Quotes About Evolution

There's no great future in being the leading supplier to a dying industry.

Most of the mainframe computer companies never successfully made the transition to minicomputers, and most mini-computer companies missed out on PCs.

They are merely partaking of the evolutionary miracle found most obviously in man, but not necessarily any more useful to his survival than a raven's, or a cat's, or a chimp's is to its.

I don't think my principles change. I think the way in which you apply those principles to modern society changes.

We hate old friends: we hate old books: we hate old opinions; and at last we come to hate ourselves.

We cannot read the same works forever. Our honey-moon, even though we wed the Muse, must come to an end; and it is followed by indifference, if not by disgust.

In going back we must take our present selves with us: the mind has taken a different colour, and this is thrown back upon our past.

I know, and all the world knows, that revolutions never go backward.

Life blindly breeds, battles, and slaughters its way up to mind and rationality

Nature breeds a vast oversupply of experiments and then sterilizes the failures by murdering them.

Never forget that the portfolio's the thing: Inevitably, it will contain poorly performing asset classes—there will always be at least one—but its identity will change from year to year.

Linguists had long known that Latin script—the everyday alphabet of today's Western world—evolved from Greek letters, which had themselves derived from Phoenician, as did Hebrew.6

Schmandt-Besserat contends that the first writing system—the familiar Sumerian cuneiform script—evolved in this way directly from the token system.13

Schmandt-Besserat's work caused a stir mainly because it seemed to contradict the "pictographic theory," that writing evolved directly from pictures—a theory that is still taught to schoolchildren. Her "token hypothesis" was so bold and so different from the pictographic theory that it could not help but evoke controversy.14

The older pictographic theory still has some virtues. First proposed by William Warburton, an Anglican cleric who eventually became bishop of Gloucester and who wrote in the 1730s, it was, and probably remains, the most commonly accepted theory about the origins of writing.

The framers discerned fundamental principles.... But our acceptance of the fundamental principles has not and should not bind us to those precise, at times anachronistic, contours. We current justices read the Constitution in the only way that we can: as 20th-century Americans.

To give meaning to the Constitution, it is necessary to give it a flexible interpretation, responsive to changing times. The framers could not have foreseen the problems and issues that face our nation today, and the Constitution should not be interpreted as if they had.

Old men are perhaps the most polished diplomats but youth changes the world.

Experience has ways of boiling over, and making us correct our present formulas

As the brain changes are continuous, so do all these consciousnesses melt into each other like dissolving views. Properly they are but one protracted consciousness, one unbroken stream.

Our minds thus grow in spots and like grease spots, the spots spread. But we let them spread as little as possible we keep unaltered as much of our old knowledge, as many of our old prejudices and beliefs, as we can.

If you can change your mind, you can change your life.

Begin to be now what you will be hereafter.

Evolution seems to close the heart to some of the plainest spiritual truths while it opens the mind to the wildest guesses advanced in the name of science.