Stephen Jay Gould Quotes

One of the basic lessons of history is that things can be different.

The past is what provides us with the building blocks. Our job today is to create new buildings out of them.

Things change, people change, but that doesn't mean you should forget the past.

A new future requires a new past.

At times, we need to stop and rethink everything. Our entire history is made up of people who were sure they knew the truth yet forgot that the truth has an annoying tendency to change on occasion without us noticing it.

I respect traditions, you can't walk all over them, but at the same time our world is changing. Life is about moving on.

You can embrace nostalgia and history and tradition at the same time - it has to progress or it can't survive.

In life you cannot be captured by the past. If you're not prepared to change for the future, you will stagnate.

Evolution, to me, is the best designer of all time.

We're not the best, but we happen to be what evolution came up with.

No great leader in history fought to prevent change.

We cannot go backward,' Marco says. 'A great deal is not how it used to be.

If the age of the Earth were a calendar year and today were a breath before midnight on New Year's Eve, we showed up a scant fifteen minutes ago, and all of recorded history has blinked by in the last sixty seconds. Luckily for us, our planet-mates--the fantastic meshwork of plants, animals, and microbes--have been patiently perfecting their wares since March, an incredible 3.8 billion years since the first bacteria. ...After 3.8 billion years of research and development, failures are fossils, and what surrounds us is the secret to survival.

We accept the verdict of the past until the need for change cries out loudly enough to force upon us a choice between the comforts of inertia and the irksomeness of action.

All things change. Cultivate flexibility rather than perfection.

I think that all human systems require continuous renewal. They rigidify. They get stuff in the joints. They forget what they cared about. The forces against it are nostalgia and the enormous appeal of having things the way they always have been, appeals to a supposedly happy past. But we've got to move on.

As natural selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress toward perfection.

We make the future better than the past. We don't hide from history. We make history.

It is failure that guides evolution; perfection provides no incentive for improvement, and nothing is perfect.

Hold fast to the best of the past and move fast to the best of the future.

We face the future fortified with the lessons we have learned from the past. It is today that we must create the world of the future.

It's harder to build than destroy. To build is to engage and change. In jazz, we call progressing harmonies changes. Changes are like obstacles on a speed course. They demand your attention and require you to be present. They are coming...they are here..... and then they are gone. It's how life comes. Each moment is a procession from the future into the past and the sweet spot is always the present. Live in that sweet spot. Be present.

People really do change. Don't let anyone tell you differently. That the future does not conform to the past is not the exception, but the rule.

The history of life is a tale of decimation and later stabilization of few surviving anatomies, not a story of steady expansion and progress.

To grow, you must be willing to let your present and future be totally unlike your past. Your history is not your destiny.