Evolution's Quotes

#1. The disastrous history of our species indicates the futility of all attempts at a diagnosis which do not take into account the possibility that homo sapiens is a victim of one of evolution's countless mistakes.

Arthur Koestler

#2. Well, evolution's just a theory.' And, I'm thinking to myself, 'Well, thank goodness gravity's a law.'

Marc Maron

#3. Maybe love was a myth anyhow, a brew of hormones and fantasy, evolution's way of getting men and women together long enough for them to procreate,back in the day when girls got pregnant at twelve, were pregnant or nursing for the next twenty years, and were dead of the plague by forty.

Jennifer Weiner

#4. Plasticity is an intrinsic property of the human brain and represents evolution's invention to enable the nervous system to escape the restrictions of its own genome and thus adapt to environmental pressures, physiologic changes, and experiences.

Philippa Perry

#5. As palaeontologist Andrew Knoll once said, "Animals might be evolution's icing, but bacteria are really the cake.

Ed Yong

#6. The nature of mind: much of its power seems to stem from just the messy ways its agents cross-connect ... it's only what we must expect from evolution's countless tricks.

Marvin Minsky

#7. Sadly, I have found that even evolution's most staunch believers are afraid to debate, because they know that their case for atheism and evolution is less than extremely weak.

Ray Comfort

#8. Despite the Great Chain of Being's traditional ranking of humans between animals and angels, there is no evolutionary justification for the common assumption that evolution is somehow 'aimed' at humans, or that humans are 'evolution's last word'.

Richard Dawkins

#9. Remember that physical beauty is evolution's way of assuring us that the other person doesn't have too many intestinal parasites.

Ben Bernanke

#10. To move violently and beautifully through skin, to enter matter-isn't that evolution's climax?

Lidia Yuknavitch

#11. Death is not necessarily what gives meaning to life LIFE gives meaning to life, and what we do with life, which is to create knowledge like music, art, science To this end, I believe intelligent life might be evolution's secret weapon: the ultimate hack that might help us transcend entropy.

Jason Silva

#12. Their textbooks would show me in grim illustration,
The most hideous thing even seen in creation
The museum would commission a model in plaster
Of ME, to be called, "Evolution's Disaster"!

Bill Watterson

#13. In the 1920s and 1930s they hit upon the bright idea of co-opting genetics and treating it as one of the Theory of Evolution's components. A

Tom Wolfe

#14. Don't blame me. That's evolution. Evolution's always hard. Hard and bleak. No such thing as happy evolution.

Haruki Murakami

#15. Meditation is evolution's strategy to bring out our full potential.

Tara Brach

#16. It's easy to tell who the folks are that don't believe in evolution. They're the ones who have refused to participate in it.

Daniel J. Solove

#17. Only by discovering alchemy have I clearly understood that the Unconscious is a process and that ego's rapport with the Unconscious and its contents initiate an evolution, more precisely, a real metamorphosis of the psyche.

Carl Jung

#18. Such, then, was my position: to care for almost nothing but the gods and heroes, the garden of the Hesperides, Launcelot and the Grail, and to believe in nothing but atoms and evolution and military service.

C.S. Lewis

#19. If evolution is a struggle for survival, why hasn't it ruthlessly eliminated altruists, who seem to increase another's prospects of survival at the cost of their own?

Peter Singer

#20. Now take all these qualities together: order, balance, evolution and intelligence. What you have is a description of love. It's not the popular ideal, it is the wizard's love - the force that upholds life and nurtures it.

Deepak Chopra

#21. If you define evolution as merely meaning change over time, then I don't see any problem with a person being a Christian and believing in evolution. But that's not how textbooks define evolution. They define evolution as being random and undirected without plan or purpose.

Lee Strobel

#22. When you're fighting for civil rights, it's sometimes two steps forward and one step back. Civil rights are an evolution; and you have to bring people along.

Gloria Allred

#23. I will give up my belief in evolution if someone finds a fossil rabbit in the Precambrian.

John B. S. Haldane

#24. The home was a closed sphere touched only at its edge by the world's evolution.

Ellen Key

#25. She captured the spot of my world's centre and sent me in elliptic rings about it, causing the ground beneath me to vanish and the breath of my lungs to disperse. I was a rock locked in helpless orbit.

Richard Ronald Allan

#26. If a sect does officially insist that its structure of belief demands that evolution be false, then no compromise is possible. An honest and competent biology teacher can only conclude that the sect's beliefs are wrong and that its religion is a false one.

George Gaylord Simpson

#27. The collective unconscious contains the whole spiritual heritage of mankind's evolution born anew in the brain structure of every individual.

Carl Jung

#28. We're hard-wired by 200,000 years of evolution to be sensitive to the idea that someone might be watching us. They might be predators, after all. An uneasy feeling is perfectly natural if you suspect that someone has you in their ocular sights, whether it's a ghost or just some guy at the bus stop.

Seth Shostak

#29. What's popularly known as the evolution of consciousness, in other words that the expansion of cognitive repertoire that occurs in human beings, which has always been a great puzzle to evolutionary theory, I believe, occurred in the presence of a kind of catalyst for the human imagination.

Terence McKenna

#30. The Truth about America's Silicon Valley-
Angels in the Silicon

Riveting and insightful regarding progressivism and the social upheavals living in the Silicon Valley.-

John Yoo, UC Berkeley Constitutional Lawyer, novelist, and public servant

Richard Theodor Kusiolek

#31. Women's evolution unfolded through stages in the last 100 years. The first stage was "Wonder Woman," an idealized figure who functioned like

Sylvia Becker-Hill

#32. You can't even begin to understand biology, you can't understand life, unless you understand what it's all there for, how it arose - and that means evolution.

Richard Dawkins

#33. Neither humans nor the Gods that they have created are superior to old Mother Nature.

Abhijit Naskar

#34. I furnished the body that was needed to sit in the defendant's chair.
[Explaining his role in the Scopes Monkey Trial.]

John T. Scopes

#35. I don't think I'm severely politically active. I care deeply, and I have my strong personal beliefs. I think America is dancing on thin ice. But I think it's bigger even than a political issue. I wonder about the evolution of the human race and spirit and what our goals and reasons for living are.

Garry Shandling

#36. The dripping ... well, if it happens, it happens; it does not take anything from the work. The dripping just proves that you were not trying to control the work, but the work was developing by itself and if it drips, it's a natural part in the evolution of the work.

Keith Haring

#37. You can perceive a person's aspiration if it is genuine, because this creates a change in the emanations from such a person.

Idries Shah

#38. Evolution is a design process; it's just not an intelligent design process.

Jonathan Haidt

#39. All living things must grow or they will die. Adaptation to change is a characteristic of all living systems. Thus, all living things must grow, adapt, evolve, or die. Evolution is nature's creative way of pushing living organisms to higher degrees of complexity. We adapt up, not compromise down.

Alvin Conway

#40. Evolution has ensured that our brains just aren't equipped to visualise 11 dimensions directly. However, from a purely mathematical point of view it's just as easy to think in 11 dimensions, as it is to think in three or four.

Stephen Hawking

#41. There's a bait and switch going on here because the critics want the textbooks to question whether evolution occurred. And of course they don't because scientists don't question whether evolution occurred.

Eugenie Scott

#42. Don't feel sad. The only certain thing in life ... is death itself. She's free from her body and her soul is ready to take on another new life, so she can continue on until she becomes light, just like the stars.

Grace Fiorre

#43. These characters, they have to evolve. They're getting older on the show, these are things that happen in everyone's life. People do get married ... this is just a natural evolution. I wonder if we'll have 'Big Bang' babies in the season finale?

Kunal Nayyar

#44. Evolution is what it is. The upper classes have always died out; it's one of the most charming things about them.

Germaine Greer

#45. I've always been fascinated with adrenaline; it's saved my life more than once, and it's caused me to need it to save my life more than once. One of the most fascinating responses in human evolution, adrenaline sharpens your brain; it sharpens your responses.

Craig Venter

#46. I often think of the different ways Goethe and Darwin got at evolution. Goethe had the poetic conception of it all right; Darwin worked it out step by step. Who's ahead? And which has any business scoffing at the other?

Susan Glaspell

#47. Feeling had controlling influence over those primitive people, not thinking. It played a crucial part in the evolutionary development of modern humans. That's why we humans are basically an emotional species alongside being the smartest one.

Abhijit Naskar

#48. This world is not a middle point in evolution. It's one step down from the middle point in evolution. This is the world of desire and fulfillment, frustration, but at least once in a while you can go to Burger King.

Frederick Lenz

#49. Gadzooks you plagiaries of truth, for twas foreseen by mine own eyes that this world is flat and straddled by two platypus's being ridden by a sea horse ...

Steve Merrick

#50. Our treatment of animals and our attitude toward them are crucial not only to any pretensions we have to ethical behavior but the humankind's intellectual and moral evolution. Which is how the human animal is meant to evolve, isn't it?

Joy Williams

#51. Opportunity's precious, and time is a sword.

Idries Shah

#52. One of the problems he will seek to solve is how to make his wife both a servant and a companion; his attitude will evolve throughout the centuries, and this will also entail an evolution in woman's destiny.11

Simone De Beauvoir

#53. Digital also had this evolution that came out of post-production. And George Lucas did it because he wanted to make a big movie with special effects. Sort of the opposite of what you'd think is an indie film. So it's coming from both these angles.

Christopher Kenneally

#54. I believe in evolution, scientific inquiry, and global warming; I believe in free speech, whether politically correct or politically incorrect, and I am suspicious of using government to impose anybody's religious beliefs -including my own- on nonbelievers.

Barack Obama

#55. I had no idea of the historical evolution of the civilized world's music and had not realized that all modern music owes everything to Bach.

Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov

#56. All of today's DNA, strung through all the cells of the earth, is simply an extension and elaboration of [the] first molecule.

Lewis Thomas

#57. The feminist revolution had to be fought because women quite simply were stopped at a state of evolution far short of their human capacity.

Betty Friedan

#58. Dedicated to the memory of MY FATHER. For if I had not believed that he would have wished me to give such help as I could toward making his life's work of service to mankind, I should never have been led to write this book.

Leonard Darwin

#59. Remember Henry Adam's jest that the succession of presidents from Washington to Grant disproved the theory of evolution?

George Will

#60. I find it far more awesome, wonderful, that creation; our appearance in the world; should be the culmination, or at least one of the latest products of 3,000 Million years of organic evolution, than a kind of country trick, taking a rib out of a man's side in a trance.

David Attenborough

#61. Apart from anything else, I am designed by evolution, like we all are: if we see a little thing like that, big eyes, tiny nose, we go 'aaah'. That's what evolution does. We are programmed to do that. So to find babies the most amazing, isn't surprising, I don't think.

David Attenborough

#62. Taste is an evolution and refinement of one's personal likes and dislikes. This evolution takes place with a constant curiosity and interest in everything. The editing consequently refines the choices and defines taste.

Norma Kamali

#63. Germany's crime is the greatest crime the world has ever known, because it is not on the scale of History: it is on the scale of Evolution.

Diane Ackerman

#64. I think of evolution as a myth, like the Norse myths, the Greek myths - anybody's myths. But it was created for a rational age.

Tom Wolfe

#65. Your mind is right now filled with old thoughts. Not only old thoughts, but mostly someone else's old thoughts. It's important now, it's time now, to change your mind about some things. This is what evolution is all about.

Neale Donald Walsch

#66. Everyone's life is an evolution of emotions, spirit and beliefs. The storyline changes, plots thicken, main characters mature and new spiritual journeys begin. This is true of inspirational authors. Their books represent only the stages of their life. New triumphs of the soul have yet to be written!

Shannon L. Alder

#67. Many call this process 'the destruction of nature.' But it's not really destruction, it's change. Nature cannot be destroyed.

Yuval Noah Harari

#68. To conquer, you must endure not just your own suffering but the suffering of others. Indifference is the ultimate evolutionary achievement, the highest rung on nature's ladder.

Rick Yancey

#69. As a musician, I look for certain things that stimulate me. And what I look for is something that's an evolution on a particular genre that I never heard before.

Steve Vai

#70. In the end, we're just showmen. But, I think that it's an important factor. Not to be anything else but clear about that - for me, creativity is an important part of our evolution. Art has probably done more good for the world than war. But they're equally powerful. They both create revolutions.

Nicolas Winding Refn

#71. I think it's darkness before the dawn, because the next evolution is going to be a consciousness evolution instead of a communication revolution.

Ram Dass

#72. I do love the evolution of people in general. I think it's a beautiful thing when someone progresses and evolves in life.

Khloe Kardashian

#73. Religion's biggest crime is to slow down the Human's Intellectual Evolution! It creates an illusion as if there is a safe port somewhere. The truth is that there is no safe port; man is in emptiness! Intellectual Evolution is our only chance to build a safe port by ourselves!

Mehmet Murat Ildan

#74. We are now becoming, by Blackmore's estimation, teme machines - servants to the evolution of our own technologies.

Michael Harris

#75. There's an evolution from, today we tell computers to do stuff for us, to where computers can actually do stuff for us. For example, if I go and pick up my kids, it would be good for my car to be aware that my kids have entered the car and change the music to something that's appropriate for them.

Sundar Pichai

#76. All we endured throughout the year was - but an integral part of our life's learning & evolution.

Eleesha

#77. Starbucks itself is a product of diverse global cultures: "Starbuck's customers, whether in Zurich or Beirut, are drinking an American version of an Italian evolution of a beverage invented by Arabs brewed from a bean discovered by Africans."71

Patricia J. Campbell

#78. It is everyone's right to achieve this state of ones evolution and everything necessary is already inbuilt. But as I respect your freedom, you have to have the desire to achieve this state, it cannot be forced upon you!

Nirmala Srivastava

#79. If God is to create or to preserve a creature, God must be present and must make and preserve God's creation both in its innermost and outermost aspects.

Martin Luther

#80. She's the latest freshest fruit of our great American evolution. She's the self-made girl!
( ... )
Well, to begin with, the self-made girl's a new feature. That, however, you know. In the second place she isn't self-made at all. We all help to make her, we take such an interest in her.

Henry James

#81. Innovation is an evolutionary process, so it's not necessary to be radical all the time.

Marc Jacobs

#82. I learned a long time ago that some people would rather die than forgive. It's a strange truth, but forgiveness is a painful and difficult process. It's not something that happens overnight. It's an evolution of the heart.

Sue Monk Kidd

#83. It's a heartening fact about the human race that utopian fiction precedes dystopian fiction in the evolution of literature.

Paul Di Filippo

#84. If there's a God, and we have all this evidence that there's evolution, but He created the world only 6,000 years ago - what is the best and most logical explanation to reconcile those two things? I came up with - He came up with it, of course - that all things are fakeable.

David Javerbaum

#85. I am sure I have heard this several times from places I can't recall, but it's not already in the Gaia Quotes database, so I add this profound insight from the fields of psychological healing and spiritual evolution. It sure has helped me.

Robert Frost

#86. I'm not the best person to analyze any kind of evolution in my work, but I do feel like it's been an ongoing struggle to basically teach myself how to tell the kinds of stories that interest me in comics form.

Adrian Tomine

#87. Evolution and creationism both require faith. It's just a matter of where you choose to place that faith.

Ben Carson

#88. But then with me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man's mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would any one trust in the convictions of a monkey's mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?

Charles Darwin

#89. We can choose this moment of crisis to ask and answer the big questions of society's evolution - like, what do we want to be when we grow up?

Paul Gilding

#90. Evolution has programmed us to feel rejection in our guts. This is how the tribe inforced obedience, by wielding the threat of expulsion. Fear of rejection isn't just psychological; it's biological. It's in our cells.

Steven Pressfield

#91. The real evolution is to learn something new every day - it's very important for chefs to share what they have discovered.

Alain Ducasse

#92. No matter what argument you make against evolution, the response is Well, you know, it's possible to believe in evolution and believe in God. Yes, and it's possible to believe in Spiderman and believe in God, but that doesn't prove Spiderman is true.

Ann Coulter

#93. Evolution is a fact. It is the best explanation of what is known from observations. It's a theory as powerful as the theory of gravity.

Donald Johanson

#94. Since the universe is stupid, it's no wonder that social Darwinism tends to support, promote and finance the evolution of fools.

William C. Brown

#95. Life is all business. Spend your energy to get joy, happiness, evolution, and to gain more ability to enjoy. In this field we spend our energy. We never use our time, energy, speech, or ability to do something that doesn't help us grow and improve our life. It's not worth it.

Maharishi Mahesh Yogi

#96. Sometimes we have to be patient because the one thing that is inevitable in life is evolution. Whether it comes at the pace that we are expecting it or not, it's inevitable.

Zoe Saldana

#97. And, you know, the fact is, if you believe in evolution, we all have a common ancestor, and we all have a common ancestry with the plant in the lobby. This is what evolution tells us. And, it's true. It's kind of unbelievable.

Jeff Hawkins

#98. Exactly. That's what's been happening here for the past ten thousand years: You've been doing what you damn well please with the world. And of course you mean to go right on doing what you damn well please with it, because the whole damn thing belongs to you.

Daniel Quinn

#99. Uproar against a new idea, and laws to prevent anybody's accepting it, nearly always can be regarded as a signal that the new idea is just about to be taken for granted ... they didn't start making laws to prohibit the teaching of evolution until everybody was about to take it for granted.

Gwen Bristow

#100. 'You do know what magic is, don't you?'
Magic's when you close your eyes, make a wish, and it comes true.'
'No, that's coincidence.'
Magic's when a princess kisses a frog and it turns into a prince.'
'No, that's evolution.'
Isabelle scratched her neck. 'Well, then, what is magic?

Suzanne Selfors