Quotes About Evolution

It might have begun a bit like a chess game, but it had taken on its own momentum, and owned both of them.

A nondescript place, but it had inevitably changed over the years; one of the old oaks had been split by lightning and now lay on its side, and the others had grown into behemoths around their fallen comrade.

Look forward, not back, the Hag said. All is change. Do not regret. Instead, learn.

Seven years of this and I'll have lost whatever edge I once had, I said. I'll have turned into one of those well-fed countrywomen who pride themselves on making better preserves then their neighbors, and give all their chickens names.

The movement of the wheel is relentless. All changes; all moves on.

No idea is as absurd as the idea of progress.

Cixi's style was not to force through drastic change, but to bring it about gradually through perseverence.

Her changes were dramatic and yet gradual, seismic and yet astonishingly bloodless.

I guess it's true what they say: if you wait long enough everything changes.

Jay-Z told me once that one of his buddies from the Marcy Projects, in Brooklyn, said to him, Man, you've changed. And he replied, You're goddamn right. You act like I've been busting my ass to stay the same.

It would seem that marsupials are poor imitations of full-fledged mammals. Their inadequacy gives them a certain appeal; we're touched by it.

If covering our bodies with clothes represents a cultural step forward, there is no guarantee that in the future masks will not be taken equally for granted.

The change in the sand corresponded to a change in himself. Perhaps, along with the water in the sand, he had found a new self.

Only man has turned away from the law of survival of the fittest, taken up the weak and ailing, and guaranteed their right to survival. So heroes perish, but the weak live on. One measure of a civilisation, in fact, is the percentage of misfits in its society. There's even a political scientist (anonymous) who claims that our modern age is an age of the patient, by the patient, for the patient.

Indeed, jealousy is an animal feeling, capable even of rising to murder. There are apparently two hypotheses about jealousy: that it is a product of civilization and that it is a basic instinct of animals.

When man evolved from the monkey, he did not do so by his use of tools, as is usually claimed, but because he had come to distinguish himself from monkeys by his face.

Oye, eres un hueso duro de roer. ¿Cuándo vas a comprender lo feo que puede resultar un cuerpo sano? Mientras la historia de los animales es un proceso de evolución, la Historia Humana no es sino una evolución retrógrada. ¡Vivan los monstruos, que son encarnaciones de los grandes débiles!

How quickly children grow! They are infants -- you look away a minute and in that time they have left their babyhood behind.

each generation has to create the image of God that works for it.

We should probably all pause to confront our past from time to time, because it changes its meaning as our circumstances alter.

Skeletal remains show that plant-fed humans were a head shorter than meat-eating hunters, prone to anemia, infectious diseases, rotten teeth, and bone disorders.

Had the notion of God not had this flexibility, it would not have survived to become one of the great human ideas.

Like the Babylonians, the Aryans were quite aware that their myths were not factual accounts of reality but expressed a mystery that not even the gods themselves could explain adequately. When they tried to imagine how the gods and the world had evolved from primal chaos, they concluded that nobody—not even the gods—could understand the mystery of existence:

As we have seen, so many of the things we once took for granted have proved unreliable that we may have to "forget" old ways of thought in order to meet the current challenges.