Quotes About Evolution

Dip a slice of bread in batter. That's September: yellow, gold, soft and sticky. Fry the bread. Now you have October: chewier, drier, streaked with browns. The day in question fell somewhere in the middle of the french toast process.

In the beginning was the thing. And one thing led to another.

If you want to change the world, change yourself.

What is politics, after all, but the compulsion to preside over property and make others people's decisions for them? Liberty, the very opposite of ownership and control, cannot, then, result from political action, either at the polls or at the barricades, but rather evolves out of attitude. If it results from anything, it must be levity.

AS THE AFTERNOON PROGRESSES, our shadows grow longer. At night, in the dark, we become our shadows.

Civilization is a mutant beast that emerged from the shattered egg of primitive stability.-Sissy Hankshaw

The dinosaurs died so that chat rooms may flourish

In school you learn that it is the thumb that separates human beings from the lower primates. The thumb is an evolutionary triumph. Because of his thumbs, man can use tools; because he can use tools he can extend his senses, control his environment and increase in sophistication and power. The thumb is the cornerstone of civilization!

Liberty, the very opposite of ownership and control, cannot, then, result from political action, either at the polls or the barricades, but rather evolves out of attitude. If it results from anything, it may be levity.

The theory arrived neither full-blown, like an orphan on the doorstep, nor sharply defined, like a spike through a shoe; nor did it develop as would a photographic print, crisp images gradually emerging from a shadowy soup. Rather, it unwound like a turban, like a mummy bandage; started with the sudden loosening of a clasp, a scarab fastener, and then unraveled in awkward spirals from end to frazzled end.

Since moving to New York, she had been gradually abandoning her old ideas about the nobility of suffering.

Isn't fixity the hallmark of the living dead?

There was no wire across in those days, no big house on the other side; nothing but the open yap of the planet, yawning as if bored by the pace of evolution.

Wasn't it made clear that civilization is not an end in itself but a theater or gymnasium in which the evolving individual finds facilities for practice?

Everywhere a buffalo fell," said Switters, "a monster sprang up in its place.

At the bat of your lashes peacocks preen. Peacocks preen, elephants remember, camels go for days without water, and dinosaurs of all types become extinct.

People used to die from germs. Now they died from bad habits.

In that nondescript period between the end of the beige fifties and the beginning of the Day-Glo sixties, I found myself drifting unfulfilled in an ocean of circumstance.

and how dangerous and dumb it can be to embalm yourself in the attractive amber of the past.

The peasants of Aelfric are like bushes, like salamanders. They were born one thing and will die one thing. But you . . . you have already been a warrior, a king, and a serf, and from the looks of it, you aren't through yet. Thus, you have learned the secret of the new direction. That is: a man can be many things. Maybe anything.

You see, at that juncture in my life I wasn't evolved enough to understand the fluid nature of romantic love (its indifference to human cravings for permanence and certainty); its uncivilized, undomesticated nature (less like a pretty melody than a foxish barking at the moon), or, more importantly perhaps, that it's a privilege to love someone, to truly love them; and while it's paradisiacal if she or he loves you back, it's unfair to demand or expect reciprocity.

Image of a Roman wax tablet, which looks very like an iPad.

At the time there were no printing presses and no paper.

Dental remains show that farmers suffered from tooth decay, unheard of in hunter-gatherers, because the carbohydrates in the farmers' cereal-heavy diets were reduced to sugars by enzymes in their saliva as they chewed.