Extinction Quotes - Page 11

• No move towards the extinction of the passion between the sexes has taken place in the five or six thousand years that the world has existed.

  Thomas Malthus

  Sex, Moving, Taken

  Thomas Malthus (2015). “An Essay on the Principle of Population: Illustrated”, p.95, eKitap Projesi

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• Sometimes in the ignorance I feel the meaning Invincible invisible wisdom, And I commune with intuitive instinct With the force that made life be And since it made life be It is greater than life And since it let extinction be It is greater than extinction. I commune with feelings more than prayer

  Sun Ra

  Prayer, Ignorance, Feelings

  Sun Ra, Hartmut Geerken (2005). “The Immeasurable Equation: The Collected Poetry and Prose”, p.132, BoD – Books on Demand

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• Now they [the Powers] have started the aggression, and the extinction of our nation is imminent. If we just fold our arms and yield to them, I would have no face to see our ancestors after death. If we must perish, why not fight to the death?

  Empress Dowager Cixi

  Fighting, Yield, Why Not

  "The Last Empress: The She-Dragon of China". Book by Keith Laidler, p. 221, January 21, 2005.

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• The principles of my works... are the extinction of expression, permanent covering and contemplative tranquillity... My ideal is the completely dark picture, full of some overwhelming silence.

  Arnulf Rainer

  Dark, Expression, Silence

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• The characteristic human trait is not awareness but conformity, and the characteristic result is religious warfare. Other animals fight for territory or food; but, uniquely in the animal kingdom, human beings fight for their 'beliefs.' The reason is that beliefs guide behavior, which has evolutionary importance among human beings. But at a time when our behavior may well lead us to extinction, I see no reason to assume we have any awareness at all. We are stubborn, self-destructive conformists. Any other view of our species is just a self-congratulatory delusion.

  Michael Crichton

  Religious, Fighting, Animal

  Michael Crichton (1996). “The lost world”

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• The once rather old-fashioned science of paleontology finds itself in a maelstrom of excitement and controversy. Astrophysicists, atmospheric scientists, geochemists, geophysicists, and statisticians are all contributing to the extinction problem. And the general public is taking part through television talk shows, magazine cover stories, newspaper editorials, and even the occasional mention in gossip columns.

  David M. Raup

  Gossip, Television, Maelstrom

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• In the beginning, there were bacteria.... [A] nearly universal assumption is that all subsequent life descended from the original life form through a continuous chain of ancestor-descendant pairs. This assumption looks good because all living organisms share biochemical traits. It is conceivable, of course, that life originated more than once on the early earth but that all except one life form died out early, leaving a single lineage as the ancestor of life as we know it. If this did happen, it was the first important species extinction.

  David M. Raup

  Leaving, Important, Earth

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• As Hegel put it, only when it is dark does the owl of Minerva begin its flight. Only in extinction is the collector comprehend.

  Walter Benjamin

  Dark, Owl, Doe

  Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt (1968). “Illuminations”, Schocken Books Incorporated

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• Sharks are being driven to extinction because people want to eat their fins and their flesh.

  Barbara Block

  Sharks, People, Flesh

  "Barbara Block: Use apps to save the great white shark". Interview with Robin McKie, www.theguardian.com. November 17, 2012.

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• 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.

  Lisa Randall

  Dark, Thinking, Dinosaurs

  "Not My Job: Physics Professor Lisa Randall Gets Quizzed On Phys Ed". "Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me!" with Peter Sagal, www.npr.org. November 21, 2015.

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• The alternative to extinction is stagnation, and stagnation is seldom a good thing.

  Ian Tattersall

  Alternatives, Good Things, Stagnation

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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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• 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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• For if that last day does not occasion an entire extinction, but a change of abode only, what can be more desirable? And if it, on the other hand, destroys and absolutely puts an end to us, what can be preferable to having a deep sleep fall on us in the midst of the fatigues of life and, being thus overtaken, to sleep to eternity?

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Life, Change, Time

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• 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.

  Dale Jamieson

  Powerful, Technology, Self

  Source: www.3ammagazine.com

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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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• 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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• I do not think that the government, under the guise of some phony, alarmist, pseudo-scientific rhetoric, should attempt to control the evolution of consciousness. After all, if these things truly are consciousness-expanding, it doesn't take too much intelligence to realize that it is the absence of consciousness that is causing our flirtation with extinction and planetary disaster.

  Terence McKenna

  Thinking, Government, Too Much

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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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• 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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• 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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• Wherever wolves run free, indigenous cultures have revered them as symbols of loyalty, free will, fearlessness and unity. But wolves haven't had it easy in North America, where negative myths prevail. Fear-based stereotypes and use of public lands for cattle ranching have resulted in Mother Nature's dogs being aggressively persecuted to the point of near extinction.

  Zoe Helene

  Loyalty, Mother, Running

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• A society where the simple many obey the few seers can live; a society where all were seers could live even more fully. But a society where the mass is still simple and the seers are no longer attended to can achieve only superficiality, baseness, ugliness, and in the end extinction. On or back we must go: to stay here is death.

  C. S. Lewis

  Simple, Achieve, Ends

  C. S. Lewis (2003). “A Mind Awake: An Anthology of C. S. Lewis”, p.223, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• 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

  Play, Feelings, Perception

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• The church must acclimate to a changing world, or she will destine herself to irrelevance or even extinction. ...One of those dramatic changes in our environment is the shift from words to images. To do church in a way that is entirely text driven is the kiss of death.

  Erwin McManus

  Kissing, Irrelevance, Church

  Erwin Raphael McManus (2013). “An Unstoppable Force: Daring to Become the Church God Had in Mind”, p.23, David C Cook

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