#evolution

Everyone knows history is written by the winners, but that cliche misses a crucial detail: Over time, the winners are always the progressives. Conservatism can only win in the short term, because society cannot stop evolving (and social evolution inevitably dovetails with the agenda of those who see change as an abstract positive). It might take seventy years, but it always happens eventually. Serious historians are, almost without exception, self-styled progressives. Radical views--even the awful ones--improve with age. ↗

— Chuck Klosterman

#conservatives #evolution #historians #history #progressive

New Rule: Stop asking Miss USA contestants if they believe in evolution. It’s not their field. It’s like asking Stephen Hawking if he believes in hair scrunchies. Here’s what they know about: spray tans, fake boobs and baton twirling. Here’s what they don’t know about: everything else. If I cared about the uninformed opinions of some ditsy beauty queen, I’d join the Tea Party. ↗

— Bill Maher

#evolution #humor #miss-usa #new-rule #political-humor

It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. . . There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved. ↗

— Charles Darwin

#nature #origin #science #species #beauty

Blind metaphysical necessity, which is certainly the same always and every where, could produce no variety of things. All that diversity of natural things which we find suited to different times and places could arise from nothing but the ideas and will of a Being, necessarily existing. ↗

— Isaac Newton

#evolution #id #intelligent-design #macroevolution #naturalism

Both of these branches of evolutionary science, are, in my opinion, in the closest causal connection; this arises from the reciprocal action of the laws of heredity and adaptation. ↗

— Ernst Haeckel

#adaptation #arises #both #branches #causal

Tolstoy to Gandhi to Martin Luther King to Me and You ↗

— Brooke Bida

#ann-anarchsit #changeagents #libertarian-ann #love #new-age

Listen, the next revolution is gonna be a revolution of ideas. ↗

— Bill Hicks

#ideas #listen #next #revolution

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable. ↗

— John F. Kennedy

#impossible #inevitable #make #peaceful #revolution

The Russian people are suffering from economic fatigue and from disillusionment with the Allies! The world thinks the Russian Revolution is at an end. Do not be mistaken. The Russian Revolution is just beginning. ↗

— Alexander Kerensky

#beginning #disillusionment #economic #end #fatigue

Useful as a war against France, undertaken by the Government against the will of the people would be for our revolutionary development, just so dangerous must be the effect upon our democratic development of a war supported by blind popular enthusiasm. ↗

— Ferdinand Lassalle

#blind #dangerous #democratic #development #effect