Quotes About Evolution

When I run out of the things I love, I move on to the things I don't hate too much, and sometimes I even discover that I can love the things I think I hate.

I thought progress was a good thing." "Well, maybe not if it just keeps piling up more junk and keeps you from fixing stuff from the past.

As someone who has to teach for a living, I shouldn't be saying this, but the planet can do quite well without books.

Being half, I am evidence that race, too, will become relic. Eventually we're all going to be brown, sort of. Some days, when I'm reeling grand, I feel brand-new - like a prototype. Back in the olden days, my dad's ancestors got stuck behind the Alps and my mom's on the east side of the Urals. Now, oddly, I straddle this blessed, ever-shrinking world.

What is the half-life of information?

What's the storm called, anyway?" "Progress." She grinned.

In this way, fluid and shape-shifting, we divide and multiply and move through time and space.

You know, it scares me. I mean, allergies are one thing. But all these surplus antibiotics are raising people's tolerances, and it won't be long before the stuff just doesn't work anymore. There's all sorts of virulent bacteria that are already resistant.... It's like back to the future—we're headed backward in time, toward a pre-antibiotic age.

A year earlier, restaurants had been asking if he wanted a booster seat; now they asked if he'd like a drink.

Oba-sans, to put it in somewhat difficult terms, are life-forms that have stopped evolving. And anyone can turn into an Oba-san. Young women, of course, but even young men, even middle-aged men —even children. You turn into an Oba-san the instant you lose the will to evolve.

They don't realize that they've changed; they think it's the world that changed.

I was worried that at this rate our mutual affection might begin to cool, that the special feelings we had for each other would end up as nothing more than close friendship. Male–female relationships are always in transition. If there's no forward progress, things tend to slip backwards.

Here it is different, here the past is as alive as the present, the unpredictable cruel Stone Age coexists with the calculating, cool age of electronics—the two eras live in the same man, who is as much the descendant of Genghis Khan as he is the student of Edison… if, that is, he ever comes into contact with Edison's world.

The old Mauser was too long, too big, and too heavy for a child. A child's small arm could not reach freely for the trigger, and he had difficulty taking aim. Modern design has solved these problems, eliminated the inconveniences. The dimensions of weapons are now perfectly suited to a boy's physique, so much so that in the hands of tall, massive men, the new guns appear somewhat comical and childish.

The Irish 'peasant' is the child of time. He is its guardian and its slave. He will preserve for centuries dull and foolish habits that those who neither love nor fear time or change will quickly cast aside; but he will also preserve dear, ancient habits that like wine and ivory grow more beautiful and precious with age, all jumbled with the useless lumber in that dusty cockloft which is his ancestral mind.

Whatever the one generation may learn from the other, that which is genuinely human no generation learns from the foregoing...Thus no generation has learned from another to love, no generation begins at any other point than at the beginning, no generation has a shorter task assigned to it than had the previous generation.

Christianity will not be content to be an evolution within the total category of human nature; an engagement such as that is too little to offer to a god. Neither does it even want to be the paradox for the believer, and then surreptitiously, little by little, provide him with understanding, because the martyrdom of faith (to crucify one's understanding) is not a martyrdom of the moment, but the martyrdom of continuance.

Only the lower natures forget themselves and become something new. For instance, the butterfly has entirely forgotten that it was a caterpillar; perhaps in turn it can forget that it was a butterfly so completely that it can become a fish. The

Just as a dog which is compelled to walk on two feet has every instant a tendency to go again on all four, and does so as soon as it sees its chance, waiting only to see its chance, so is Christendom an effort of the human race to go back to walking on all fours, to get rid of Christianity, to do it knavishly under the pretext that this is Christianity, claiming that it is Christianity perfected.

the genuinely humane no generation learns from the foregoing

Once we overcome our biases about the past, we will realize that the people we see as primitive have a lot to teach us, that looking back can help us to move forward.

If learning lessons from history is a mark of enlightenment, so is breaking free from it.

We had to become other than we were, or cease to be at all

Make mistakes -- just don't keep making the same goddamn ones.