Our physiological constitution is obviously a product of Darwinian processes, insofar as you buy the evolutional theory as a generative, as an account of the mechanism that generated us. Our physiology evolved, our behaviors evolved, and our accounts of those behaviors, both successful and unsuccessful, evolved.

A new breeze is blowing, and a world refreshed by freedom seems reborn; for in man’s heart, if not in fact, the day of the dictator is over. The totalitarian era is passing, its old ideas blown away like leaves from an ancient, lifeless tree.

It is change, continuing change, inevitable change, that is the dominant factor in society today. No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be.

Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.

To discover and know has always been a deep tendency of our nature. Can we not recognize it already in caveman?

One must change one’s tactics every ten years if one wishes to maintain one’s superiority.

With Kansas, I had a four-year deal. The initial two months were real tough. I had to adjust a lot. Then, things started looking up.

I don’t like typing messages on my phone. Some people get used to it.

No sensible decision can be made any longer without taking into account not only the world as it is, but the world as it will be.

You listen to Charlie Parker or John Coltrane before they found their voice, they sounded different. And when you listen to them after they found their voice on their instruments, they sound more confident and in control. Artists have that, too.

Evolution was far more thrilling to me than the biblical account. Who would not rather be a rising ape than a falling angel? To my juvenile eyes, Darwin was proved true every day. It doesn’t take much to make us flip back into monkeys again.

We must adjust to changing times and still hold to unchanging principles.

Constant development is the law of life, and a man who always tries to maintain his dogmas in order to appear consistent drives himself into a false position.

In war as in life, it is often necessary when some cherished scheme has failed, to take up the best alternative open, and if so, it is folly not to work for it with all your might.

The earth’s crust has not yet stopped heaving and plunging under our feet. Mountain ranges are still being thrust up on the horizon. Granites are still growing under the continental masses. Nor has the organic world ceased to produce new buds at the tips of its countless branches.

It is only the modern that ever becomes old-fashioned.

We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.

Publishing is in a kind of Jurassic age.

One thing is sure. We have to do something. We have to do the best we know how at the moment… If it doesn’t turn out right, we can modify it as we go along.

Personal columnists are jackals and no jackal has been known to live on grass once he had learned about meat – no matter who killed the meat for him.

Religion and science are the two conjugated faces or phases of one and the same complete act of knowledge – the only one which can embrace the past and future of evolution and so contemplate, measure and fulfil them.

Evolution can go to hell as far as I am concerned. What a mistake we are. We have mortally wounded this sweet life-supporting planet – the only one in the whole Milky Way – with a century of transportation whoopee.

The mind unlearns with difficulty what it has long learned.

What religion a man holds, to what race he belongs, these things are not important; the really important thing is this knowledge: the knowledge of God’s plan for men. For God has a plan, and that plan is evolution.

I really don’t pay attention to the outside world when I’m incarcerated, because being in prison is like being in a different world. So I don’t pay attention to what’s going on outside of jail, because it’s all beyond my control.

When it comes down to it, glam rock was all very amusing. At the time, it was funny, then a few years later it became sort of serious-looking and a bit foreboding.

I don’t know if she should worry too much, I mean some of our greatest writers have had movies made of their books, lots of Hemingway novels were turned into movies, it doesn’t hurt the book.

If you change and adapt your persona, you are seen as inauthentic; if you stay the angry young man, you fade from attention or seem tiresome.

I think that the idea of having a different approach to every single one of my albums is so exciting to me. I never want to make the same record twice. Why do it? What’s the point?

What is normal? Normal was yesterday. If you lose a leg, one day you’re hopping around on one leg, so you know the difference.

Nevertheless, it is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.

Don’t bother about being modern. Unfortunately it is the one thing that, whatever you do, you cannot avoid.

What’s dangerous is not to evolve.

We only have to look at ourselves to see how intelligent life might develop into something we wouldn’t want to meet.

Regarded zoologically, man is today an almost isolated figure in nature. In his cradle, he was less isolated.

Baseball changes through the years. It gets milder.

You don’t have the same mentality as you did five years ago – even one year. People are always changing, and I believe that everyone deserves the space to change and for people to recognize their change.

Failed plans should not be interpreted as a failed vision. Visions don’t change, they are only refined. Plans rarely stay the same, and are scrapped or adjusted as needed. Be stubborn about the vision, but flexible with your plan.

The decisive moment in human evolution is perpetual. That is why the revolutionary spiritual movements that declare all former things worthless are in the right, for nothing has yet happened.

I think the F2 tyres are probably one of the hardest things to adapt to, harder than the Formula One Pirellis were to get used to.

It is true that we are weak and sick and ugly and quarrelsome but if that is all we ever were, we would millenniums ago have disappeared from the face of the earth.

A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason.

There have only been about a half dozen genuinely important events in the four-billion-year saga of life on Earth: single-celled life, multicelled life, differentiation into plants and animals, movement of animals from water to land, and the advent of mammals and consciousness.

Since the beginning, it was just the same. The only difference, the crowds are bigger now.

Jobs are a centuries-old concept created during the Industrial Revolution. Despite the reality that we’re now deep in the Information Age, many people are studying for, or working at, or clinging to the Industrial Age idea of a safe, secure job.

I’m not afraid to look like a big, hairy, smelly, foreign devil in Tokyo, though I do my best not to, I really do.

The world moves, and ideas that were once good are not always good.

It may be hard for an egg to turn into a bird: it would be a jolly sight harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are like eggs at present. And you cannot go on indefinitely being just an ordinary, decent egg. We must be hatched or go bad.

The history of mankind is the instant between two strides taken by a traveler.

I do not look upon these United States as a finished product. We are still in the making.

I think New York has evolved in my work just the way the city has.

The state of the economy is not the issue when it comes to growing a business. The relevant questions are always: ‚What business are you in? Furthermore, is it adapting to the times?‘

The heresy of one age becomes the orthodoxy of the next.

Fashion is made to become unfashionable.

Dance music is no longer a simple Donna Summer beat. It’s become a whole language that I find fascinating and exciting. Eventually, it will lose the dance tag and join the fore of rock.

Beauty is the bait which with delight allures man to enlarge his kind.

Every generation laughs at the old fashions, but follows religiously the new.

I can’t usually stomach a project after I finish it, but for those days and weeks and months that it’s new to me, I do listen to it, and it might change over time, but it’s about function.

Even with all the advantages of retrospect, and a lot of witnesses dead and gone, you can’t make your life look as if you intended it or you were consistent. All you can show is how you dealt with various hands.

If you’re teaching today what you were teaching five years ago, either the field is dead or you are.

He who has not the spirit of this age, has all the misery of it.