Evolution Quotes

So do not throw your pearls before swine, Instead in the sand go and draw your line.For this love you have is rare dear girl, A guide and blessing in the name of Estelle. I sat and woke to see it all clear, A stage I was seeking, no longer to fear. For I've spent too long wasting precious time, Never again will I throw pearls before swine.

~ Nicole Bonomi

Some people will bring up evolutionary biology and apes, how female apes bow to male apes - that sort of thing. But the point is this: we are not apes. Apes also live in trees and eat earthworms. We do not.

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

... we live in a society of larvae--immature human beings, adolescents disguised as adults.

~ Lyudmila Ulitskaya

If man were infinitely malleable, there would have been nor revolutions; there would have been no change because a culture would have succeeded in making man submit to its patterns without resistance. But man, being only relatively malleable, has always reacted with protest against conditions which made the disequilibrium between the social order and his human needs too drastic or unbearable. The attempt to reduce this disequilibrium and the need to establish a more acceptable and desirable solution is at the very core of the dynamism of the evolution of man in history. Man's protest arose not only because of material suffering; specifically human needs...are an equally strong motivation for revolution and the dynamics of change.

~ Erich Fromm

What holds true for the individual holds true for a society. It is never static; if it does not grow, it decays; if it does not transcend the status quo for the better, it changes for the worse. Often we, the individual or the people who make up a society, have the illusion we could stand still and not alter the given situation in the one or the other direction. This is one of the most dangerous illusions. The moment we stand still, we begin to decay.

~ Erich Fromm

A knowledge both of the factors of evolution and how they operate in human society becomes necessary if we are to develop a sound social order.

~ Conway Zirkle

Nearly all libertarians were once conservatives or progressives or independent statists of some stripe. But scarcely any conservatives, progressives, or independent statists were once libertarians. This asymmetry in the direction of ideological migration is interesting and perhaps informative.

~ Robert Higgs

The economy of early hominids and that of twenty-first century society have enormous differences, but they do share one important feature: in both of these economies, humans accumulate information in objects. Our world is different from that of early hominids only in the way in which atoms are arranged.

~ César A. Hidalgo

Society needs to evolve just as our DNA does.

~ Kat Lahr

When it comes to society and human consciousness, Darwinism still exists in its primal message.

~ Kat Lahr

Virtually all organisations known to you work largely by means of your greed. They attract you because... they appeal to your greed.

~ Idries Shah

...most systems end up by making imagined humility into a form of vanity, so they end up with vanity just the same.

~ Idries Shah

An island, on the other hand, is small. There are fewer species, and the competition for survival has never reached anything like the pitch that it does on the mainland. Species are only as tough as they need to be, life is much quieter and more settled [..] So you can imagine what happens when a mainland species gets introduced to an island. It would be like introducing Al Capone, Genghis Khan and Rupert Murdoch into the Isle of Wight - the locals wouldn't stand a chance.

~ Douglas Adams

We have won the time lottery of the last 4 billion years.

~ Stefan Molyneux

The hardest time in this world is for the sensitive and intelligent people.

~ Swami Dhyan Giten

Those who hold to the Christian faith see law as an ultimate order of the universe. It is the invariable factor in a variable world, the unchanging order in a changing universe. Law for the Christian is thus absolute, final, and an aspect of God's creation and a manifestation of His nature. In terms of this, the Christian can hold that right is right, and wrong is wrong, that good and evil are unchanging moral categories rather than relative terms.From an evolutionary perspective, however, we have a very different concept of law. The universe is evolving, and the one constant factor is change. It is impossible therefore to speak of any absolute law. The universe has evolved by means of chance variations, and no law has any ultimacy or absolute truth. As a result when we talk about law, we are talking about social customs or mores and about statistical averages. Social customs change, and what was law to the ancient Gauls is not law to the modern Frenchmen. We can expect men's ideas of law to change as their societies change and evolve. Moreover, statistics give us an average and a mean which determine normality, and our ideas of law are governed by what is customary and socially accepted.

~ Rousas John Rushdoony

Everyone knows history is written by the winners, but that cliche misses a crucial detail: Over time, the winners are always the progressives. Conservatism can only win in the short term, because society cannot stop evolving (and social evolution inevitably dovetails with the agenda of those who see change as an abstract positive). It might take seventy years, but it always happens eventually. Serious historians are, almost without exception, self-styled progressives. Radical views--even the awful ones--improve with age.

~ Chuck Klosterman

How much more generous it would be if, instead of writing parables about childhood wounds, psychologists were to accept that some differences between the sexes just are, that they are in the nature of the beasts, because each sex has an evolved tendency to develop that way in response to experience.

~ Matt Ridley

The offspring cannot rely on its parents for disinterested guidance. One expects the offspring to be preprogrammed to resist some parental manipulation while being open to other forms. When the parent imposes an arbitrary system of reinforcement (punishment and reward) in order to manipulate the offspring to act against its own best interests, selection will favor offspring that resist such schedules of reinforcement.

~ Robert Trivers

In a fascinating study, Barrett (1999) demonstrated that children as young as threeyears of age have a sophisticated cognitive understanding of predator-prey encounters. Children from both an industrialized culture and a traditional hunter-horticulturalist culture wereable to spontaneously describe the flow of events in a predator-prey encounter in an ecologically accurate way. Moreover, they understood that after a lion kills a prey, the prey is no longer alive, can no longer eat, and can no longer run and that the dead state is permanent.This sophisticated understanding of death from encounters with predators appears to be developed by age three to four.

~ David M. Buss

For a man, the optimal evolutionary strategy is to disseminate his genes as widely as possible, given his few minutes (or, alas, seconds) of investment in each encounter. It all makes simple evolutionary sense, since a woman invests a good deal of time and effort -a nine month long, risky, strenuous pregnancy, in each offspring. Naturally she has to be very discerning in her choice of sexual partners.

~ Abhijit Naskar

Man with all his noble qualities, with sympathy which feels for the most debased, with benevolence which extends not only to other men but to the humblest living creature, with his god-like intellect which has penetrated into the movements and constitution of the solar system—with all these exalted powers—Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.

~ Charles Darwin

People change and needs change. So what was Sufism once is Sufism no more.

~ Idries Shah

Man (as he imagines himself to be), in general, is a possibility, not a fact.

~ Idries Shah

The basic urge toward mysticism is never, in the unaltered man, clear enough to be recognized for what it is.

~ Idries Shah

Humility is a teacher of itself. It is learnt by means of its practise.

~ Idries Shah

You must improve yourself on a higher level if you are to be able to help people, and not just weep over them.

~ Idries Shah

As a nation we should look more carefully at how our fear of future acts of terrorism is undermining our quality of life.

~ Bruce H. Lipton

Evolution is central to the understanding of life, including human life. Like all living things, we are outcomes of natural selection; we got here because we inherited traits that allowed our ancestors to survive, find mates, and reproduce. This momentous fact explains our deepest strivings: why having a thankless child is sharper than a serpent's tooth, why it is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife, why we do not go gentle into that good night but rage, rage against the dying of the light

~ Steven Pinker

To bind one free man with love is better than to release a thousand slaves.

~ Idries Shah

Saying of the ProphetUnderstandingSpeak to everyone in accordance with his degree of understanding.

~ Idries Shah

Patience is a garment which has never worn out.

~ Idries Shah

Saying of the ProphetEnvyEnvy devours good deeds, as a fire devours fuel.

~ Idries Shah

What you are seeking in your retreat, I see clearly in every road and alleyway.

~ Idries Shah

In the realm of Greater Understanding, the workshop is dismantled after the work is finished.

~ Idries Shah

The moment we refuse to hurt others because of our own pain, is the time we evolve as souls.

~ Aleksandra Ninkovic

A Sufi is alive to the value of time, and is given, every moment, to what that moment demands.

~ Idries Shah

Human emotions have deep evolutionary roots, a fact that may explain their complexity and provide tools for clinical practice.The Nature of Emotions (2001)

~ Robert Plutchik

None should say: ‘I can trust,’ or ‘I cannot trust’ until he is master of the option, of trusting or not trusting.

~ Idries Shah

The Sufi is one who does what others do – when it is necessary. He is also one who does what others cannot do – when it is indicated.

~ Idries Shah