Clyde Tombaugh Quotes

It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change.

'Animal Kingdom' is a lot of things, but it's not heartwarming.

Take, for example, the African jungle, the home of the cheetah. On whom does the cheetah prey? The old, the sick, the wounded, the weak, the very young, but never the strong. Lesson: If you would not be prey, you had better be strong.

The bird is powered by its own life and by its motivation.

Fishes live in the sea, as men do a-land; the great ones eat up the little ones.

Now, if you notice how the swan, putting its neck down into the deep water, brings up food for itself from below, then you will discover the wisdom of the Creator, in that He gave it a neck longer than its feet for this reason, that it might, as if lowering a sort of fishing line, procure the food hidden in the deep water.

Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature's inexorable imperative.

People are violent by nature. That’s why we rule the earth; we beat the crap out of everyone else.

We should not live by Darwinian principles. But Darwin explains how we got here.

Every live thing is a survivor on a kind of extended emergency bivouac.

Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no need of change.

At the banquet table of nature, there are no reserved seats. You get what you can take, and you keep what you can hold. If you can't take anything, you won't get anything, and if you can't hold anything, you won't keep anything. And you can't take anything without organization.

Life will find a way.

Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up, it knows it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle, or it will starve. It doesn't matter whether you're the lion or a gazelle-when the sun comes up, you'd better be running.

This world… belongs to the strong, my friend! The ritual of our existence is based on the strong getting stronger by devouring the weak.

Most organisms either adapt and become part of the system, or get wiped out. The only thing we have to adapt to the system with is our brain. If we don't use it, and we don't adapt fast enough, we won't survive.

We can't help it. Life looks for life.

Evolution leads the way through desire.

Life is an instinct for growth, for survival, for the accumulation of forces, for power.

It may not be irrelevant to note that even very modest forms of life, like earthworms, dung beetles and fiddler crabs, have no trouble identifying the real problems they must deal with if they are to survive.

Nature drives with a loose rein and vitality of any sort can blunder through many a predicament in which reason would despair.

You adapt, evolve, compete or die.

A worm is as good a traveler as a grasshopper or a cricket, and a much wiser settler. With all their activity these do not hop away from drought nor forward to summer. We do not avoid evil by fleeing before it, but by rising above or diving below its plane; as the worm escapes drought and frost by boring a few inches deeper.

The very comprehensibility of the world points to an intelligence behind the world. Indeed, science would be impossible if our intelligence were not adapted to the intelligibility of the world. The match between our intelligence and the intelligibility of the world is no accident. Nor can it properly be attributed to natural selection, which places a premium on survival and reproduction and has no stake in truth or conscious thought. Indeed, meat-puppet robots are just fine as the output of a Darwinian evolutionary process.

The creator's concern is the conquest of nature. The parasite's concern is the conquest of men.