Extinction Quotes - Page 5

• Many of us, utterly overcome by Tamas, the dark and heavy demon of inertia, are saying nowadays that it is impossible, that India is decayed, bloodless and lifeless, too weak ever to recover; that our race is doomed to extinction. It is a foolish and idle saying. No man or nation need be weak unless he chooses, no man or nation need perish unless he deliberately chooses extinction.

  Sri Aurobindo

  Dark, Men, Race

  "Bhawani Mandir (1905)". "India's Rebirth : A Selection from Sri Aurobindo's Writings, Talks and Speeches", 3rd edition. Book by Sri Aurobindo, 2000.

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• Almost by definition, secularism cannot be a future: it's a present-tense culture that over time disconnects a society from cross-generational purpose. Which is why there are no examples of sustained atheist civilizations. "Atheistic humanism" became inhumanism in the hands of the Fascists and Communists and, in its less malign form in today's European Union, a kind of dehumamism in which a present-tense culture amuses itself to extinction. Post-Christian European culture is already post-cultural and, with its surging Muslim populations, will soon be post-European.

  Mark Steyn

  Christian, Atheist, Hands

  "America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It". Book by Mark Steyn, 2006.

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• Not for the first time Richard reflected that this age's vaunted 'communications industry' had chiefly provided people and nations with the means of frightening to death and simultaneously boring to extinction themselves and each other.

  Fritz Leiber

  Communication, Mean, People

  Fritz Leiber (2014). “The Wanderer”, p.160, Open Road Media

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• In the long term, it is desirable that the human race, faced with the prospect of extinction on Earth, should prepare an escape route for itself to another inhabitable planet.

  Paul Johnson

  Race, Long, Earth

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• Therefore, this is a question of whether we, humans, can change our culture and begin to truly care for all Creation, nurture all Life and thereby avert our own extinction. As such, this is a deeply spiritual issue and we can begin to act today, regardless of age. But the good news is that this is not a question of whether we will change our culture, but a question of when.

  Shailesh Rao

  Spiritual, Issues, Growth

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• If we drive our fellow species to extinction, we will leave a far more desolate planet for our descendants than the world we inherited from our elders.

  James Hansen

  Nature, Climate, World

  "Coal-fired power stations are death factories. Close them". www.theguardian.com. February 15, 2009.

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• Climate change is not a major issue because it will cause sea level rises or temperature increases, since we know how to live at higher elevations and regulate the temperature within our homes. It is a major issue because ecosystems are finding it difficult to adapt to the rapidity of the climate and environmental changes and are dying off, thereby accelerating the species extinction that is already underway due to our consumption habits.

  Shailesh Rao

  Nature, Home, Sea

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• Genocide, the physical extinction of a people, is universally condemned, but ethnocide, the destruction of people's way of life, is not only not condemned, it's universally celebrated as part of a development strategy.

  Wade Davis

  Motivation, Inspiration, People

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• And I have lived since - as you have - in a period of cold war, during which we have ensured by our achievements in the science and technology of destruction that a third act in this tragedy of war will result in the peace of extinction.

  Lester B. Pearson

  War, Technology, Achievement

  Lester B. Pearson (1964). “The Four Faces of Peace and the International Outlook: Statements”, McClelland and Stewart

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• But when we are following the light, even its extinction is a guide.

  George MacDonald

  Light, Guides, Following

  George MacDonald (2015). “Delphi Complete Works of George MacDonald (Illustrated)”, p.7896, Delphi Classics

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• Its haunting to realize that half of the languages of the world are teetering on the brink of extinction.

  Wade Davis

  Haunting, Half, World

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• What is the extinction of a condor to a child who has never seen a wren?

  Robert Pyle

  Children, Wrens

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• The choice, however, is as clear now for nations as it was once for the individual: peace or extinction.

  Lester B. Pearson

  Peace, Choices, Individual

  Lester B. Pearson (1964). “The Four Faces of Peace and the International Outlook: Statements”, McClelland and Stewart

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• I remain fearless of airplanes after 9/11. But during a trip to Los Angeles on a Boeing 767, I couldn't keep my mind from drifting: What's the largest piece of this airplane that could crash into the World Trade Center, explode out the other side, and survive intact? The landing gear? My computer battery? My belt buckle? My wedding ring?

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Airplane, Fearless, Mind

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• When you're a hammer (as the saying goes), all your problems look like nails. If you're a meteorite expert pondering the sudden extinction of boatloads of species, you'll want to say an impact did it. If you're an igneous petrologist, volcanoes did it. If you're into spaceborne bioclouds, an interstellar virus did it. If you're a hypernova expert, gamma rays did it.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Impact, Volcanoes, Rays

  Neil deGrasse Tyson (2007). “Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries”, p.281, W. W. Norton & Company

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• We're [humans] running great risks of doing things that will not be good for us. The cost can be very high indeed if we reach the point where we can't adapt to our own increasingly rapid adaptations. We run the risk of early extinction. So this certainly isn't a triumphalist story, but it is trying to get at what, in the very long run, leads to the amazing creatures that we are.

  Robert Neelly Bellah

  Running, Long, Risk

  Source: blogs.ssrc.org

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• The chunks of comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 were so large, and were moving so fast, that each hit Jupiter with at least the equivalent energy of the dinosaur-killing collision between Earth and an asteroid 65 million years ago. Whatever damage Jupiter sustained, one thing is for sure: it's got no dinosaurs left.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Moving, Years, Energy

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• As many glaciers are melting and icy tundras are decaying, there's an unprecedented amount of woolly mammoth material that's becoming dislodged from the ice. Not just mammoth, but all kinds of fossils from the past. What occurred to me was, had anyone tried to pinpoint the first case of human-induced extinction? What was the first time we as species pushed another one to oblivion? I would argue that's probably going to be one of the defining moral problems of the century, human-induced extinction. And I really wanted to know, when did we first cross that barrier?

  Dario Robleto

  Past, Ice, Becoming

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• We can't say that when x happens we get a mass extinction. To the extent we understand mass extinction, one has been caused by glaciation event, one has been caused by a massive climate change, and one has been caused by an asteroid. These events turn out to have no precedent.

  Elizabeth Kolbert

  Mass Extinction, Climate, Events

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• Science devises ever bloodier means of war until humanity's powers of destruction overcome our powers of creation and our civilisation drives itself to extinction.

  David Mitchell

  War, Mean, Humanity

  David Mitchell (2012). “Cloud Atlas (Enhanced Movie Tie-in Edition): A Novel”, p.443, Random House Group

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• In this twenty-first century, there's no one like Sharona Muir who can write, in bright accurate language, animals real or imaginary in an updated bestiary that riffs on evolution, extinction, and what it means to be human among other species. We need this view, and you'll be right there with her on every page of Invisible Beasts.

  John Felstiner

  Real, Mean, Writing

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• [On women:] We are all yeses. We are worthy enough, we passed inspection, we survived the great fetal oocyte extinctions. In that sense, at least - call it a mechanospiritual sense - we are meant to be. We are good eggs, every one of us.

  Natalie Angier

  Women, Eggs, Enough

  Natalie Angier (1999). “Woman: An Intimate Geography”, p.30, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• When the veil of fiction was rent, man shuddered before "Nature, red in tooth and claw." Nature had always been that and always will be, and the hands of man, even when he fashions and defends the noblest civilization, must forever be bloody hands, for this is a world in which only the strong and resolute nations survive, while the weak, especially the morally weak, who babble about brotherhood and peace, are biologically degenerate and doomed to extinction.

  Revilo P. Oliver

  Fashion, Strong, Men

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• We have restricted humans from giving 'free' food to bears and dolphins because we know that such feeding would make them dependent and lead to their extinction. But when it comes to our own species, we have difficulty seeing the connection between short-term kindness and long-term cruelty; we give women money to have more children, making them more dependent with each child and discouraging them from developing the tools to fend for themselves. The real discrimination against women, then, is 'free feeding'.

  Warren Farrell

  Children, Kindness, Real

  Warren Farrell (1993). “The Myth of Male Power: Why Men Are the Disposable Sex”

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• I used to go to church. I even went through a rather intense religious period when I was sixteen. But the idea of an everlasting life -- a never-ending banquet, as a stupid visiting minister to our church once appallingly described it -- filled me with a greater terror than the concept of extinction.

  Louis Auchincloss

  Religious, Stupid, Ideas

  Louis Auchincloss (2004). “East Side Story: A Novel”, p.93, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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