Quotes About Extinction

#1. 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

#2. There are problems humans cannot solve, to wit: density dependent birth rates, loss of genetic diversity, the overturning of his population pyramid, traveling to the nearest star, and the extinction of Man.

Bill Gaede

#3. The human heart is not yet so corroded that it can read off the extinction of these two men without a shock to the very roots of its belief in justice and humanity.

Katherine Anne Porter

#4. If the worst comes true, and the paper book joins the papyrus scroll and parchment codex in extinction, we will miss, I predict, a number of things about it.

John Updike

#5. My happiest hours are those in which I think nothing, want nothing, when I do not even dream, but lose myself in some spurious vegetable torpor, moss growing on the surface of life. Without a trace of bitterness I savour my absurd awareness of being nothing, a mere foretaste of death and extinction.

Fernando Pessoa

#6. The extinction of the human race will come from its inability to EMOTIONALLY comprehend the exponential function.

Edward Teller

#7. Common man has at long last got himself so far out of gear with nature and his environment that he is beginning to see the shape of extinction, whether he recognizes it as such or not.

Philip Wylie

#8. We advocate biodiversity for biodiversity's sake. It may take our extinction to set things straight.

David Foreman

#9. Overpopulation in the United States will become THE single greatest issue facing Americans in the 21st century. We either solve it proactively or nature will solve it brutally for us via water shortages, energy crisis, air pollution, gridlock, species extinction and worse.

Frosty Wooldridge

#10. I have spent hours and hours watching elephants, and to come to understand what emotional creatures they are...it's not just a species facing extinction, it's massive individual suffering.

Mike Bond

#11. At its best, no art form is more thrilling than grand opera, yet none is at greater risk of following the dinosaurs down the cold road to extinction.

Terry Teachout

#12. In exactly the same way, ... scatter your body, your feeling, your perception, your predispositions, your discriminative consciousness, break them up, knock them down, cease to play with them, apply yourself to the destruction of craving for them. Verily, ... the extinction of craving is Nirvana.

Gautama Buddha

#13. To dismiss the current extinction wave on the grounds that extinctions are normal events is like ignoring a genocidal massacre on the grounds that every human is bound to die at some time anyway.

Jared Diamond

#14. We're seeing right now that a mass extinction can be caused by human beings.

Elizabeth Kolbert

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

Ezra Pound

#16. This will be the greatest discovery since the extinction of dinosaurs."
"Assuming dinosaurs did exist, that is," Derkein said.
Alex shook her head. "Couldn't just let me have this moment, could you?

Alecia Stone

#17. 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

#18. The ill-fated dodo. Slow, flightless and dangerously trusting, the dodo was driven to extinction just seventy years after first being spotted by European sailors on its island home of Mauritius.

Bill Bryson

#19. Freedom of religion is not enough; we need the extinction of it, because no one has turned to be a religious by their own choice.

M.F. Moonzajer

#20. Most evolving lineages, human or otherwise, when threatened with extinction, don't do anything special to avoid it.

George C. Williams

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

Joyce Carol Oates

#22. You live with the threat of my extinction. I live with it too.

Michael Cunningham

#23. Racism, pollution and the rest of it are themselves very close to extinction.

R. Buckminster Fuller

#24. Bravery is absence of contemplation and idiocy is the extinction of it.

M.F. Moonzajer

#25. It is a cosmic joke. Preoccupation with survival has set the stage for extinction.

John Steinbeck

#26. The tragedy of power like mine is that there is no way down. There can only be extinction. Dust to dust; rags to rags; fear to fear.

V.S. Naipaul

#27. So science alone cannot solve this problem [mass extinction of humans]. It's something that we can only tackle by bringing science together with culture, economics, and even politics.

Annalee Newitz

#28. one fine day, a purely predatory world shall consume itself. Yes, the Devil shall take the hindmost until the foremost is the hindmost. In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction. Is

David Mitchell

#29. Donald was verging on the sad realization that humanity had been thrown to the brink of extinction by insane men in positions of power following one another, each thinking the others knew where they were going.

Hugh Howey

#30. As long as we are a single-planet species, we are vulnerable to extinction by a planetwide catastrophe, natural or self-induced. Once we become a multiplanet species, our chances to live long and prosper will take a huge leap skyward.

David Grinspoon

#31. Extinction was a difficult concept for a 10-year-old.

Nell Newman

#32. We must admit that by approving multiculturalism in its current, misguided form, we are paving the road to White, Black, Indian and Asian genocide faster than the Sixth Mass Extinction.

Anita B. Sulser PhD

#33. 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

#34. His life was focused on each single day. For him each night meant a void, a grave, extinction. The capacity to lay oneself down to die at the end of every day, without thinking anything of it, was something he had not yet acquired.

Robert Musil

#35. If in your lifetime you watch a species go extinct, or plummet almost to the point of extinction, that is a sign that something really serious is going on.

Elizabeth Kolbert

#36. What appear to be depravity, injury, or extinction are merely traces of memory and experience obscuring the soul. These are merely shadows of the soul, never its substance. The soul itself is always pure and whole.

Ilchi Lee

#37. If there's been epidemic extinction and ecospace opens up, rats may be best placed to take advantage of that.

Elizabeth Kolbert

#38. An asteroid can literally destroy 80 or 90 percent of the species that are alive on Earth. These are big events. I mean, this is called extinction.

Rusty Schweickart

#39. A real hansom-cab took him from the station to Trinity College: the vehicle, it seemed, had been waiting there especially for him, desperately holding out against extinction till that moment, and then gladly dying out to join side whiskers and the Large Copper.

Vladimir Nabokov

#40. Mongols were "a race of people on the path to extinction, incapable of progress, doomed to be swallowed up by their neighbors.

Willard Sunderland

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

Leonardo DiCaprio

#42. Nature doesn't need people - people need nature; nature would survive the extinction of the human being and go on just fine, but human culture, human beings, cannot survive without nature.

Harrison Ford

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

George MacDonald

#44. Education without execution is extinction

Bo Sanchez

#45. How could being the entire cosmos and all of its wonder and all of its stages and cycles, and yet being that which is beyond them all, the invisible, be extinction? Extinction? The extinction of what, of whom? How can that which has never been be extinguished?

Frederick Lenz

#46. Priam and Achilles meet in the very twilight of their lives. Their extinction is certain and there will be no reward for behaving well, and yet, in the face of implacable fate and an indifferent universe, they mutually assert the highest ideals of their humanity.

Caroline Alexander

#47. It was highly possible that I saved that cookie from possible extinction. Ok, who was I kidding? When it came to cookie extinction, I was a world-ender.

Bradford Bates

#48. 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

#49. The extinction of all reality is a concept no resignation can encompass. Until annihilation comes. And all grand ideas are seen for what they are.

Cormac McCarthy

#50. All of humanity is in peril of extinction if each one of us does not dare, now and henceforth, always to tell only the truth, and all the truth, and to do so promptly -right now.

R. Buckminster Fuller

#51. As the colonial insects did to the other insects, we have pushed all other mammals to the margins, to extinction, or to servitude.

Jonathan Haidt

#52. Natural Selection almost inevitably causes much Extinction of the less improved forms of life and induces what I have called Divergence of Character.

Charles Darwin

#53. If we are to save humanity and the planet from the worst mass extinction of all time, worse even than that at the end of the Permian, we must stop at two degrees.

Mark Lynas

#54. 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

#55. Today, due to the massive Chinese population transfer, the nation of Tibet truly faces the threat of extinction, along with its unique cultural heritage of Buddhist spirituality.

Dalai Lama

#56. What man really fears is not so much extinction, but extinction with insignificance.

Ernest Becker

#57. The tyrannosaurus looked a little shamefaced - but only a little, for dinosaurs would rather drown in tar than admit they're wrong. That unfortunate attitude played a key role in their extinction.

Catherynne M Valente

#58. 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

#59. After all, if you have the majority of customers, then what you do becomes the standard. Your competitors have little choice but to follow. If you are the leader, then having a nonstandard infrastructure is a bad idea. Ultimately, it leads to extinction.

Douglas Gwyn

#60. It can be fairly argued that the highest priority for mankind is to save itself from extinction. However, it can also be argued th at a society that neglects its children and robs them of their human potential can extinguish itself without an external enemy.

Selma Fraiberg

#61. Humanity is creating an extinction event that will make every war ever fought a footnote to history. We belong to the only generation in history that can turn this around - we're one step away from greatness or the biggest disaster since the meteor wiped out the dinosaurs.

Louie Psihoyos

#62. There is no place in nature for extinction.

Lucretius

#63. Like us, those vanished warriors planted their standards in the sands of their own self-summoned extinction.

Steven Pressfield

#64. 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

#65. If our extinction proceeds slowly enough to allow a moment of horrified realization, the doers of the deed will likely be quite taken aback on realizing that they have actually destroyed the world. Therefore I suggest that if the Earth is destroyed, it will probably be by mistake.

Eliezer Yudkowsky

#66. 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

#67. 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

#68. Oh. Come on! I left my backpack on the bus. According to Darwin, you're a prime candidate for extinction. Too stupid to live!

Mimi Jean Pamfiloff

#69. We all have a stake - equally. Because if we do not save the environment and save the Earth, then whatever we do in civil rights or in a war against poverty will be of no meaning, because then we will have the equality of extinction and the brotherhood of the grave.

James Farmer

#70. Earth, earthriding your merry-go-roundtoward extinction,right to the rootsthickening the oceans like gravy,festering in your caves,you are becoming a latrine.

Anne Sexton

#71. Faced with our imminent extinction, Tom Laughlin believes, all assumptions are called into question.

Steven Pressfield

#72. A high jeopardy of extinction comes with territory. Islands are where species go to die.

David Quammen

#73. 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

#74. By a pair of herpetologists. It was titled Are We in the Midst of the Sixth Mass Extinction?

Elizabeth Kolbert

#75. We have no problem with the extinction of domestic animals.

Wayne Pacelle

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

Susan Sontag

#77. The fate of hundreds of thousands of species on this planet may be decided in the next decade. To slow the rush to extinction, we need to achieve real, substantive political power, and we need to get there fast.

Eban Goodstein

#78. One of the most jolting days of adulthood comes the first time you run out of toilet paper. Toilet paper, up until this point, always just existed. And now it's a finite resource, constantly in danger of extinction, that must be carefully tracked and monitored, like pandas?

Kelly Williams Brown

#79. It's haunting to realize that half of the languages of the world are teetering on the brink of extinction.

Wade Davis

#80. There could be no such experience if death means extinction or cessation. Death always means separation, and it does in Romans 6 as well.

Charles C. Ryrie

#81. 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

#82. Biological diversity is messy. It walks, it crawls, it swims, it swoops, it buzzes. But extinction is silent, and it has no voice other than our own.

Paul Hawken

#83. The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.

Robert Maynard Hutchins

#84. In the great debate that has raged for centuries about what, if anything, happens to you after death, be it heaven, hell, purgatory or extinction, one thing has never been in doubt - that you would at least know the answer when you were dead.

Douglas Adams

#85. Vaccines don't cause autism. Vaccines, instead, prevent disease. Vaccines have wiped out a score of formerly deadly childhood diseases. Vaccine skepticism has helped to bring some of those diseases back from near extinction.

Alex Pareene

#86. Allen: "One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly." Panic

Stewart Brand

#87. Besides, morality is not about whether the human race survives, but about what kind of survival it gets. We marry; guppies don't. We don't eat our young; they do. Yet neither species is in danger of extinction.

J. Budziszewski

#88. 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

#89. Truth be told, if Islam and the Sixth Mass Extinction continue on their path unhindered, chances are worlds will collide with high casualty rates...

Anita B. Sulser PhD

#90. A sign in the Hall of Biodiversity offers a quote from the Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich: IN PUSHING OTHER SPECIES TO EXTINCTION, HUMANITY IS BUSY SAWING OFF THE LIMB ON WHICH IT PERCHES.

Elizabeth Kolbert

#91. Life is a copiously branching bush, continually pruned by the grim reaper of extinction, not a ladder of predictable progress.

Stephen Jay Gould

#92. The new bill reads 'To: saving human race from total extinction - no charge.'

Douglas Adams

#93. What is the extinction of a condor to a child who has never seen a wren?

Robert Pyle

#94. Many troubled Midwestern towns are grasping for ways to fend off decline and, in some cases, extinction.

Stephen Kinzer

#95. I'm quite mad by nature, and it's my craziness that has saved me from extinction.

Marco Pantani

#96. If we don't watch out, the pleasure o be gained from the discriminating enjoyment of food will be lost. It may not be long before the art of fine cooking is viewed as the invention of a handful of snobs ... A whole aspect of living well, of civilization itself, is threatened with extinction.

Benoite Groult

#97. 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

#98. Now that we've entered the wave of extinction let's sing while we still can ... Quick, climb onto my back and cry wreck it wreck it like a frog in the grip of ecstatic amplexus

Lucia Perillo

#99. The destiny of all species is extinction as such, fortunately for them.

T.H. White

#100. I'm not saying we don't have our set of problems - climate crisis, species extinction, water and energy shortage - we surely do. [But] ultimately we knock them down.

Peter Diamandis