Extinction Quotes - Page 3

• There are plenty of problems in the world, many of them interconnected. But there is no problem which compares with this central, universal problem of saving the human race from extinction

  John Foster Dulles

  Race, World, Saving

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• We have a planet that is at risk, where resources don't have a permanent life. We are going to have to make the decision: are we going to survive or are we waiting for our extinction? One day we will wake up and find people are fighting not for oil but water.

  Desmond Tutu

  Fighting, Oil, People

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• EXTINCTION, n. The raw material out of which theology created the future state.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Sarcastic, Future, Raw Materials

  Ambrose Bierce (2016). “The Devil's Dictionary: The Devil World”, p.61, 谷月社

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• Man is an over-complicated organism. If he is doomed to extinction he will die out for want of simplicity.

  Ezra Pound

  Men, Simplicity, Simple Life

  1938 Guide to Kulcher, pt.3, section 5, ch.19.

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• Extinction has only separated groups: it has by no means made them; for if every form which has ever lived on this earth were suddenly to reappear, though it would be quite impossible to give definitions by which each group could be distinguished from other groups, as all would blend together by steps as fine as those between the finest existing varieties, nevertheless a natural classification, or at least a natural arrangement, would be possible.

  Charles Darwin

  Mean, Science, Giving

  Charles Darwin (2016). “On the Origin of Species”, p.322, Zillmann Publishing

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• In America, the traditional routes to black identity have hardly been normal. Suicide (disappearance by imitation, or willed extinction), violence (hysterical religiosity, crime, armed revolt), and exemplary moral courage; none of these is normal.

  June Jordan

  Suicide, America, Black

  June Jordan (1981). “Civil Wars”, p.48, Simon and Schuster

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• Although humankind inherently "desires to know", if open access to, and unlimited development of, knowledge henceforth puts us all in clear danger of extinction, then common sense demands that we re-examine our reverence for knowledge.

  Bill Joy

  Knowledge, Common Sense, Desire

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• With respect to phenomena like mass extinction, somebody might say why worry about it because in a geological perspective mass extinctions aren't so bad, they wipe out some things and then 10 million years down the road we get new and interesting objects.But I tell you mass extinctions are really awful for folks caught in the midst of them.

  Richard Lewontin

  Mass Extinction, Years, Interesting

  Source: www.abc.net.au

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• Well lose more species of plants and animals between 2000 and 2065 than weve lost in the last 65 million years. If we dont find answers to these problems, were gonna be victims of this extinction event that were at fault for.

  Paul Watson

  Animal, Years, Events

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• The extinction rate is so huge now, we're to the stage where we've got to set up recombinant ecologies. There are no longer enough species left, anywhere, to hold the system together.

  Bill Mollison

  Together, Enough, Stage

  "Permaculture: Design For Living". Interview with Alan AtKisson, www.context.org. 1991.

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• The diversity of life on Earth, generally, is astonishing. But despite those large numbers, it's also important to recognize that every species, one way or another, is vulnerable to extinction. And in our time on Earth... our impact on the diversity of life has been profound.

  Sylvia Earle

  Impact, Numbers, Profound

  "Big Thinkers on Evolution". "NOVA" Interview, www.pbs.org. October 6, 2009.

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• Nevertheless so profound is our ignorance, and so high our presumption, that we marvel when we hear of the extinction of an organic being; and as we do not see the cause, we invoke cataclysms to desolate the world, or invent laws on the duration of the forms of life!

  Charles Darwin

  Ignorance, Law, Profound

  Charles Darwin (2015). “Delphi Complete Works of Charles Darwin (Illustrated)”, p.3445, Delphi Classics

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• I was reading about how countless species are being pushed toward extinction by man's destruction of forests. . . . Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.

  Bill Watterson

  Reading, Thinking, Intelligent

  Calvin and Hobbes (comic strip), 8 Nov. 1989

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• By 2050, at bio-extinction's current rate, between 25 per cent and 50 per cent of all species will have disappeared or be too few in numbers to survive. There'll be a few over-visited parks, the coral reefs will be beaten up, grasslands overgrazed. Vast areas of the tropics that have lost their forests will have the same damn weeds, bushes and scrawny eucalyptus trees so that you don't know if you're in Africa or the Americas.

  Stuart L. Pimm

  Weed, Numbers, Tree

  "Mass Extinction Not Inevitable". The Wired Interview, www.wired.com. March 20, 2004.

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• Part of what I wanted to do in my book was point out that we have almost reached the point where we can prevent a mass extinction with the science and technology we have today. We can build carbon neutral cities.

  Annalee Newitz

  Book, Technology, Mass Extinction

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Our biggest challenges for the ocean and for the planet are problems of perception. People need to understand that species extinctions, habitat destruction, ocean acidification, and pollution are all chipping away at the resilience of the thin layer of life that sustains us on Spaceship Earth.

  Edith Widder

  Ocean, People, Challenges

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• To be fair, if we are having a mass extinction, we're in the early stages of it. I think it's knowing facts like that which has made me less fearful about the future. Mass extinction is a long, complicated process that we are just now beginning to understand - and likewise, we are just beginning to understand how we might prevent one.

  Annalee Newitz

  Thinking, Mass Extinction, Knowing

  Source: therumpus.net

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• I would want us to start our quest to survive mass extinction by rethinking how we build cities. Cities should be commonplaces of production, rather than consumption - they should be producing food, and fuel.

  Annalee Newitz

  Mass Extinction, Cities, Fuel

  Source: therumpus.net

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• We live in a time where we have more extinction happening on our planet than since the dinosaurs were wiped out 50 million years ago.

  Jeff Corwin

  Years, Dinosaurs, Planets

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• One of the laws of paleontology is that an animal which must protect itself with thick armour is degenerate. It is usually a sign that the species is on the road to extinction.

  John Steinbeck

  Animal, Law, Paleontology

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• The folly of war is that it can have no natural end except in the extinction an entire people.

  Joyce Carol Oates

  War, People, Natural

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• an Autobiography is the truest of all books; for while it inevitably consists mainly of extinctions of the truth, shirkings of the truth, partial revealments of the truth, with hardly an instance of plain straight truth, the remorseless truth is there, between the lines, where the author-cat is raking dust upon it which hides from the disinterested spectator neither it nor its smell... the result being that the reader knows the author in spite of his wily diligences.

  Mark Twain

  Book, Cat, Dust

  Mark Twain (2016). “The Wit and Wisdom of Mark Twain”, p.55, Chartwell

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• Oil is dead, on its way to extinction. As a group of citizens we must speak up and act towards ending fracking. Let your government know you will not tolerate a technology that not only poisons your family but our creature family at large; let them know you want sustainable power and all the jobs that will come with that new growth.

  Ian Somerhalder

  Jobs, Technology, Oil

  "Ian Somerhalder, ‘The Vampire Diaries’ Actor, Talks Love, Social Media And Social Change With Origin Magazine". Interview with Maranda Pleasant, www.huffingtonpost.com. April 21, 2013.

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• Nirvana is the utter extinction of all that is base in us, all that is vicious in us. Nirvana is not like the black, dead peace of the grave, but the living peace, the living happiness of a soul which is conscious of itself and conscious of having found its own abode in the heart of the Eternal.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Heart, Soul, Black

  Mahatma Gandhi, Anand T. Hingorani, Ganga Anand Hingorani (1985). “The Encyclopaedia of Gandhian Thoughts”

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• On an overcrowded planet where more species slip toward extinction every day, should one species have the right to multiply and consume at will, even as it nudges others to oblivion?

  Thomas French

  Nudge, Oblivion, Should

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