Human Adaptation Quotes

Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel!

As civilization advances, man grows unconscious of the primitive elements of life; he is separated from them by his perfection of material techniques.

Human society can only adapt to social change at a certain rate.

There are no conditions to which a man cannot get accustomed, especially if he sees that everyone around him lives in the same way.

What's going on is that our most fundamental ideas about life are not serving us. They never have. But now, with our advances in communication and technology, the situation has become critical - for our mechanisms have outrun our mentality. And so we find ourselves trying to solve the dilemmas of tomorrow with the solutions of yesterday.

Science fiction was rocket-mad for about 40 years until aerospace hit a brick wall about 1970. I would not write off space colonisation or exploration completely, but we are profoundly ill adapted for going boldly into outer space.

Society is undergoing a silent revolution, which must be submitted to, and which takes no more notice of the human existences it breaks down than an earthquake regards the houses it subverts. The classes and the races, too weak to master the new conditions of life, must give way.

I believe the earth's climate is changing, but I think it's changing for natural variation reasons and I think mankind has been adapting to climate as long as man has walked the earth.

One thought that occurs to me is that men will continue to withdraw from nature in order to create an environment that will suit them better.

We have changed our environment more quickly than we have learned how to change ourselves.

Man not only survives and functions in his environment, he shapes it and he is shaped by it.

Neuroligacally, human beings haven't caught up with today's overstimulating environment. Getting kids out in nature can make a difference.

It is simple and brutal: a person can get used to anything, even to killing.

Organs, faculties, powers, capacities, or whatever else we call them; grow by use and diminish from disuse, it is inferred that they will continue to do so. And if this inference is unquestionable, then is the one above deduced from it-that humanity must in the end become completely adapted to its conditions-unquestionable also. Progress, therefore, is not an accident, but a necessity.

When a tiger changes his nature, Englishmen will change theirs.

We're the only creature God ever created that doesn't want to adapt. We want to make it stand still. And one thing that's constant is nature is constantly changing.

In the past the man has been first; in the future the system must be first.

I've written a number of books that have to do with the evolution of humans, human intelligence, human emotions.

Everything in nature has found a niche, a perfect harmony of balance. Man need to find his niche, his perfect balance, where he fits in the natural cycle

It's our machines and our technologies that are now the major evolutionary forces acting upon us. It's not our political systems.

The human mind and body remains the most complex, powerful machine on the planet, and we will adapt and thrive in a world of accelerating technological change.

The idea was to have a basin inverted on his head and his hair cut to the shape of it. Skill and money were not needed. Then the idea grew that it was more convenient to leave the basin on his head. Stray thoughts were trimmed along with stray hair; brain-vines, tentacles of thought, were not encouraged to wander. Then, in the interests of human economy, the head of adaptable man became a basin of uniform shape—a basin, a crash helmet. Safe at last; no more thought-cuts.

The broadest pattern of history - namely, the differences between human societies on different continents - seems to me to be attributable to differences among continental environments, and not to biological differences among peoples themselves.

It's funny how quickly human beings adapt.

The style of life is a unity because it has grown out of the difficulties of early life and out of the striving for a goal.