› velení v Å¡esti minutách - jako kdyby si velitel ?ety protÃ…â"¢el o?i a zjistil, že velí brigádÄ›. SlyÅ¡eli jste o tom?

heard Prof say, "Manuel, when faced with a problem you do not understand, do any part of it you do understand, then look at it again.

Wherever there is power and mass to manipulate, Man can live.

If a table has four legs, which one can you afford to throw away?

We need to have as many baskets for our eggs as possible. Even if we don't manage to ruin this planet ourselves, natural disasters or changes—or even changes in our star—could make it impossible to live on this planet. —Philosopher Anson MacDonald, radio interview, Butler, MO, USA, Terra, July 7, 1987 ("Anson MacDonald Day")

The quickest way I know to break a person is to give him or her two sets of contradicting values—which is exactly what we do, in modern culture, with our Sunday and Monday moralities. We are taught by Christianity to follow a set of values that are almost entirely disregarded in everyday business life. How is a person to cope?

Most psychotherapies are designed to patch up wounded people and then throw them back into the battle of oppositions. They guide people in how to become better adapted socially: more adept at making money, more highly disciplined, more dutiful, more economically productive. Even when such therapy is successful and gets an individual back out into the rat race again, you can watch them wither over time under the weight of it all. In

the urge toward suicide signals an edge of a new level of consciousness. If you can kill the right thing—the old way of adaptation—and not injure yourself, a new energy-filled era will begin.

When it is time for growth, the old ways and the old habits must welcome the new. The old way seems to hinder the new growth at every point, but if you persevere, this way will bring a new consciousness to birth.