Extinction Quotes - Page 8

• The whole earth, perpetually steeped in blood, is nothing but an immense altar on which every living thing must be sacrificed without end, without restraint, without respite until the consummation of the world, the extinction of evil, the death of death.

  Joseph de Maistre

  Life, Death, Sacrifice

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• No one knows the diversity in the world, not even to the nearest order of magnitude. ... We don't know for sure how many species there are, where they can be found or how fast they're disappearing. It's like having astronomy without knowing where the stars are.

  E. O. Wilson

  Stars, Order, Knowing

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• You are too much concerned with past and future. It is all due to your longing to continue, to protect yourself against extinction. And as you want to continue, you want others to keep you company, hence your concern with their survival. But what you call survival is but the survival of a dream.

  Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

  Dream, Future, Past

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• The buffaloes are gone.
  And those who saw the buffaloes are gone.

  Carl Sandburg

  Gone, Saws, Abandonment

  Carl Sandburg (2003). “The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg”, p.256, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• I wish all men to be free. I wish the material prosperity of the already free which I feel sure the extinction of slavery would bring.

  Abraham Lincoln

  Men, Wish, Slavery

  Abraham Lincoln (2008). “The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln”, p.41, Wildside Press LLC

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• It's possible that we'll screw up the climate so badly that most of us will die and a few breeding pairs will remain somewhere in the arctic. What's more likely is that we'll continue remaking the planet, driving many species to extinction, killing millions of people through the indirect effects of climate change, making life even harder for the poor and powerless than it is now, and making it a little more difficult for the global middle class to live the lives to which they have become accustomed - in other words, business as usual, only worse.

  Dale Jamieson

  Class, People, Screw Ups

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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• The diminution of public virtue is usually attended with that of public happiness, and the public liberty will not long survive the total extinction of morals.

  Samuel Adams

  Long, Liberty, Moral

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• For my own part, I do not want the freedom of India if it means extinction of English or the disappearance of Englishmen.

  Mahatma Gandhi

  Mean, India, Want

  Mahatma Gandhi (1984). “The Quintessence of Gandhi in His Own Words”

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• I've accepted the fact that there's a beginning and end to everything. All species are born, evolve, and then die off. We're going through the 6th great extinction and the large mammals are going first and, you know what - we're large mammals!

  Yvon Chouinard

  Firsts, Facts, Beginnings And Ends

  "Don of the Dirtbags: An Interview with Yvon Chouinard". The Vertical Interview, theusualmontauk.com. October 22, 2016.

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• Even very smart people can try to shoehorn new information that just doesn't fit into an existing paradigm.For a long time the story that we've been telling ourselves is that humans are just another animal. We evolved from other animals and our place in the universe isn't particularly special. What I'm trying to convey in my book [The Sixth Extinction] is that we are unusual.

  Elizabeth Kolbert

  Smart, Book, Animal

  "Pulitzer Winner Elizabeth Kolbert on Mass Extinctions - and Our Own Eventual One". Interview with Benjy Hansen-Bundy, www.motherjones.com. February 4, 2014.

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• Looking at everything, I started to feel nauseous, as if the seventies had taken refuge here against extinction and were preparing to take over the world.

  Kim Harrison

  Taken, World, Feels

  Kim Harrison (2010). “White Witch, Black Curse”, p.51, HarperCollins UK

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• Precise adaptation, with each part finely honed to perform a definite function in an optimal way, can only lead to blind alleys, dead ends, and extinction.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Way, Blind, Adaptation

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• The early Triassic was a period when the planet was recovering from the worst mass extinction it had ever known - that was the end Permian extinction, where climate change caused in part by mega-volcanic eruptions wiped out ninety-five percent of life on Earth. It took about ten or twenty million years for the planet's ecosystems to stabilize. During that time you saw a lot of weird, out-of-balance ecosystems where, for example, crocodile-like predators ripped the crap out of each other along the coasts.

  Annalee Newitz

  Mass Extinction, Years, Ecosystems

  Source: therumpus.net

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• Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams and push our paved roads through the last of the silence . . .

  Wallace Stegner

  Zoos, Dirty, Book

  Wallace Earle Stegner (2007). “The Selected Letters of Wallace Stegner”, Counterpoint

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• I am thinking of one woman and the rest is blotto. I say I am thinking of her, but the truth is I am dying a stellar death. I am lying there like a sick star waiting for the light to go out. Years ago I lay on this same bed and I waited and waited to be born. Nothing happened. Except that my mother, in her Lutheran rage, threw a bucket of water over me. My mother, poor imbecile that she was, thought I was lazy. She didn't know that I had gotten caught in the stellar drift, that I was being pulverized to a black extinction out there in the farthest rim of the universe.

  Henry Miller

  Mother, Stars, Lying

  Henry Miller (1966). “Tropic of Capricorn”

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• Why fight the 'natural' (oh, weaselly word!) order of things? Why? Because of this--one fine day, a purely predatory world shall consume itself. In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction.

  David Mitchell

  Fighting, Order, Soul

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• The strain of constant adaptation to so many fearful events and discoveries is already too much to bear with sanity; one has to keep pretending to slip successfully into the new mould; a time will come when the tailored and camouflaged mind breaks beneath the burden; the stick insect in our brains no longer cares to resemble a twig on the same habitual human tree in the mere hope that it may survive extinction.

  Janet Frame

  Discovery, Tree, Brain

  Janet Frame (2010). “Towards Another Summer”, p.105, Counterpoint Press

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• If I had a soul I sold it for pretty words If I had a body I used it up spurting my essence Allen Ginsberg warns you dont follow my path to extinction

  Allen Ginsberg

  Essence, Soul, Body

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• Global warming, along with the cutting and burning of forests and other critical habitats, is causing the loss of living species at a level comparable to the extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. That event was believed to have been caused by a giant asteroid. This time it is not an asteroid colliding with the Earth and wreaking havoc: it is us.

  Al Gore

  Inspirational, Cutting, Loss

  Al Gore (2006). “An Inconvenient Truth: The Planetary Emergency of Global Warming and What We Can Do About It”, p.10, Rodale

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• This is the whole point of technology. It creates an appetite for immortality on the one hand. It threatens universal extinction on the other. Technology is lust removed from nature. - Murray (WN 285)

  Don DeLillo

  Technology, Hands, Lust

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• Thanks to art, instead of seeing one world only, our own, we see that world multiply itself and we have at our disposal as many worlds as there are original artists, worlds more different one from the other than those which revolve in infinite space, worlds which, centuries after the extinction of the fire from which their light first emanated, whether it is called Rembrandt or Vermeer, send us still each one its special radiance.

  Marcel Proust

  Art, Space, Fire

  Marcel Proust, Joanna Kilmartin (1992). “In Search of Lost Time: Time regained. VI”, Random House (UK)

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• Scratch any fortune and you'll find blood only a generation or two back...child labor in mines or mills...Slavery. Drugs. Stock swindles. Wasting nature with clear-cuts, pollution, harvesting to extinction. Monopolies. Disease. War. Every fortune comes out of something unpleasant.

  Chuck Palahniuk

  Children, War, Cutting

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• It was the nature of his profession that his experience with death should be greater than for most and he said that while it was true that time heals bereavement it does so only at the cost of the slow extinction of those loved ones from the heart's memory which is the sole place of their abode then or now. Faces fade, voices dim. Seize them back, whispered the sepulturero. Speak with them. Call their names. Do this and do not let sorrow die for it is the sweetening of every gift.

  Cormac McCarthy

  Memories, Heart, Names

  Cormac McCarthy (2010). “The Crossing”, p.296, Pan Macmillan

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• Doctors, dressed up in one professional costume or another, have been in busy practice since the earliest records of every culture on earth. It is hard to think of a more dependable or enduring occupation, harder still to imagine any future events leading to its extinction.

  Lewis Thomas

  Thinking, Doctors, Practice

  Lewis Thomas (1996). “Fragile Species”, p.7, Simon and Schuster

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• The damage that climate change is causing and that will get worse if we fail to act goes beyond the hundreds of thousands of lives, homes and businesses lost, ecosystems destroyed, species driven to extinction, infrastructure smashed and people inconvenienced.

  David Suzuki

  Home, Ecosystems, People

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