Extinction Quotes

• In pushing other species to extinction, humanity is busy sawing off the limb on which it perches.

  Paul R. Ehrlich

  Humanity, Pushing, Busy

  Elizabeth Kolbert (2014). “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History”, p.268, A&C Black

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• Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.

  Carl Sagan

  Nature, Mass Extinction, Exception To The Rule

  Carl Sagan (2006). “The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God”, p.76, Penguin

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• In the 24 hours since this time yesterday, over 200,000 acres of rainforest have been destroyed in our world. Fully 13 million tons of toxic chemicals have been released into our environment. Over 45,000 people have died from starvation, 38,000 of them children. And more than 130 plant and animal species have been driven to extinction by the actions of humans. And all this just since yesterday.

  Thom Hartmann

  Children, Animal, Our World

  "The Last Hours Of Ancient Sunlight: Waking up to personal and global transformation". Book by Thom Hartmann, 1998.

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• The money to be made is clearly more important than the extinctions we cause, including our own.

  Guy R. McPherson

  Important, Causes, Made

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• We torture and kill two billion sentient living beings every week. 10,000 entire species are wiped out every year because of the actions of one, and we are now facing the sixth mass extinction in cosmological history. If any other organism did this, a biologist would consider them a virus.

  Philip Wollen

  Animal, Mass Extinction, Years

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• Our planet has not seen an extinction crisis as serious as the one in progress for 65 million years.

  David Suzuki

  Years, Environmental, Progress

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• People forget the good that zoos do. If it weren't for zoos, we would have so many species that would be extinct today.

  Betty White

  Zoos, People, Would Be

  Source: www.nbcnews.com

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

  George C. Williams

  Special, Lineage, Conservation

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• In the landscape of extinction, precision is next to godliness.

  Samuel Beckett

  Landscape, Next, Precision

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

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Life, Science, Progress

  Stephen Jay Gould (1990). “Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History”, p.35, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Death is not extinction. Neither the soul nor the body is extinguished or put out of existence.

  Oliver Lodge

  Soul, Body, Existence

  Sir Oliver Lodge, Raymond Lodge (Spirit) (1916). “Raymond Revised: A New Abbreviated Edition of "Raymond Or Life and Death" with an Additional Chapter”

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• That last day does not bring extinction to us, but change of place.

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Change, Death, Dying

  "Tusculanarum Disputationum". Book by Marcus Tullius Cicero (Book I, Chapter 49), translated, 45 BC.

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• 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.

  Ronald Reagan

  Freedom, People, Presidential

  Ronald Reagan, Michael Reagan (2016). “The Last Best Hope: The Greatest Speeches of Ronald Reagan”, p.7, Humanix Books

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• 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.

  Derrick Jensen

  Civilization, Mass Extinction, Matter

  Derrick Jensen (2012). “The Derrick Jensen Reader: Writings on Environmental Revolution”, p.87, Seven Stories Press

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• The extinctions ongoing worldwide promise to be at least as great as the mass extinction that occurred at the end of the age of dinosaurs.

  E. O. Wilson

  Mass Extinction, Promise, Age

  "Planet Of The Year: What on EARTH Are We Doing?" by Thomas A. Sancton, content.time.com. January 2, 1989.

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• During your lifetime, the people of our culture are going to figure out how to live sustainably on this planet--or they're not. Either way, it's certainly going to be extraordinary. If they figure out how to live sustainably here, then hum anity will be able to see something it can't see right now: a future that extends into the indefinite future. If they don't figure this out, then I'm afraid the human race is going to take its place among the species that we're driving into extinction here every day--as many as 200--every day

  Daniel Quinn

  Race, People, Culture

  Daniel Quinn (2011). “If They Give You Lined Paper, Write Sideways.”, p.169, Steerforth

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• There are plenty of problems in the world, many of them interconnected. But there is no problem which compares with this central, universal problem of saving the human race from extinction

  John Foster Dulles

  Race, World, Saving

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• It is even harder to realize that this present universe has evolved from an unspeakably unfamiliar early condition, and faces a future extinction of endless cold or intolerable heat. The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless.

  Steven Weinberg

  Future, Science, Faces

  The First Three Minutes epilogue (1977)

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• [Man] ... his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms; that no fire, no heroism, no intensity of thought and feeling can preserve an individual life beyond the grave; that all the labour of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system, and that the whole temple of Man's achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins.

  Bertrand Russell

  Inspiration, Science, Men

  Bertrand Russell (2015). “Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays”, p.46, Booklassic

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• Often extinctions in the ocean occur at the same time as those on land. Then again, the ice age extinctions lost many big animals, but not many sea faring ones.

  Robert T. Bakker

  Ocean, Hockey, Animal

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• Of the four billion life forms which have existed on this planet, three billion, nine hundred and sixty million are now extinct. We don't know why. Some by wanton extinction, some through natural catastrophe, some destroyed by meteorites and asteroids. In the light of these mass extinctions it really does seem unreasonable to suppose that Homo sapiens should be exempt. Our species will have been one of the shortest-lived of all, a mere blink, you may say, in the eye of time.

  P. D. James

  Eye, Mass Extinction, Light

  P. D. James (2010). “The Children of Men”, p.24, Vintage

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

  Ezra Pound

  Men, Simplicity, Simple Life

  1938 Guide to Kulcher, pt.3, section 5, ch.19.

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• EXTINCTION, n. The raw material out of which theology created the future state.

  Ambrose Bierce

  Sarcastic, Future, Raw Materials

  Ambrose Bierce (2016). “The Devil's Dictionary: The Devil World”, p.61, 谷月社

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• Extinction has only separated groups: it has by no means made them; for if every form which has ever lived on this earth were suddenly to reappear, though it would be quite impossible to give definitions by which each group could be distinguished from other groups, as all would blend together by steps as fine as those between the finest existing varieties, nevertheless a natural classification, or at least a natural arrangement, would be possible.

  Charles Darwin

  Mean, Science, Giving

  Charles Darwin (2016). “On the Origin of Species”, p.322, Zillmann Publishing

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• 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

  Suicide, America, Black

  June Jordan (1981). “Civil Wars”, p.48, Simon and Schuster

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