Paul R. Ehrlich Quotes

Take the best out of everything and adapt it to your needs.

Make it work

Success nullifies. You then have to do it again, preferably differently.

One cannot manage change. One can only be ahead of it.

Style has a profound meaning to Black Americans. If we can’t drive, we will invent walks and the world will envy the dexterity of our feet. If we can’t have ham, we will boil chitterlings; if we are given rotten peaches, we will make cobblers; if given scraps, we will make quilts; take away our drums, and we will clap our hands. We prove the human spirit will prevail. We will take what we have to make what we need. We need confidence in our knowledge of who we are.

Live in the world you inhabit. Look upon things as they are. Take them as you find them. Make the best of them. Turn them to your advantage.

To succeed in this world, you have to change all the time.

Embrace your constraints.

I am dedicating the majority of my wealth to improving education. It is the key to the survival of the human race. We have to plan for our collective future - and the first step begins with the social, emotional, and intellectual tools we provide to our children. As humans, our greatest tool for survival is our ability to think and to adapt - as educators, storytellers, and communicators our responsibility is to continue to do so.

It’s tempting to wish for the perfect boss, the perfect parent, or the perfect outfit. But maybe the best any of us can do is not to quit, play the hand we’ve been dealt, and accessorize what we’ve got.

It's not resources but resourcefulness that ultimately makes the difference.

Failure is part of discovering the problem you need to be working on. If, as an entrepreneur, you are afraid to fail or to admit the failure of your efforts, then you completely lose any chance at being able to adapt and succeed at finding the problem that needs solving.

A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school,preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always like a cat falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days and feels no shame in not "studying a profession," for he does not postpone his life, but lives already.

Much has seen said of the wisdom of old age. Old age is wise, I grant, for itself, but not wise for the community. It is wise in declining new enterprises, for it has not the power nor the time to execute them; wise in shrinking from difficulty, for it has not the strength to overcome it; wise in avoiding danger, for it lacks the faculty of ready and swift action, by which dangers are parried and converted into advantages. But this is not wisdom for mankind at large, by whom new enterprises must be undertaken, dangers met, and difficulties surmounted.

This is one of the glories of man, the inventiveness of the human mind and the human spirit: whenever life doesn't seem to give an answer, we create one.

Adapt your techniques to an idea, not an idea to your techniques.

Success comes from persistently improving and inventing, not from persistently promoting what’s not working.

When you can't rely on sticking a pipe in the ground, what you have to rely on is unlocking the energy and talent of all your people - men and women.

Why is our free-enterprise system so strong?- Not because it stands still, frozen in the past, but because it has always adapted to changing realities

We can't afford to stand pat while the world races by. The United States of America did not become the most prosperous nation on Earth by sheer luck or happenstance. We got here because each time a generation of Americans has faced a changing world, we have changed with it. We have not feared our future; we have shaped it.

Never, never, never think - that's one lesson you should have in life. Never think that lack of variability is stability.

Cutting off fundamental, curiosity-driven science is like eating the seed corn. We may have a little more to eat next winter but what will we plant so we and our children will have enough to get through the winters to come?

In a time of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future.

When the going gets tough, the tough reinvent.

Wisdom is probably the ability to cope. That's why someone who has to walk seven miles every day to get water for their children can be wiser than someone sitting behind a desk in Wall Street.