Quotes About Evolution

I think it is something else. I think we were given a starting point, but nothing more. The future remains undecided. Things may change as events unfold, and we must be ready to change with them.

No one likes letting go of what they have always believed, even when they know it's right to do so.

Humans—once they were born into the world—were of a different mind-set. They were determined to make their lives better not by adapting to nature, but by subjugating her. The entire history of their evolution has been centered on taking

Evolution is a competitive game in which victory comes not from achieving some fixed number of points but by simply outscoring the opposition

We are built to pursue happiness as a tool to replicate our genes.

A different future has to be the future of this particular present. And most of the present is made up of the past. We have nothing with which to fashion a future other than the few, inadequate tools we have inherited from our history. And these tools are tainted by the legacy of wretchedness and exploitation by which they descend to us.

Marxists want nothing more than to stop being Marxists. In this respect, being a Marxist is nothing like being a Buddhist or a billionaire.

Sometimes, it is necessary to step beyond what you have known and to reach for something more.

Life is the future, not the past.

I know, Magda, your heart, and your loyalty to your love for me. But don't let that be the end of your ability to love. That love wouldn't harm me, or diminish me, or change what we had. It can only add to you and who you are. You need to embrace the reality of what is, not what was.

The situation was rather like that of the mid-twentieth century, when the old vaudeville comedians – with their distinctive repertoire of hand-me-down material culled from many years of touring music halls – found themselves displaced by the university-educated satirists of the television age who wrote their own fresh material every week.

Gay is the new straight, in case you haven't noticed.

You cannot go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.

I'd rather be a rising ape than a falling angel.

The entire universe has been neatly divided into things to (a) mate with, (b) eat, (c) run away from, and (d) rocks.

All tapes left in a car for more than about a fortnight metamorphose into Best of Queen albums.

Humans need fantasy to be human. To be the place where the falling angel meets the rising ape.

Progress just means bad things happen faster.

You're not allowed to call them dinosaurs any more, said Yo-less. It's speciesist. You have to call them pre-petroleum persons.

The anthropologists got it wrong when they named our species Homo sapiens ('wise man'). In any case it's an arrogant and bigheaded thing to say, wisdom being one of our least evident features. In reality, we are Pan narrans, the storytelling chimpanzee.

The turtle moves.

Most species do their own evolving, making it up as they go along, which is the way Nature intended. And this is all very natural and organic and in tune with mysterious cycles of the cosmos, which believes that there's nothing like millions of years of really frustrating trial and error to give a species moral fiber and, in some cases, backbone.

People don't like change. But make the change fast enough and you go from one type of normal to another.

This, milord, is my family's axe. We have owned it for almost nine hundred years, see. Of course, sometimes it needed a new blade. And sometimes it has required a new handle, new designs on the metalwork, a little refreshing of the ornamentation . . . but is this not the nine hundred-year-old axe of my family? And because it has changed gently over time, it is still a pretty good axe, y'know. Pretty good.