Quotes About Adaptation

Trialability is the degree to which an innovation may be experimented with on a limited basis.

The more we know about how to do something, the harder it is to learn how to do it differently

The prejudice of [research] training is always a certain 'trained incapacity': The more we know about how to do something, the harder it is to learn how to do it differently

the economy "is like a bird. You can't hold it in your hand but have to let it fly. But it might fly away, and that is why you need a cage to control it.

In his pursuit of economic modernization, Deng liked to say that he was groping for stones as he crossed the river.

You used to be entertaining before you started to write.

People like us can't adopt whole theories, as you did. If we can do the next thing, and have an hour a day to think in, we can accomplish marvels, but as far as any high-handed scheme of blind dominance is concerned—we'd just make asses of ourselves.

On Shaw's principle that "if you don't get what you like, you better like what you get

Grown up, and that is a terribly hard thing to do. It is much easier to skip it and go from one childhood to another.

Everywhere we go and move on and change, something's lost--something's left behind. You can't ever quite repeat anything, and I've been so yours, here--

It's a great advantage not to drink among hard-drinking people. You can hold your tongue, and, moreover, you can time any little irregularity of your own so that everybody else is so blind that they don't see or care.

How different it all was from what you'd planned.

A man does not recover from such jolts-- he becomes a different person and, eventually, the new person finds new things to care about.

Compromising with events time moves along.

The transition from libertine to prig was so complete.

There are no second acts in American lives.

I was looking at it again, through Daisy's eyes. It is invariably saddening to look through new eyes at things upon which you have expended your own powers of adjustment.

Now you've a clean start... you've brushed three or four ornaments down, and in a fit of pique knocked off the rest of them. The thing now is to collect some new ones, and the farther you look ahead in the collecting, the better, but remember, do the next thing.

They were both overwhelmed by the sudden flatness that comes over American travellers in quiet foreign places. No stimuli worked upon them, no voices called them from without, no fragments of their own thoughts came suddenly from the minds of others.

I wouldn't ask too much of her,' I ventured. 'You can't change the past.' 'Can't change the past?' he cried incredulously. 'Why of course you can!

I found, moreover, that there was no great literary tradition; there was only the tradition of the eventful death of every literary tradition….

Modern life," began Amory again, "changes no longer century by century, but year by year, ten times faster than it ever has before—populations doubling, civilizations unified more closely with other civilizations, economic interdependence, racial questions, and—we're dawdling along. My idea is that we've got to go very much faster.

Reform won't catch up to the needs of civilization unless it's made to.

Whatever worth while comes to you, won't be through the channels you were searching last year.