Quotes About Adaptation

The outer garments of to-day will become the under-clothes of some destined to-morrow, and centuries hence a man found walking on the public highways dressed as you are will be arrested by the police for shocking the sense of propriety of the community, and so on. It will go on and on until you will find human beings everywhere decked out in layer after layer of clothes until he or she has lost all semblance to that beautiful thing that an all-wise Providence has designed us to be.

Apparently I lack some particular perversion which today's employer is seeking.

The enemy of the conventional wisdom is not ideas but the march of events.

Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.

Change comes not from men and women changing their minds, but from the change from one generation to the next.

Your personality as the prime minister feeds through to what you emphasise, and what you don't, how you'll handle a situation - whether you've got the combination of intelligence or instincts to adapt and to make good decisions.

You've got to look after yourself, nothing comes for free and you've got to do the other bloke before he does you. That's what the pensioners don't realise. They might be owed something but there's nobody left to cough up. It's a different world now. The war spirit is dead and gone, packaged and sold off to the highest bidder.

all great achievements carry the seeds of their ossification.

Everything has to evolve or else it perishes.

The whole country is a Franciscan monastery compared to Hong Kong. It is like a fusty family firm where the paterfamilias died years ago and they have carried on doing everything in exactly the same way, except somebody installed a 1924 cash register a year or so ago, and since then everybody has been congratulating themselves on how up to date they are. Money is a typhoon, and Britain has so far felt only its first faint breath.

On a more specifically practical level, my main initial impression was to do with the fact that nobody spoke English. Okay, that's an exaggerated way of putting it, a good few people did speak English

Others were simply possessed by a feeling that they had made a catastrophic mistake. They had made an irreversible error in coming to England, and their lives would never recover - their lives would never again be their lives, but the story of this huge mistake that they had made.

It made sense: we were Others now.

It gave her a sudden sense that it was now her turn to grow old, to find the world changing, sliding away from the old ways of being and behaving, so that you were gradually a stranger to the place you lived in. The woman priest with jogging clothes and a BlackBerry gave Mary a glimpse of what life must have been like for her mother as she grew older.

No, Roger had not seen the funny side. But there had been a moment when, after looking at his watch, he had thought: I can remember when Christmas morning would start at about half past ten with a glass of Buck's Fizz in bed. Now it begins at half past five, with a test of my fine motor skills and ability to read Korean.

In Shahid's view, the best way through difficult times, as through life in general, was just to go along with things. It was a rare problem that couldn't be solved by being ignored.

The Cold War was over long before it was officially declared dead.

The most important thing about technology is that it can seamlessly work its way into your routine and your life.

Apathy isn't it. We can do something. So flower power didn't work. So what. We start again.

Whatever gets you through the night is all right.

Isn't it amazing the way the future succeeds in creating an appropriate past?

You ever think that life is something that happens and that you're not ever completely prepared for?

here." "You'll get over it.

Assuming stability is one of the ways ruins get made. Resilience accommodates the unexpected.