Quotes About Evolution

A science that hesitates to forget its founders is lost.

It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, 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.

the major advances in civilization are processes that all but wreck the societies in which they occur

In some measure or other, progress is always a transcendence of what is obvious.

It is the first step in sociological wisdom, to recognize that the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur :—like unto an arrow in the hand of a child.

Every species has come into existence coincident both in space and time with a preexisting closely allied species.

On the Law Which has Regulated the Introduction of Species 1855

all humans are descended from an original population in Africa.

in the Cheddar Gorge area of Somerset, revealed that these Britons were far from the light-skinned, straight- and fair-haired humans that they had been supposed to be.

The 'racial types' they posited are of relatively recent origin, having been replaced over and over by other types of populations in previous centuries.

Words are themselves organisms, ...

Things can change over time, what looks fixed and pinned and closed in a life can change and open, and what's unthinkable and impossible at one time will easily be possible in another.

We move from one invisibility to another.

Here's an old story so new that it's still in the middle of happening, writing itself right now with no knowledge of where or how it'll end.

Animals, Mark, have no use for nostalgia, Aunt Kenna says. It is not a tool for survival, my darling. But

You can't stop change, the man says. It comes of necessity. You have to go with it and make something of what it makes of you.

Change is the nature of luck.

The earth is made of it. Green. Moss, algae, lichen, mould. It's the colour everything was before there were flowers, the colour of the first trees, the trees that didn't have leaves, had needles instead, the trees that grew in the first hiatus between cold and warm -

Eras end, Paulina said. I'm Romanian. I know. They have to. So that new eras can begin.

Everything means something quite other now.

Everything, sooner or later, transforms into story.

Not whole thing works as configured. Not everyone acts as trained.

In these days of the shattering of the old form and the building of the new, adaptability is needed. We must avert the danger of crystallisation through pliability and expansion. The "old order changeth," but primarily it is a change of dimension and of aspect, and not of material or of foundation.

Initiation, or the process of undergoing an expansion of consciousness, is part of the normal process of evolutionary development, viewed on a large scale, and not from the standpoint of the individual.