Human Flexibility Quotes

I have never met a dog I couldn't help; however, I have met humans who weren't willing to change.

If humans were totally unstructured creatures, they would be... a tool which can properly be shaped by outside forces.

We are not like the social insects. They have only the one way of doing things and they will do it forever, coded for that way. We are coded differently, not just for binary choices, go or no-go. We can go four ways at once, depending on how the air feels: go, no-go, but also maybe, plus what the hell let's give it a try.

With people, if you see something you want to change, you can make the change immediately. And if that doesn't work, you can change it again half an hour later. You can't do that with a robot. They're terrible at experimenting.

Unless man can make new and original adaptations to his environment as rapidly as his science can change the environment, our culture will perish.

Of course, Minneapolis, we think, 'Oh well, it's cold there, lethally cold.' But the reality is you adapt to weather... Humans are consummately adaptable creatures.

Men are noisy, narrow-band devices, but their nervous systems have very many parallel and simultaneously active channels. Relative to men, computing machines are very fast and very accurate, but they are constrained to perform only one or a few elementary operations at a time. Men are flexible, capable of "programming themselves contingently" on the basis of newly received information. Computing machines are single-minded, constrained by their "pre-programming."