Extinction Quotes by Don DeLillo, Marco Pantani, Peter Diamandis, George Monbiot, Noam Chomsky, David Attenborough and many others.
There is good reason to believe that we have already entered the Sixth Extinction, a period of destruction of species on a massive scale, comparable to the Fifth Extinction 65 million years ago, when three-quarters of the species on earth were destroyed, apparently by a huge asteroid.
China cares about its reputation and doesn’t want to be known as the nation whose preferences drove the extinction of elephants.
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.
Amidst the vicissitudes of the earth’s surface, species cannot be immortal, but must perish, one after another, like the individuals which compose them. There is no possibility of escaping from this conclusion.
What is your personal carrying capacity for grief, rage, despair? We are living in a period of mass extinction. The numbers stand at 200 species a day. That’s 73,000 a year. This culture is oblivious to their passing, feels entitled to their every last niche, and there is no roll call on the nightly news.
The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment.
The buffaloes are gone.
And those who saw the buffaloes are gone.
And those who saw the buffaloes are gone.
We are killing life on Earth, we’re in the sixth mass extinction event and it’s possible that human beings will go extinct. We’re in a culture that doesn’t want you to think about that.
We’ll lose more species of plants and animals between 2000 and 2065 than we’ve lost in the last 65 million years. If we don’t find answers to these problems, we’re gonna be victims of this extinction event that we’re at fault for.
As long as a branch of science offers an abundance of problems, so long it is alive; a lack of problems foreshadows extinction or the cessation of independent development.
The short-lived self, teetering on the edge of extinction, is the only thing that can ever really matter.
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.
Hundreds of species are facing extinction due to human impacts on the environment.
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.
We are in the midst of the 6th largest extinction event in the history of the plant and the first caused by human action.
An established company which, in an age demanding innovation, is not able to innovation, is doomed to decline and extinction.
Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. … Everything science has taught me-and continues to teach me-strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death. Nothing disappears without a trace.
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.
To follow art for the sake of being a great man, and therefore to cast about continually for some means of achieving position or attracting admiration, is the surest way of ending in total extinction.
Given the incredible power of these new technologies, shouldn’t we be asking how we can best coexist with them? And if our own extinction is a likely, or even possible, outcome of our technological development, shouldn’t we proceed with great caution?
With ‘Extinction Machine,’ I wanted to start some conversations about whether we’re alone in the universe and what that might mean.
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.
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.
No matter what we call it, poison is still poison, death is still death, and industrial civilization is still causing the greatest mass extinction in the history of the planet.
Life is a copiously branching bush, continually pruned by the grim reaper of extinction, not a ladder of predictable progress.
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.
Cheetah genes cooperate with cheetah genes but not with camel genes, and vice versa. This is not because cheetah genes, even in the most poetic sense, see any virtue in the preservation of the cheetah species. They are not working to save the cheetah from extinction like some molecular World Wildlife Fund.
The technical definition of the Holocene has to do with the extinction of a snail species in Sicily.
The future of humanity is going to bifurcate in two directions: Either it’s going to become multiplanetary, or it’s going to remain confined to one planet and eventually there’s going to be an extinction event.
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.
We’re not just being dramatic talking about a human extinction – that’s the pathway we’re on. We have to look at the bigger picture. If your child had cancer and it was unlikely they were going to survive, you’d do everything in your power to fight it.
Man is an over-complicated organism. If he is doomed to extinction he will die out for want of simplicity.
Transcendence is the only real alternative to extinction. This is serious. This may be the ultimate final exam.
It’s a fair guess that at the rate we’re destroying habitat, especially but not exclusively in the tropics, we’re pushing to extinction about one species every hour. That doesn’t count the species whose populations are being reduced so greatly that diversity within the population is essentially gone.
Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people. Those who have known freedom, and then lost it, have never known it again.
We have no ethical obligation to preserve the different breeds of livestock produced through selective breeding One generation and out. We have no problems with the extinction of domestic animals. They are creations of human selective breeding.
Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.
All life pulsates in time to the Earth and our artificial fields cause abnormal reactions in all organisms… Increasing electropollution could set in motion irreversible changes leading to our extinction.
If mankind is to escape its programmed self-extinction the God who saves us will not descend from the machine: he will rise up again in the human soul.
America faces a fundamental choice: either the blessings of liberty or the servitude of liberalism. In the political struggle for survival, one or the other is headed for extinction.
I think that people get outraged over things. I think what we really need is a kind of borderline extinction level event to get people back to caring about what really matters.
Mass extinctions may not threaten distant futures, but they are decidedly unpleasant for species caught up in the throes of their power.
During cycles long anterior to the creation of the human race, and while the surface of the globe was passing from one condition to another, whole races of animals-each group adapted to the physical conditions in which they lived-were successively created and exterminated.
Land bridges were everywhere during the extinction, many species were spreading, and there were many diseases.
We have no problem with the extinction of domestic animals.
Many troubled Midwestern towns are grasping for ways to fend off decline and, in some cases, extinction.
Protecting eagles from the threat of extinction is a conservation success story that we must prudently safeguard for future generations to come.
What I would say is that in its first iteration, Extinction Rebellion is really about democracy, by calling in for these new democratic forms for people to have their power. And frankly, in many countries of the world, democracy is in just absolute shambles.
This fundamental subject of Natural Selection will be treated at some length in the fourth chapter; and we shall then see how Natural Selection almost inevitably causes much Extinction of the less improved forms of life and induces what I have called Divergence of Character.
Evolution crawls to imperfection. It ends in extinction.
I did not set out to explain the extinction of the dinosaurs. I’m a particle physicist, and I was actually thinking about dark matter along with some collaborators.
Humans regard animals as worthy of protection only when they are on the verge of extinction.
Extinction catches Man by surprise because no one can even imagine that such a catastrophe can happen to an intelligent species.
To drive to extinction something He has created is wrong. He has a purpose for everything… We Christians have a responsibility to take the lead in caring for the earth.
The government of the United States is a device for maintaining in perpetuity the rights of the people, with the ultimate extinction of all privileged classes.
A species may eat a particular bacterium, phytoplankton, smaller fish, or plant in an area. Lacking a predator, these species/populations will overgrow and alter the area’s biology, overwhelming and driving to extinction dozens or hundreds or thousands of other local species.
One can live with the thought of one’s own death. It is the thought of the death of the words and books that is terrifying for that is the deeper extinction.
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.
For thousands of years it has been understood that, just as civilizations have to come to an end, there can even be times of global extinctions. But always there are people who know how to gather the essence of life and hold it safely, protect it and nurture it until the next seeding.
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.
Most of them are doomed to rapid extinction, but a few may make evolutionary inventions, such as physiological, ecological, or behavioral innovations that give these species improved competitive potential.
As long as hierarchy persists, as long as domination organises humanity around a system of elites, the project of dominating nature will continue to exist and inevitably lead our planet to ecological extinction.
Both climate change and extinction are results of our tyranny over the nonhuman world and our domination of, and exploitation of, whole categories of each other – and those, in turn, are clearly linked to agriculture, the cattle-industrial complex, capitalism.
That last day does not bring extinction to us, but change of place.
[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.
One of the many things I do not understand about Americans is this: what is it like to be a citizen of a superpower, to maintain democratically the means of planetary extinction. I wonder how this contributes to the dreamlife of America, a dreamlife that is so deep and troubled.
What I really wanted was to travel and see all the different animals that were on the verge of extinction.
There’s a fundamental difference, if you sort of look into the future, between a humanity that is a space-faring civilization, that’s out there exploring the stars…compared with one where we are forever confined to Earth until some eventual extinction event.
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.
Human extinction in our children‘s lifetime, it should be your top news item every single day, what’s happening, you should be holding politicians to account.
The density of human population combined with the development of powerful and largely unconstrained technology has given us the problems of the anthropocene and the serious possibility of self-caused extinction.
The extinction of Homo Sapiens would mean survival for millions, if not billions, of Earth-dwelling species. Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on Earth – social and environmental.
There’s no question that the gay movement would not be as far along as it is without AIDS. But how can there be any other issue in the face of death, possible extinction?
So why don’t we make ourselves the last generation on earth? If we would all agree to have ourselves sterilized then no sacrifices would be required – we could party our way into extinction!
‘Man is an endangered species,’ announces one of the titles at the beginning of the sci-fi lump ‘Battlefield Earth.’ And after about 20 minutes of this amateurish picture, extinction doesn’t seem like such a bad idea.
Once again, stock markets have been threatened with extinction for almost 75 years, and I have found that stock markets are harder to kill than roaches.
The choice, however, is as clear now for nations as it was once for the individual: peace or extinction.
There is no place in nature for extinction.
For my own part, I do not want the freedom of India if it means extinction of English or the disappearance of Englishmen.
There is a one-in-300 chance that Earth will be struck on March 16, 2880, by an asteroid large enough to destroy civilization and possibly cause the extinction of the human race. But, on the bright side, Prince could re-release his hit song with the new refrain ‘We’re gonna party like its twenty-eight seventy-nine.’
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.
We advocate biodiversity for biodiversity’s sake. It may take our extinction to set things straight.
It’s haunting to realize that half of the languages of the world are teetering on the brink of extinction.