Selection Quotes - Page 10

What does it say about a society that it devotes more care and patience to the selection of those who handle its money than of those who handle its children?

Malcolm Gladwell

Children, Doe, Care

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Slowly, quietly, like snow-flakes—like the small flakes that come when it is going to snow all night —little flakes of me, my impressions, my selections, are settling down on the image of her. The real shape wil be quite hidden in the end.

C. S. Lewis

Real, Night, Snow

C.S. Lewis (2012). “A Grief Observed”, p.12, Faber & Faber

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...mediocre people find their way into positions of authority...because when it comes to even the most important positions, our selection decisions are a good deal less rational than we think.

Malcolm Gladwell

Thinking, People, Decision

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If you're trying to cast the widest possible net to attract the largest selection of men or women, the last thing you should do is to start listing your income, political views, and the like. Avoid mentioning specific comedians, shows, or movies unless those are top-tier attributes on your list.

Amy Webb

Men, Views, Political

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Selection is the very keel on which our mental ship is built. And in this case of memory its utility is obvious. If we remembered everything, we should on most occasions be as ill off as if we remembered nothing.

William James

Memories, Ships, Should

William James (2012). “The Principles of Psychology”, p.680, Courier Corporation

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The invention of photography provided a radically new picture-making process - a process based not on synthesis but on selection. The difference was a basic one. Paintings were made - constructed from a storehouse of traditional schemes and skills and attitudes - but photographs, as the man on the street put, were taken.

John Szarkowski

Photography, Attitude, Taken

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Make the short story tremendously succinct - with a very short pulse or rhythm - and the closest selection of detail - in other words summarise intensely and deeply and keep down the lateral development. It should be a little gem of bright, quick, vivid form

Henry James

Pulse, Details, Stories

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That there is much suffering in the world no one disputes. Which is more likely, that pain and evil are the result of an all-powerful and good God, or the product of uncaring natural forces? The presence of much suffering agrees well with the view that all organic beings have been developed through variation and natural selection.

Charles Darwin

Pain, Powerful, Views

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The millionaires are a product of natural selection ... the naturally selected agents of society for certain work. They get high wages and live in luxury, but the bargain is a good one for society.

William Graham Sumner

Luxury, Wages, Agents

William Graham Sumner (1914). “The challenge of facts: and other essays”

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Between ourselves and our real natures we interpose that wax figure of idealizations and selections which we call our character.

Walter Lippmann

Real, Character, Personality

Walter Lippmann (1914). “A Preface to Politics”

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Truly, this earth is a trophy cup for the industrious man. And this rightly so, in the service of natural selection. He who does not possess the force to secure his Lebensraum in this world, and, if necessary, to enlarge it, does not deserve to possess the necessities of life. He must step aside and allow stronger peoples to pass him by.

Adolf Hitler

Men, Stronger, Doe

Max Domarus, Adolf Hitler (1990). “Hitler: speeches and proclamations, 1932-1945 : the chronicle of a dictatorship”

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Even today a good many distinguished minds seem unable to accept or even to understand that from a source of noise natural selection alone and unaided could have drawn all the music of the biosphere. In effect natural selection operates upon the products of chance and can feed nowhere else; but it operates in a domain of very demanding conditions, and from this domain chance is barred. It is not to chance but to these conditions that eveloution owes its generally progressive cource, its successive conquests, and the impresssion it gives of a smooth and steady unfolding.

Jacques Monod

Science, Acceptance, Giving

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Dogma is actually the only thing that cannot be separated from education. It IS education. A teacher who is not dogmatic is simply a teacher who is not teaching. There are no uneducated people; only most people are educated wrong. The true task of culture today is not a task of expansion, but of selection-and-rejection. The educationist must find a creed and teach it.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

Teacher, Educational, Teaching

"What's Wrong With The World". Part Four: Education: Or the Mistake About the Child. Ch. 4: The Truth About Education. Book by Gilbert K. Chesterton, 1910.

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Natural selection is the blind watchmaker, blind because it does not see ahead, does not plan consequences, has no purpose in view. Yet the living results of natural selection overwhelmingly impress us with the appearance of design as if by a master watchmaker, impress us with the illusion of design and planning.

Richard Dawkins

Atheist, Views, Design

Richard Dawkins (2015). “The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design”, p.31, W. W. Norton & Company

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Come boy, and pour for me a cup Of old Falernian. Fill it up With wine, strong, sparkling, bright, and clear; Our host decrees no water here. Let dullards drink the Nymph's pale brew, The sluggish thin their blood with dew. For such pale stuff we have no use; For us the purple grape's rich juice. Begone, ye chilling water sprite; Here burning Bacchus rules tonight! Catullus, Selections From Catullus No poems can live long or please that are written by water-drinkers.

Horace

Strong, Wine, Boys

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Opponents say natural selection is not a theory supported by observation or experiment; that it is not based on fact; and that it cannot be proved. Well, no, you cannot prove the theory to people who won't believe in it any more than you can prove that the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066. However, we know the battle happened then, just as we know the course of evolution on earth unambiguously shows that Darwin was right.

David Attenborough

Believe, People, Battle

"How Darwin won the evolution race" by Robin McKie, www.theguardian.com. June 21, 2008.

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The essence of Darwinism lies in its claim that natural selection creates the fit. Variation is ubiquitous and random in direction. It supplies raw material only. Natural selection directs the course of evolutionary change.

Stephen Jay Gould

Lying, Essence, Raw Materials

Stephen Jay Gould (1992). “Ever Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History”, p.44, W. W. Norton & Company

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This preservation of favourable variations and the destruction of injurious variations, I call Natural Selection, or the Survival of the Fittest. Variations neither useful nor injurious would not be affected by natural selection and would be left a fluctuating element.

Charles Darwin

Science, Survival, Would Be

Charles Darwin (1869). “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection: Or, The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life”, p.92

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It is natural selection that gives direction to changes, orients chance, and slowly, progressively produces more complex structures, new organs, and new species. Novelties come from previously unseen association of old material. To create is to recombine.

Francois Jacob

Science, Giving, Association

François Jacob, Nadine Peyrieras, Michel Morange (2002). “Travaux scientifiques de François Jacob”, p.709, Odile Jacob

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In the process of natural selection, then, any device that can insert a higher proportion of certain genes into subsequent generations will come to characterize the species.

E. O. Wilson

Science, Generations, Evolution

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I am quite sure that our views on evolution would be very different had biologists studied genetics and natural selection before and not after most of them were convinced that evolution had occurred.

John B. S. Haldane

Science, Views, Would Be

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Historians will have to face the fact that natural selection determined the evolution of cultures in the same manner as it did that of species.

Konrad Lorenz

Science, Libertarian, Faces

Konrad Lorenz (2005). “On Aggression”, p.115, Routledge

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Evolution has no long-term goal. There is no long-distance target, no final perfection to serve as a criterion for selection, although human vanity cherishes the absurd notion that our species is the final goal of evolution.

Richard Dawkins

Distance, Science, Vanity

Richard Dawkins (2015). “The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe without Design”, p.58, W. W. Norton & Company

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Speciation does not necessarily promote evolutionary change; rather, speciation 'gathers in' and guards evolutionary change by locking and stabilization for sufficient geological time within a Darwinian individual of the appropriate scale. If a change in a local population does not gain such protection, it becomes-to borrow Dawkins's metaphor at a macroevolutionary scale-a transient duststorm in the desert of time, a passing cloud without borders, integrity, or even the capacity to act as a unit of selection, in the panorama of life's phylogeny.

Stephen Jay Gould

Life, Integrity, Clouds

Stephen Jay GOULD, Stephen Jay Gould (2009). “Punctuated Equilibrium”, p.83, Harvard University Press

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As Mayor, I will fully support my Arts Commission and its professional selection committees so that they can commission a full range of public art that is daring and, when appropriate, daringly traditional

Gavin Newsom

Art, Support, Range

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