Quotes About Evolution

If you kept changing the way people saw the world, you ended up changing the way you saw yourself.

Inside every lump of coal there's a diamond waiting to get out.

Nothing has to be true forever. Just for long enough.

No other species anywhere in the world had invented boredom. Perhaps it was boredom, not intelligence, that had propelled them up to the evolutionary ladder.

Natural selection saw to it that professional heroes who at a crucial moment tended to ask themselves questions like 'What is my purpose in life?' very quickly lacked both.

Y'know,' he said, 'it's very hard to talk quantum using a language originally designed to tell other monkeys where the ripe fruit is.

It is a popular fact that nine-tenths of the brain is not used and, like most popular facts, it is wrong. Not even the most stupid Creator would go to the trouble of making the human head carry around several pounds of unnecessary gray goo if its only real purpose was, for example, to serve as a delicacy for certain remote tribesmen in unexplored valleys.

People build something that works. Then circumstances change, and they have to tinker with it to make it continue to work, and they are so busy tinkering that they cannot see that a much better idea would be to build a whole new system to deal with the new circumstances. But to an outsider, the idea is obvious.

ASTONISHING, said Death. REALLY ASTONISHING. LET ME PUT FORWARD ANOTHER SUGGESTION: THAT YOU ARE NOTHING MORE THAN A LUCKY SPECIES OF APE THAT IS TRYING TO UNDERSTAND THE COMPLEXITIES OF CREATION VIA A LANGUAGE THAT EVOLVED IN ORDER TO TELL ONE ANOTHER WHERE THE RIPE FRUIT WAS.

We may even find out why the duck-billed platypus.* *Not why is it anything . Just why it is.

Rincewind trudged back up the beach. The trouble is, he said, is that things never get better, they just stay the same, only more so.

The nose is also the only organ that can see backwards in time.

What is normal? Normal is yesterday and last week and last month taken together

Keep your vocabulary as wide as you can. I have some difficulty with the word 'cool', and I'm not too bothered about the word 'awesome'. People like me are looking to people like you guys of the next generation to deal with this shit. It's like seeing a rock guitarist pick up a Fender Stratocaster and hold it the wrong way.

And in this doleful mood he ventured to wonder if they ever thought back to when things were just old-fangled or not fangled at all as against the modern day when fangled had reached its apogee. Fangling was indeed, he thought, here to stay. Then he wondered: had anyone ever thought of themselves as a fangler?

If the abnormal goes on long enough it becomes the normal.

And I'm made up of everyone I've ever met who's changed the way I think. So who is me?

It was one of the most ancient terrors, the one that meant that no sooner had mankind learned to walk on two legs than it dropped to its knees.

Old gods do new jobs.

And his head is on fire with new things[...]he called himself the little blue hermit, scuttling across the sand in search of a new shell, but now he looks at the sky and knows that no shell will ever be big enough, ever.

New things, new ideas arrived and strutted their stuff and were vilified by some and then lo! that which had been a monster was suddenly totally important to the world.

With magic, you can turn a frog into a prince. With science, you can turn a frog into a Ph.D and you still have the frog you started with.

here is the new thing and here it is. And yesterday you never thought about it and after today you don't know what you would do without it. That was what the technology was doing. It was your slave but, in a sense, it might be the other way round.

the world kept turning and the Turtle moved.