Species Quotes - Page 14

• 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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• 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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• In the human species at all events there is a great diversity of pleasures. The same things delight some men and annoy others, and things painful and disgusting to some are pleasant and attractive to others.

  Aristotle

  Men, Diversity, Events

  Aristotle (1934). “The Nicomachean ethics”

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• For me the protection of Planet Earth, the survival of all species and the sustainability of our ecosystems is more than a mission. It is my religion and my dharma.

  Rajendra K. Pachauri

  Ecosystems, Survival, Earth

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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 shark is the apex predator in the sea. Sharks have molded evolution for 450 million years. All fish species that are prey to the sharks have had their behavior, their speed, their camouflage, their defense mechanisms molded by the shark.

  Paul Watson

  Sharks, Years, Sea

  "Sea Shepherd: How We Sank the Japanese Whaling Fleet". Interview with Deborah Bassett, www.theecologist.org. April 21, 2011.

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• Species evolve to meet the environment. An intelligent species changes the environment to suit itself. As soon as a species becomes intelligent, it should stop evolving.

  Larry Niven

  Intelligent, Suits, Environment

  Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle (1991). “The Mote in God's Eye”, p.31, Simon and Schuster

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• I believe all sin, love, glory are this: when you slide down the knotted sheets, escaping from Gestapo headquarters, and she hugs you, there, suspended, and she whispers that she's always dreamed of you. The rest is just sex, copulation, the perpetuation of the vile species.

  Umberto Eco

  Sex, Believe, Escaping

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• All phenomena of which we are aware take place in our own minds, and therefore the only thing we have to look at is the mind; which is a more constant quantity over all the species of humanity than is generally supposed.

  Aleister Crowley

  Humanity, Mind, Looks

  Aleister Crowley (2014). “Eight Lectures on Yoga”, p.2, Lulu Press, Inc

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• The facts of variability, of the struggle for existence, of adaptation to conditions, were notorious enough; but none of us had suspected that the road to the heart of the species problem lay through them, until Darwin and Wallace dispelled the darkness.

  Thomas Huxley

  Struggle, Heart, Darkness

  Leonard Huxley, Thomas Henry Huxley (2011). “Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley”, p.246, Cambridge University Press

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• Elohim was, in logical terminology, the genus of which ghosts, Chemosh, Dagon, Baal, and Jahveh were species. The Israelite believed Jahveh to be immeasurably superior to all other kinds of Elohim. The inscription on the Moabite stone shows that King Mesa held Chemosh to be, as unquestionably, the superior of Jahveh.

  Thomas Huxley

  Kings, Stones, Elohim

  Thomas Henry Huxley (1892). “Essays Upon Some Controverted Questions”

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• In a fragile environment, we need to be aware of ourselves as members of a uniquely powerful species living among other species who are quite as interesting as we are but vulnerable to us because we are cleverer in more destructive ways.

  Andrew Motion

  Powerful, Interesting, Needs

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• Man is an individual. The animals, plants and minerals are divided into species. They are not individualized in the same sense that man is.

  Max Heindel

  Animal, Men, Individual

  Max Heindel (1920). “The Rosicrucian Cosmo-conception: Or, Mystic Christianity ; an Elementary Treatise Upon Man's Past Evolution, Present Constitution and Future Development”, p.71, Lulu.com

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• Indeed, the whole human species is endangered, by nuclear weapons or by other means of wholesale destruction which further advances in science are likely to produce.

  Joseph Rotblat

  Mean, Nuclear, Weapons

  Joseph Rotblat, Daisaku Ikeda (2007). “A Quest for Global Peace: Rotblat and Ikeda on War, Ethics and the Nuclear Threat”, p.134, I.B.Tauris

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• Human can surprise you sometimes. An unpredictable species, Homo sapiens

  Katherine Applegate

  Sometimes, Surprise, Unpredictable

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• We suffered a terrible blow on 11 September 2001. We responded with fear and anger. A fight-or-flight response is adaptive in any species. For us, given our power, fight was the only response we could imagine.

  Yochai Benkler

  Fighting, Blow, September

  "Manning and Snowden light path for the US to return to its better self" by Yochai Benkler, www.theguardian.com. July 26, 2013.

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• Human beings are remarkably resilient. When you think about it, our species has been teetering upon the edge of the existential cliff since Hiroshima. In short, we endure.

  Rick Yancey

  Thinking, Hiroshima And Nagasaki, Cliffs

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• We need to take a leaf out of natures book. Any species that clones itself will eventually be attacked by a parasite, leading to an inevitable population crash.

  Daniel Suarez

  Book, Population, Needs

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• He who is unconscious of the ties which connect him with every individual of his species feels no obligation to make sacrifices for their welfare or happiness.

  Benjamin Robbins Curtis

  Sacrifice, Ties, Welfare

  Benjamin Robbins Curtis, George Ticknor Curtis (1879). “A Memoir of Benjamin Robbins Curtis, LL. D.: Professional and miscellaneous writings”, Boston : Little, Brown,

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• One of the basic steps in saving a threatened species is to learn more about it: its diet, its mating and reproductive processes, its range patterns, its social behavior.

  Dian Fossey

  Social Behavior, Saving, Patterns

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• My favorite term for a new kind of performance is "security theater." In this genre, we watch as ritualized inspections and patdowns create the illusion of security. It's a form that has become common since 9/11, and even the government agencies that participate in this activity acknowledge,off the record, that it is indeed a species of theater.

  David Byrne

  Agency, Government, Watches

  David Byrne (2017). “How Music Works”, p.76, Three Rivers Press

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• The Human is the most insane species

  Hubert Reeves

  Insane, Humans

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• I feel overawed by quantity where counting no longer makes sense. By unrepeatability within such a quantity. By creatures of nature gathered in herds, droves, species, in which each individual, while subservient to the mass, retains some distinguishing features. A crowd of people, birds, insects, or leaves is a mysterious assemblage of variants of certain prototype. A riddle of nature's abhorrence of exact repetition or inability to produce it. Just as the human hand cannot repeat its own gesture, I invoke this disturbing law, switching my own immobile herds into that rhythm.

  Magdalena Abakanowicz

  Hands, Law, People

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• Somewhere close I knew spear-nosed bats flew through the tree crowns in search of fruit, palm vipers coiled in ambush in the roots of orchids, jaguars walked the river's edge; around them eight hundred species of trees stood, more than are native to all of North America; and a thousand species of butterflies, 6 percent of the entire world fauna, waited for the dawn.

  E. O. Wilson

  Butterfly, Eight, Orchids

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