“Young people have a marvellous faculty of either dying or adapting themselves to circumstances.”

“Most hackers are young because young people tend to be adaptable. As long as you remain adaptable, you can always be a good hacker.”

“The pale organisms of literary heroes feeding under the author's supervision swell gradually with the reader's lifeblood; so that the genius of a writer consists in giving them the faculty to adapt themselves to that - not very appetizing - food and thrive on it, sometimes for centuries.”

“People talk about human intelligence as the greatest adaptation in the history of the planet. It is an amazing and marvelous thing, but in evolutionary terms, it is as likely to do us in as to help us along.”

“...the old are destroying the young by them to die in distant fields, and in response the young are destroying themselves.”

“Ideology knows the answer before the question has been asked.Principles are something different: a set of values that have to be adapted to circumstances but not compromised away.”