Quotes About Evolution

If we do not alter with the times, the times yet alter us. We may stand perfectly still, but our surroundings shift round and we are not in the same relationship to them for long; just as a chameleon, matching perfectly the greenness of a leaf, should know that the leaf will one day fade.

We build our computers the way we build our cities—over time, without a plan, on top of ruins.

Code and forget, code and forget: programming as a collective exercise in incremental forgetting.

But now what? Is this a ticket to a new understanding of my life, or a bomb that's going to blow up everything? Consider one more possibility: that you remain essentially the same person you were, neither new nor destroyed.

To keep up even a worthwhile tradition means vitiating the idea behind it which must necessarily be in a constant state of evolution: it is mad to try to express new feelings in a mummified form.

We shall not have succeeded in demolishing everything unless we demolish the ruins as well. But the only way I can see of doing that is to use them to put up a lot of fine, well-designed buildings.

To keep up even a worthwhile tradition means vitiating the idea behind it which must necessarily be in a constant state of evolution: it is mad to try to express new feelings in a "mummified" form.

The world of today is at the crossroads--[t]he whole scheme of aimless capitalism and the last dregs of traditionalist nationalism are being seen more clearly in their death struggle.

My contention is that while progress in some of the great matters of human concern has been long proceeding in accordance with the law of a rapidly increasing geometric progression, progress in the other matters of no less importance has advanced only at the rate of an arithmetical progression or at best at the rate of some geometric progression of relatively slow growth. To see it and to understand it we have to pay the small price of a little observation and a little meditation.

The rapidity with which one can completely change one's ideas . . . and accommodate ourselves to a state of barbarism is wonderful.

And slowly answer'd Arthur from the barge:The old order changeth, yielding place to new;And God fulfills himself in many ways,Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.

Our little systems have their day.

I the heir of all the ages, in the foremost files of time.

Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change.

I know that age to age succeeds,Blowing a noise of tongues and deeds,A dust of systems and of creeds.

And ah for a man to arise in me,That the man I am may cease to be!

The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order.

In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of defeat, but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress toward a victory.

A culture is in its finest flower before it begins to analyze itself.

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking.

Error is the price we pay for progress.

The art of progress is to reserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order.

In formal logic, a contradiction is the signal of a defeat; but in the evolution of real knowledge it marks the first step in progress towards a victory.

It is a profoundly erroneous truism that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.