Adaptability Quotes

As with our military potential, our economic assets are more than equal to the task. Our independent farmers produce an abundance of food and fibre. Our free workers are versatile, intelligent, and hardworking. Our businessmen are imaginative and resourceful. The productivity, the adaptability of the American economy is the solid foundation-stone of our security structure.

Preparing for battle, plans were essential. But once the battle was joined, plans were useless.

In order to govern, the question is not to follow out a more or less valid theory but to build with whatever materials are at hand. The inevitable must be accepted and turned to advantage.

In politics nothing is immutable. Events carry within them an invincible power. The unwise destroy themselves in resistance. The skillful accept events, take strong hold of them and direct them.

One must change one's tactics every ten years if one wishes to maintain one's superiority.

One thing is sure. We have to do something. We have to do the best we know how at the moment... If it doesn't turn out right, we can modify it as we go along.

Times change, we need to change as well.

The human body has an enormous capacity for adjusting to trying circumstances. I have found that one can bear the unbearable if one can keep one's spirit strong, even when one's body is being tested. Strong convictions are the secret of surviving deprivation. Your spirit can be full even when your stomach is empty.

When I was a young subaltern in the South African War, the water was not fit to drink. To make it palatable we had to put a bit of whiskey in it. By diligent effort I learned to like it.

The English know how to make the best of things. Their so-called muddling through is simply skill at dealing with the inevitable.

Me, as a person, I grow. I'm like a chameleon. You know? That is a gift and a curse for me. But more so a gift, because it never puts me in a box.

There are no conditions to which a man cannot get accustomed, especially if he sees that everyone around him lives in the same way.

Species that struggle to adapt to survive will become extinct.

How have all those exquisite adaptations of one part of the organisation to another part, and to the conditions of life, and of one organic being to another being, been perfected?

Hence it is quite credible that the presence of a feline animal in large numbers in a district might determine, through the intervention first of mice and then of bees, the frequency of certain flowers in that district!

Building a better mousetrap merely results in smarter mice.

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change, that lives within the means available and works cooperatively against common threats.

Always fall in with what you're asked to accept. Take what is given, and make it over your way. My aim in life has always been to hold my own with whatever's going. Not against: with.

The most important factor in survival is neither intelligence nor strength but adaptability.

In the long history of humankind (and animal kind, too) those who learned to collaborate and improvise most effectively have prevailed.