Quotes About Adaptation

We can have no progress without change, whether it be basketball or anything else.

When almost half a lifetime has been spent in one conception of order, reorientation is no five-minute business.

Your work is to survive. Neither his kind, nor his kind of thinking will survive long. They are the crown of creation, they are ambition fulfilled—they have nowhere more to go. But life is change, that is how it differs from the rocks, change is its very nature. Who, then, were the recent lords of creation, that they should expect to remain unchanged?

But it is an inescapable conclusion that life has to be dynamic and not static. Change is bound to come one way or another.

You can't kill an idea the way they try to. You can keep it down awhile, but sooner or later it'll come out. Now what you've got to understand is that the wheel's not evil. Never mind what the scared men all tell you. no discovery is good or evil until men make it that way." -The Wheel, John Wtndham

And so the one in our garden continued its growth peacefully, as did thousands like it in neglected spots all over the world. It was some little time later that the first one picked up its roots and walked.

The leader does the planning, but he's wise enough not to say so. As the changes become necessary, he slips them in as a concession – temporary, of course – to circumstances, but if he's good, he's slipping in the right bits for the ultimate shape.

You know, one of the most shocking things about it is to realize how easily we have lost a world that seemed so safe and certain.

Only so few years ago,' Josella said reflectively, 'people were wailing about the way those bungalows were destroying the countryside. Now look at them.' 'The countryside is having its revenge, all right,' I said.

We don't seem to be good at integrating novelties with our social lives, do we? The world of the etiquette book fell to pieces at the end of the last century, and there has been no code of manners to tell us how to deal with anything invented since. Not even rules for an individualist to break, which is itself another blow at freedom. Rather a pity, don't you think?

Will you agree to be superseded, and start on the way to extinction without a struggle? I do not think you are decadent enough for that.

laws evolved by one particular species, for the convenience of that species, are, by their nature, concerned only with the capacities of that species—against a species with different capacities they simply become inapplicable.

The way I came to miss the end of the world – well, the end of the world I had known for close on thirty years – was sheer accident: like a lot of survival, when you come to think of it.

There was the feeling, too, that she no longer belonged – that she had become a stranger in another people's world. It had all altered so much; first changing into a place that it was difficult to understand, then growing so much more complex that one gave up trying to understand. No wonder, she thought, that the old become possessive about things; cling to objects which link them with the world that they could understand…

There is an inability to sustain the tragic mood, a phoenix quality of the mind.

In my experience,' he told me, 'if you run away from a thing just because you don't like it, you don't like what you find either.

The living form defies evolution at its peril; if it does not adapt, it will be broken. The idea of completed man is the supreme vanity: the finished image is a sacrilegious myth.

The essential quality of life is living' the essential quality of living is change; change is evolution; and we are part of it.

If you want to keep alive in the jungle, you must live as the jungle does.

There is an inability to sustain the tragic mood, a phoenix quality of the mind. It may be helpful or harmful, it is just a part of the will to survive—yet, also, it has made it possible for us to engage in one weakening war after another. But it is a necessary part of our mechanism that we should be able to cry only for a time over even an ocean of spilt milk—the spectacular must soon become the commonplace if life is to be supportable.

People are different in different places,' he thought hazily. 'And if they're all right in one place, it's best to leave them there.

So powerful, in fact, is simple string in taming the world to human will and ingenuity that I suspect it to be the unseen weapon that allowed the human race to conquer the earth, that enabled us to move out into every econiche on the globe during the Upper Paleolithic. We could call it the String Revolution.

Words, as. it happens, sometimes survive the millennia better than material objects, and they do so best in areas in which the culture changed only very slowly - as in the far north, where the intense winter cold discouraged immigrants.

then the bottom fell out of everything that used to have a bottom, and now she's expected to kill her own plants. At