Extinction Quotes - Page 2

• More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.

  Woody Allen

  Inspirational, Inspiring, Hope

  Side Effects "My Speech to the Graduates" (1980)

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• It's a matter of life and death for this country. The Kenyan forests are facing extinction and it is a man-made problem.

  Wangari Maathai

  Country, Men, Life And Death

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• I accept extinction as best explaining disjoined species. I see that the same cause must have reduced many species of great range to small, and that it may have reduced large genera to so small, and of families.

  Asa Gray

  May, Causes, Accepting

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• I can't visualize the situation in which we nuke ourselves into extinction.

  John Keegan

  Nukes, Situation, I Can

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• The struggle for existence holds as much in the intellectual as in the physical world. A theory is a species of thinking, and its right to exist is coextensive with its power of resisting extinction by its rivals.

  Thomas Huxley

  Struggle, Science, Thinking

  Thomas Henry Huxley (2011). “Collected Essays”, p.229, Cambridge University Press

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• America has faced much more difficult times, including potential national extinction, without flinching.

  Nick Clooney

  America, Difficult Times, Including

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• The physical extinction of the human race is one possibility.

  Vernor Vinge

  Race, Possibility, Humans

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• Unless one says goodbye to what one loves, and unless one travels to completely new territories, one can expect merely a long wearing away of oneself and an eventual extinction.

  Jean Dubuffet

  Goodbye, Farewell, Long

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• The government of the United States is a device for maintaining in perpetuity the rights of the people, with the ultimate extinction of all privileged classes.

  Calvin Coolidge

  Rights, Government, Class

  Calvin Coolidge (2001). “The Quotable Calvin Coolidge: Sensible Words for a New Century”, Images from the Past Incorporated

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• The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality.

  T. S. Eliot

  Art, Sacrifice, Self

  The Sacred Wood "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1920)

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• It is peoples' fantasies of what is true that is so extraordinary. That that we were born and that we face eternal extinction after death is an extraordinary fantasy.

  Brian Perkins

  Faces, Fantasy, Born

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• The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication.

  Susan Sontag

  Two, World, Way

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• A widespread taste for pornography means that nature is alerting us to some threat of extinction.

  J. G. Ballard

  Nature, Sex, Mean

  J. G. Ballard (2001). “The complete short stories”, Fourth Estate

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• Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same.

  Ronald Reagan

  Strength, Peace, Children

  Ronald Reagan (1983). “A Time for Choosing: The Speeches of Ronald Reagan, 1961-1982”, Gateway Books

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• The extinction of race consciousness as between Muslims is one of the outstanding achievements of Islam, and in the contemporary world there is, as it happens, a crying need for the propagation of this Islamic virtue.

  Arnold J. Toynbee

  Freedom, Islamic, Race

  Arnold J. Toynbee (1949). “Civilization on Trial”

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• I want upon death to be buried, just like in the old days, where I decompose by the action of microorganisms, and I am dined upon by any form of creeping animal or root system that sees fit to do so.... I will have recycled back to the universe at least some of the energy that I have taken from it. And in so doing, at the conclusion of my scientific adventures, I will have come closer to the heavens than to Earth.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Taken, Adventure, Animal

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• The number of people displaced by dams is estimated at between 40 million and 80 million, most of them in China and India. The costs of dams were on average 50% above their original estimate. Some designed to reduce flooding made it worse, and there were many unexpected environmental disadvantages, including the extinction of fish and bird species. Half the world's wetlands had been lost because of dams.

  Paul Brown

  Average, Numbers, People

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• One day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.

  Ronald Reagan

  Children, Sunset, Men

  Ronald Reagan (1983). “A Time for Choosing: The Speeches of Ronald Reagan, 1961-1982”, Gateway Books

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• The short-lived self, teetering on the edge of extinction, is the only thing that can ever really matter.

  Eric Hoffer

  Self, Matter, Short Lived

  Eric Hoffer (1982). “Between the Devil and the Dragon: The Best Essays and Aphorisms of Eric Hoffer”, HarperCollins Publishers

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• What I really wanted was to travel and see all the different animals that were on the verge of extinction.

  Leonardo DiCaprio

  Animal, Different, Wanted

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• It is even harder to realize that this present universe has evolved from an unspeakably unfamiliar early condition, and faces a future extinction of endless cold or intolerable heat. The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless.

  Steven Weinberg

  Future, Science, Faces

  The First Three Minutes epilogue (1977)

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• Often extinctions in the ocean occur at the same time as those on land. Then again, the ice age extinctions lost many big animals, but not many sea faring ones.

  Robert T. Bakker

  Ocean, Hockey, Animal

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• I think we must ask ourselves if this is really what we want to do to God's creation, to drive it to extinction? Because extinction really is irreversible; species that go extinct are lost forever. This is not like Jurassic Park. We can't bring them back.

  Stuart L. Pimm

  Animal, Thinking, Jurassic Park

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• [Man] ... his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labour of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins.

  Bertrand Russell

  Inspiration, Science, Men

  Bertrand Russell (2015). “Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays”, p.46, Booklassic

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• During your lifetime, the people of our culture are going to figure out how to live sustainably on this planet--or they're not. Either way, it's certainly going to be extraordinary. If they figure out how to live sustainably here, then hum anity will be able to see something it can't see right now: a future that extends into the indefinite future. If they don't figure this out, then I'm afraid the human race is going to take its place among the species that we're driving into extinction here every day--as many as 200--every day

  Daniel Quinn

  Race, People, Culture

  Daniel Quinn (2011). “If They Give You Lined Paper, Write Sideways.”, p.169, Steerforth

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