Extinction Quotes - Page 9

• 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.

  Murray Bookchin

  Nature, Persistence, Long

  "Toward an Ecological Society". Book by Murray Bookchin, 1980.

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• 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

  Dream, Thinking, Vegetables

  Fernando Pessoa (2010). “The Book of Disquiet”, p.50, Profile Books

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• The old ways are dead. And you need people around you who concur. That means hanging out more with the creative people, the freaks, the real visionaries, than you're already doing. Thinking more about what their needs are, and responding accordingly. Avoid the dullards; avoid the folk who play it safe. They can't help you anymore. Their stability model no longer offers that much stability. They are extinct, they are extinction.

  Hugh Jackman

  Real, Mean, Thinking

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• 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.

  Richard Dawkins

  Science, Wildlife, Vices

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• 'Extinction' issue. Save the species for whom??? Humans' convenience, of course! Individuals of the species are snatched from their homes/family/habitat/held in captivity/forced to mate at great physical/ spiritual pain. When the right numbers are reached, their holocaust starts all over again! Another merry-go-round/ bu$ine$$ a$ u$ual!!! Protectionists/welfarists find it a profitable issue: no controversy/ easy donations! I'd rather see an entire species extinct than in the hands of the humans!

  Adela Popescu

  Spiritual, Pain, Home

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• 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

  Ideas, Choices, Leader

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• Reason's biological function is to preserve and promote life and to postpone its extinction as long as possible. Thinking and acting are not contrary to nature; they are, rather, the foremost features of man's nature. The most appropriate description of man as differentiated from nonhuman beings is: a being purposively struggling against the forces adverse to his life.

  Ludwig von Mises

  Struggle, Men, Thinking

  Ludwig Von Mises (1963). “Human action: a treatise on economics”

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• The biggest bursts of speciation that we know about in the history of the earth are soon after great cataclysms, like the extinction of the dinosaurs, which create new opportunities, and all sorts of new forms spring up... So, quite often, the reasons for creativity depend on accidents or disasters that prevent the normal habits being carried out.

  Rupert Sheldrake

  Spring, Creativity, Opportunity

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• All this I bear, for, what I seek, I know: Peace, peace is what I seek, and public calm: Endless extinction of unhappy hates.

  Matthew Arnold

  Peace, Hate, Unhappy

  Matthew Arnold (2013). “Delphi Complete Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold (Illustrated)”, p.325, Delphi Classics

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• 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

  Buddhism, Suffering, Enlightenment

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• If global extinction is to be avoided, woman must unite and come to terms with their destiny.

  Frederick Lenz

  Women, Destiny, Enlightenment

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• It is essential to release humanity from the false fixations of yesterday which seem now to bind it to a rationale of action leading only to extinction.

  R. Buckminster Fuller

  Inspirational, Yesterday, Humanity

  R. Buckminster Fuller “Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking”, Estate of R. Buckminster Fuller

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• 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

  Running, Pandas, Paper

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• One thing you cannot know: The sudden extinction of every alternative, The unexpected crash of the iron cataract. You do not know what hope is, until you have lost it. You only know what it is not to hope: You do not know what it is to have hope taken from you Or to fling it away, to join the legion of the hopeless Unrecognized by other men, though sometimes by each other.

  T. S. Eliot

  Hope, Taken, Men

  T.S. Eliot (2011). “The Complete Poems and Plays of T. S. Eliot”, p.290, Faber & Faber

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• For all the sublimity of art, physics, music, mathematics, and other manifestations of human genius, everything depends on the mundane, frustrating, often debased vocation known as politics (and its most exacting subspecialty - statecraft). Because if we don't get politics right, everything else risks extinction.

  Charles Krauthammer

  Art, Risk, Genius

  "Are We Alone in the Universe?". jewishworldreview.com. December 30, 2011.

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• In view of the fading animals the proliferation of sewers and fears the sea clogging, the air nearing extinction we should be kind, we should take warning, we should forgive each other Instead we are opposite, we touch as though attacking, the gifts we bring even in good faith maybe warp in our hands to implements, to manoeuvres

  Margaret Atwood

  Animal, Air, Views

  Margaret Atwood (1987). “Selected Poems: 1965-1975”, p.161, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• 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

  Heart, Men, Two

  The Nation, August 31, 1927.

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• 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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