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Evolution thus is merely contingent on certain processes articulated by Darwin: variation and selection. -- Ernst Mayr
I sometimes ponder on variation form and it seems to me it ought to be more restrained, purer. -- Johannes Brahms
The interaction of the variation in our genes is what's responsible for lots of our attributes and vigor. -- Walter Gilbert
I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection. -- Charles Darwin
A rise of wages from this cause will, indeed, be invariably accompanied by a rise in the price of commodities; but in such cases, it will be found that labour and all commodities have not varied in regard to each other, and that the variation has been confined to money. -- David Ricardo
Uncontrolled variation is the enemy of quality. -- W. Edwards Deming
There are only a few notes. Just variations on a theme. -- John Lennon
People of all sexes have the right to explore femininity, masculinity-and the infinite variations between-without criticism or ridicule. -- Leslie Feinberg
Nature is an endless combination and repetition of a very few laws. She hums the old well-known air through innumerable variations. -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
In modern praxis lost positions are salvaged most often when the play is highly complicated with many sharp dynamic variations to be calculated. -- Leonid Shamkovich
Now, no matter what the mullah teaches, there is only one sin, only one. And that is theft. Every other sin is a variation of theft. -- Khaled Hosseini
If you look at music, you see theme, variation, you see symmetry, asymmetry, you see structure, and these are related to skills in the real world. -- Dave Van Ronk
Cuvier had preceded Lamarck in specifying the kinds and degrees of variation, which his own observations and critical judgment of the reports of others led him to admit. -- Richard Owen
Readers will stay with an author, no matter what the variations in style and genre, as long as they get that sense of story, of character, of empathetic involvement. -- Dean Koontz
It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure. -- Albert Einstein
When the Internet publicity began, I remember being struck by how much the world was not the way we thought it was, that there was infinite variation in how people viewed the world. -- Eric Schmidt
A river is water is its loveliest form; rivers have life and sound and movement and infinity of variation, rivers are veins of the earth through which the lifeblood returns to the heart -- Roderick Haig-Brown
I frequently compose out the entire metric structure of a piece in modified cyclic form, where each cyclic revolution undergoes some form of 'variation' much as if measure lengths were concrete musical 'material.' -- Brian Ferneyhough
Regularity in the hours of rising and retiring, perseverance in exercise, adaptation of dress to the variations of climate, simple and nutritious aliment, and temperance in all things are necessary branches of the regimen of health. -- Lord Chesterfield
Collect impressions. Don't be in a hurry to write them down. Because that's something music can do better than painting: it can centralise variations of colour and light within a single picture a truth generally ignored, obvious as it is. -- Claude Debussy
It is a tragedy, I feel, that people of a different sexual type are caught in a world which shows so little understanding for homosexuals and is so crassly indifferent to the various gradations and variations of gender and their great significance in life. -- Emma Goldman
In the US, there is basically one party - the business party. It has two factions, called Democrats and Republicans, which are somewhat different but carry out variations on the same policies. By and large, I am opposed to those policies. As is most of the population. -- Noam Chomsky
What I warn you to remember is that I am a detective. Our relationship with truth is fundamental but cracked, refracting confusingly like fragmented glass. It is the core of our careers, the endgame of every move we make, and we pursue it with strategies painstakingly constructed of lies and concealment and every variation on deception. -- Tana French
I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in life. And I am horribly limited. -- Sylvia Plath
Variation must be taken as random until there is positive evidence to the contrary. -- Harold Jeffreys
A sensation, hidden in the depths of my emotional memory, was suddenly revived: what if... What if for me The Variation is not dead? If The Variation is alive?! -- Lev Polugaevsky
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
Variation does not mean evolution. If an artist varies his mode of expression this only means that he has changed his manner of thinking, and in changing, it might be for the better or it might be for the worse. -- Pablo Picasso
One [method] is by a Watch to keep time exactly. But, by reason of the motion of the Ship, the Variation of Heat and Cold, Wet and Dry, and the Difference of Gravity in different Latitudes, such a watch hath not yet been made. -- Isaac Newton
I make up stories about people who are either imaginary or some variation of myself. -- Jami Attenberg
My serve can get better, for sure. It's not just about serving bombs, but positioning, variation in speed, in spin. -- Rafael Nadal
All evolutionary biologists know that variation itself is nature's only irreducible essence... I had to place myself amidst the variation. -- Stephen Jay Gould
In skating there's always another jump or another spin variation or another thing to learn, and that's what I liked about it. -- Gracie Gold
Granted there are only seven stories in the universe. And I agree with that. But give me a great variation of those stories. And literate. -- Debra Winger
Almost every culture has its own variation on chicken soup, and rightly so - it's one of the most gratifying dishes on the face of the Earth. -- Yotam Ottolenghi
After all these years of cooking and writing recipes, I am still amazed every time I notice how even the minutest of variation in technique can make a spectacular difference. -- Yotam Ottolenghi
The older the layers, the more each of them is uniform over a great extent; the newer the layers, the more they are limited and subject to variation within small distances. -- Georges Cuvier
In nearly every religion I am aware of, there is a variation of the golden rule. And even for the non-religious, it is a tenet of people who believe in humanistic principles. -- Hillary Clinton
I believe the earth's climate is changing, but I think it's changing for natural variation reasons and I think mankind has been adapting to climate as long as man has walked the earth. -- Joe Barton
I'm not a frustrated concert composer, and the concert pieces I've done have been a small part of my work. What I've sought there is instruction, variation from the demands of film and relief from its restrictions. -- John Towner Williams
The Moon stabilizes Earth's obliquity. Well, almost. The tilt actually varies between 22 and 24.5 degrees - and the variation is enough to induce such environmental inconveniences as the occasional ice age. Without the Moon, it might be much worse. -- Seth Shostak
Evolutionary biologists are not content merely to explain how variation occurs within limits, however. They aspire to answer a much broader question-which is how complex organisms like birds, and flowers, and human beings came into existence in the first place. -- Phillip E. Johnson
You can open up a centenarian's brain, and you'll see some areas that look like that of a 50-year-old or of a 110-year-old. You can have variation in the basic process of aging, called senescence, in different parts of the same body. -- S. Jay Olshansky
In stating the principles which regulate exchangeable value and price, we should carefully distinguish between those variations which belong to the commodity itself, and those which are occasioned by a variation in the medium in which value is estimated, or price expressed. -- David Ricardo
Research shows that there is only half as much variation in student achievement between schools as there is among classrooms in the same school. If you want your child to get the best education possible, it is actually more important to get him assigned to a great teacher than to a great school. -- Bill Gates
When nobody read, dyslexia wasn't a problem. When most people had to hunt, a minor genetic variation in your ability to focus attention was hardly a problem, and may even have been an advantage. When most people have to make it through high school, the same variation can become a genuinely life-altering disease. -- Alison Gopnik
If you look at any leaf on any tree branch, it's similar to but not exactly a repetition of the previous branch. So the new science of complexity or showing how an architecture can be produced just as quickly, cheaply and efficiently by using computer production methods to get the slight variation, the self-similarity. -- Charles Jencks
In my teaching, I try to expose my students to the widest range of aesthetic possibilities, so I'll offer them stories from Anton Chekhov to Denis Johnson, from Flannery O'Connor to A.M. Homes, and perhaps investigating all that strange variation of beauty has rubbed off on me. Or perhaps that's why I enjoy teaching literature. -- Chang-Rae Lee
An aria in an opera - Handel's 'Ombra mai fu,' for example - gets along with an incredibly small number of words and ideas and a large amount of variation and repetition. That's the beauty of it. It's not taxing to the listener's intelligence because if you haven't heard it the first time round, it'll come around again. -- James Fenton
We are now beyond nature's normal variation in terms of how the atmosphere is composed. Nature did something for a million years. It actually goes back a lot further than that, but the ice core records show a million years. So, nature has this normal oscillation within this zone, and all of a sudden, we're forty percent outside that zone. -- James Balog
We must understand variation. -- W. Edwards Deming
Originality is only variation. -- Holbrook Jackson
Shrink, shrink variation, to reduce the loss. -- W. Edwards Deming
Statisticians do it with confidence, frequency and variation -- Lillian Hellman
Remember that every man is a variation of yourself -- William Saroyan
His brothers were the type; he was the variation. -- Henry Adams
I love variation in all forms: in painting, in music. -- Jim Jarmusch
There's more variation among human groups than between human groups. -- Gloria Steinem
Change is upsetting. Repetition is tedious. Three cheers for variation! -- Mason Cooley
Postulate 3. Assignable causes of variation may be found and eliminated. -- Walter A. Shewhart
Repetition makes us feel secure and variation makes us feel free. -- Robert Hass
Understanding variation is the key to success in quality and business. -- W. Edwards Deming
Every rock song is some variation of 'Pull down your pants' -- Bruce Springsteen
I had always been appalled by the variation of the gospel of prosperity -- Sunday Adelaja
...beauty, she had discovered occupied a narrow band. Ugliness, on the hand, had infinite variation. -- Ian Mcewan
The range of variation in the female far exceeds the range of variation in the male. -- Alfred Kinsey
In my opinion the Open variation is absolutely correct - and more interesting than the Closed. -- Bent Larsen
The variation in the value of money, however great, makes no difference in the rate of profits;... -- David Ricardo
They've offered me every variation on Audrey Horne, none of which were as good or as much fun. -- Sherilyn Fenn
The interaction of the variation in our genes is what's responsible for lots of our attributes and vigor." -- Walter Gilbert
Unfortunately, with dinosaurs, we haven't had enough specimens to determine how much variation there is within a species. -- Jack Horner
There are patterns which emerge in one's life, circling and returning anew, an endless variation of a theme -- Jacqueline Carey
Only play into a variation in which your opponent is strong if you have your own personal novelty ready! -- Edmar Mednis
Nature does not turn out her work according to a single pattern; she prides herself upon her power of variation... -- Seneca the Younger
Trained as a musician, [photographer Ansel] Adams understood the richness of variation that could be unfolded from a simple theme. -- John Szarkowski
You must not forget that a monster is only a variation, and that to a monster the norm is monstrous. -- John Steinbeck
His knowledge is not like ours, which has three tenses; present, past, and future. God's knowledge has no change or variation. -- Saint Augustine
His knowledge is not like ours, which has three tenses: present, past, and future. God's knowledge has no change or variation. -- Augustine of Hippo
There is great variation in brain power all the way from Einstien on one hand to Sarah Palin on the other. -- Richard Dawkins
I've fallen for one girl too many who's wanted some variation of who I am and only that. It eats you alive. -- Christopher Krovatin
The variation between countries is partly due to cultural and institutional differences, but undoubtedly the economic landscape within each territory is crucial. -- Lorna Byrne
Clearly the secret of happiness...is a variation on the general principle of banging your head against a wall, and then stopping. -- Stef Penney
After every movie, I always kick myself for the same things-didn't do enough, not enough variation, not enough interesting choices, too bland. -- Robin Wright
Remember that every man is a variation of yourself. No man's guilt is not yours, nor is any man's innocence a thing apart. -- William Saroyan
There is no creation without tradition; the 'new' is an inflection on a preceding form; novelty is always a variation on the past. -- Carlos Fuentes
Scientists say that somewhere in the universe, every event under the sun repeats itself an infinite number of times in every possible variation. -- Romina Russell
Her face was one of a kind, a surprising variation that made observers think, Yes--that would be another very nice way for people to look. -- Kurt Vonnegut
Every (stressful thought) is a variation on a single theme: This shouldn't be happening. I shouldn't be having this experience. God is unjust. Life isn't fair. -- Byron Katie
Bob Dylan's one of the greatest blues singers of the western world; ancient art, on-the-spot improvisation, mind quickness, endless variation, classical formulae, prophetic vision, mighty wind-horse. -- Allen Ginsberg
I think the future of lunar bases has to be somewhere around the South or North Pole. You have less variation in temperature and more daylight hours. -- Charles Duke
You know what they say," Amanda said. "Hatred isn't the opposite of love, it's just another variation of it. They both mean you have passionate feelings for someone. -- Robin Brande
... much seemingly chance variation in human behavior is not due to chance; it is in fact the logical result of a few basic, observable differences in mental functioning. -- Isabel Briggs Myers
Evolution by natural selection is not an idle hypothesis. The genetic variation on which selection acts is well understood in principle all the way down to the molecular level. -- E. O. Wilson
If I have any talent, it's in the artistic end of football. The variation of movement of 11 players and the orchestration of that facet of football is beautiful to me. -- Bill Walsh
I keep to this routine every day without variation. The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it's a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind. -- Haruki Murakami
Some of my favorite music is incredibly repetitive, or on the surface has an element of repetition. But once you go beneath the surface, you realize in the repetition is constant variation. -- John Dieterich
Intelligent design cannot explain Darwinian evolution. Darwin's whole point is that variation and change are random and without higher purpose. We cannot imagine that God designed this disproof of His own existence. -- James K. Galbraith
Instead of constantly enhancing the norm - forever upping the ante of the 'normal' with new technologies - we should work on enhancing the concept of normal by broadening appreciation of anatomical variation. -- Alice Dreger
I think a brain can be made "more thinking" or made "more emotional." At what point does this become abnormal? Autism in its milder variants, I think, is part of normal human variation. -- Temple Grandin
Myths of the heroes are cosmic creation myths in microcosm. They depict, in no matter how subtle variation, the eternal battle we wage to release the creative energies within ourselves and in the world. -- Dorothy Norman
In the target seats we have been going like a bomb and there is a great deal of confidence. I think there's going to be a great deal of regional variation throughout the UK. -- Menzies Campbell
Develop a respect and reverence for the principle of variation: the idea that the message ain't in the mean, the mode or the median - it's in the differences that occur throughout a population. -- Tom Peters
Whether we know it or not, our minds and hearts are populated by all the characters we will ever need - though we may disassemble them and rearrange the parts into composites for variation. -- David Corbett
Everybody has a theme. You talk to somebody awhile, and you realize they have one particular thing that rules them. The best you can do is a variation on the theme, but that's about it. -- Meg Wolitzer
It turns out that there are swaths of habitat in the north of Siberia and Yukon that actually could house a mammoth. Remember, this was a highly plastic animal that lived over tremendous climate variation. -- Hendrik Poinar
I think the eyeball is the same, [in] an American or African. The problem is the same, the treatment is the same. Yet why should there be so much variation in quality and in service? -- Thulasiraj Ravilla
He decided there was no point in telling her he'd looked in the fridge and seen none of these things. There'd just be some variation of his mother's standard crack about Male Refrigeration Blindness Syndrome. -- Nora Roberts
Basically, when I'm writing something, I think about what is the subject of the piece. The subject of the piece is our fear of getting old, which is a variation on our fear of dying. -- M. Night Shyamalan
Those humble but indomitable workers, to whom later generations referred by the collective name of Baale Masorah, Masters of Tradition, performed in obscurity their Herculean task of guarding the Biblical Text against loss or variation. -- Robert Gordis

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