Quotes about Adaptation

Student: Dr. Einstein, Aren't these the same questions as last year's [physics] final exam? Dr. Einstein: Yes; But this year the answers are different.

Necessity is the mother of all invention.

It is our American habit if we find the foundations of our educational structure unsatisfactory to add another story or wing.

When I was young I found out that the big toe always ends up making a hole in a sock. So I stopped wearing socks.

Every theory is killed sooner or later in that way. But if the theory has good in it, that good is embodied and continued in the next theory.

We cannot solve problems with the kind of thinking we employed when we came up with them

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.

You got rid of them. Yes, that's just like you. Getting rid of everything unpleasant instead of learning to put up with it. Whether 'tis better in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, or to take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end them… But you don't do either. Neither suffer nor oppose. You just abolish the slings and arrows. It's too easy.

Not so much like drops of water, though water, it is true, can wear holes in the hardest granite; rather, drops of liquid sealing-wax, drops that adhere, incrust, incorporate themselves with what they fall on, till finally the rock is all one scarlet blob.

The universal and ever-present urge to self-transcendence is not to be abolished by slamming the current popular Doors in the Wall. The only reasonable policy is to open other, better doors in the hope of inducing men and women to exchange their old habits for new and less harmful ones.

Science and technology would be used as though, like the Sabbath, they ahd been made for man, not as though man were to be adapted and enslaved to them.

To change a vocabulary is easy; to change external circumstances or our own ingrained habits is hard and tiresome.