Quotes About Adaptation

La historia era un palimpsesto, borrado y reescrito tantas veces como fuese necesario.

He accepted everything. The past was alterable.

But this sense of guilt and inevitable failure was balanced by something else: that is, the instinct to survive. Even a creature that is weak, ugly, cowardly, smelly and in no way justifiable still wants to stay alive and be happy after its own fashion. I could not invert the existing scale of values, or turn myself into a success, but I could accept my failure and make the best of it. I could resign myself to being what I was, and then endeavour to survive on those terms.

hereditary aristocracies have always been shortlived, whereas adoptive organisations such as the Catholic Church have sometimes lasted for hundreds or thousands of years.

Has it ever occurred to you [...] that by the year 2050...not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?

Like all man who have lived much alone, he adjusted himself better to ideas than to people.

The war had jerked me out of the old life I'd known, but in the queer period that came afterwards I forgot it almost completely.

It needs some very great disaster, such as prolonged subjugation by a foreign enemy, to destroy a national culture. The Stock Exchange will be pulled down, the horse plough will give way to the tractor, the country houses will be forgotten, but England will still be England, an everlasting animal stretching into the future and the past and like all living things, having the power to change out of recognition and yet remain the same.

Every Communist is in fact liable at any moment to have to alter his most fundamental convictions, or leave the party. The unquestionable dogma of Monday may become the damnable heresy of Tuesday, and so on.

For a few days after getting into the water the toad concentrates on building up his strength by eating small insects. Presently he has swollen to his normal size again, and then he goes through a phase of intense sexiness.

Pourquoi avait-il du mal à supporter la vie actuelle, si ce n'est qu'il y avait une sorte de souvenir ancestral d'une époque où tout était différent ?

The Hate continued exactly as before, except that the target had been changed.

To dissemble your feelings, to control your face, to do what everyone else was doing, was an instinctive reaction.

Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In

At one time it had been a sign of madness to believe that the earth goes round the sun; today to believe that the past is unalterable.

God had given him a tail to keep the flies off, but that he would sooner have no tail and no flies

Ideology knows the answer before the question has been asked. Principles are something different: a set of values that have to be adapted to circumstances but not compromised away.

Men go and come, but earth abides.

The trouble you're expecting never happens; it's always something that sneaks up the other way.

Man has been growing more stupid for several thousand years; I myself shall waste no tears at his demise.

Men go and come, but the earth abides

Therefore, I urge all men to be in the front rank of progress and not to stand still, lest they be left behind.

Life is hard and there will always be some who cannot adjust themselves to it.

A quelque chose malheur est bon, pour qui sait réfléchir.