Species Quotes - Page 15

• Biodiversity can't be maintained by protecting a few species in a zoo, or by preserving greenbelts or national parks. To function properly, nature needs more room than that. It can maintain itself, however, without human expense, without zookeepers, park rangers, foresters or gene banks. All it needs is to be left alone.

  Donella Meadows

  Zoos, Needs, National Parks

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• We live in a world bathed in 5,000 times more energy than we consume as a species in the year, in the form of solar energy.

  Peter Diamandis

  Years, Energy, World

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• This influential, yet controversial idea requires that the mixture of species on Earth at any moment acts as a collective organism that continuously (yet unwittingly) tunes Earth's atmospheric composition and climate to promote the presence of life... But I'd bet there are some dead Martians and Venusians who advanced the same theory about their own planets a billion years ago.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Science, Ideas, Years

  Neil deGrasse Tyson (2007). “Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries”, p.210, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Ever since there have been people, there have been explorers, looking in places where other hadn't been before. Not everyone does it, but we are part of a species where some members of the species do, to the benefit of us all.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  People, Doe, Benefits

  "Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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• When you're a hammer (as the saying goes), all your problems look like nails. If you're a meteorite expert pondering the sudden extinction of boatloads of species, you'll want to say an impact did it. If you're an igneous petrologist, volcanoes did it. If you're into spaceborne bioclouds, an interstellar virus did it. If you're a hypernova expert, gamma rays did it.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Impact, Volcanoes, Rays

  Neil deGrasse Tyson (2007). “Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries”, p.281, W. W. Norton & Company

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• Something bad happened on both Mars with its dried-up watercourses and Venus with its runaway greenhouse effect. Could something bad happen on Earth too? Our species currently turns row upon row of environmental knobs, without much regard to long-term consequences.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Long, Environmental, Mars

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• For all we know, the aliens have already done this and unwittingly concluded that there was no intelligent life on Earth. They would now be looking elsewhere. A more humbling possibility would be if aliens had become aware of the technologically proficient species that now inhabits Earth, yet they had drawn the same conclusion.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Intelligent, Would Be, Done

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• I'd bet almost anything that life from another planet, if formed independently from life on Earth, would be more different from all species of Earth life than any two species of Earth life are from each other.

  Neil deGrasse Tyson

  Earth Life, Two, Different

  Neil deGrasse Tyson (2007). “Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries”, p.306, W. W. Norton & Company

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• The reason we form networks is because the benefits of a connected life outweigh the costs. It's to our advantage as individuals and a species to assemble ourselves in this fashion.

  Nicholas A. Christakis

  Fashion, Cost, Benefits

  "TED 2010 | Nicholas Christakis: Does This Social Network Make Me Look Fat?". Interview with Kim Zetter, www.wired.com. February 12, 2010.

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• There are a lot of obstacles in the way of our understanding animal intelligence - not the least being that we can't even agree whether nonhuman species are conscious. We accept that chimps and dolphins experience awareness; we like to think dogs and cats do. But what about mice and newts? What about a fly? Is anything going on there at all?

  Jeffrey Kluger

  Inspirational, Motivational, Dog

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• By preventing dangerous asteroid strikes, we can save millions of people, or even our entire species. And, as human beings, we can take responsibility for preserving this amazing evolutionary experiment of which we and all life on Earth are a part.

  Rusty Schweickart

  Responsibility, People, Earth

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• 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

  Mean, Alive, Earth

  "Asteroid". "NOVA scienceNOW" with Neil Degrasse Tyson, www.pbs.org. October 3, 2006.

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• The urgency to mate persists in all people as in all other mammals because of the evolutionary drive to continue the species, the inborn imperative for genes to reproduce and hormonal differences that evolved over millions of years.

  Lynn Margulis

  Years, Differences, People

  "A Woman's Worth: 1857 Letter Echoes Still; Some Basic Disputes Over Feminism Persist" by Patricia Cohen, www.nytimes.com. July 18, 1998.

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• The fewer species there are and the fewer species we know about, the fewer questions we even know to ask.

  Lynn Margulis

  Fewer, Knows, Asks

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• I was taught over and over again that the accumulation of random mutations led to evolutionary change - led to new species. I believed it until I looked for evidence.

  Lynn Margulis

  Mutation, Taught, Accumulation

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• The world has been close to war before - but now man, who has survived all previous threats to his existence, has taken into his mortal hands the power to exterminate the entire species some seven times over.

  John F. Kennedy

  War, Taken, Men

  Address of Senator John F. Kennedy accepting the Democratic Party Nomination for the Presidency of the United States at Memorial Coliseum in Los Angeles, California, www.jfklibrary.org. July 15, 1960.

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• Disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but at last it was complete.

  Charles Darwin

  Atheism, Lasts, Rate

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• That there is a continuous link from humans to gorillas, with the intermediate species merely long dead, is beyond the understanding of speciesists. Tie the label Homo sapiens even to a tiny piece of insensible embryonic tissue, and its life suddenly leaps to infinite, incomputable value.... Self-styled pro-lifers, and others that indulge in footling debates about exactly when in its development a foetus becomes human, exhibit the same discontinuous mentality. Human, to the discontinuous mind, is an absolutist concept. There can be no half measures. And from this flows much evil.

  Richard Dawkins

  Self, Indulge In, Ties

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• The two big mistakes were the belief in a sky god - that there's a man in the sky with 10 things he doesn't want you to do and you'll burn for a long time if you do them - and private property, which I think is at the core of our failure as a species. That's the source of my indignations, my dissatisfactions, however it comes out on the stage. I feel betrayed by the people I'm part of, these creatures, these magnificent creatures.

  George Carlin

  Mistake, Men, Thinking

  Las Vegas CityLife, August 09, 2007.

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• Woman is the gate of the devil, the road to iniquity, the sting of the scorpion, in a word, a dangerous species.

  St. Jerome

  Scary, Devil, Scorpions

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• We have seen that blood united to blood in the case of but remotely connected species of animals, kills; blood united to blood in the case of more closely allied species of animals does not kill. The physical organism of man survives when strange blood comes in contact with strange blood, ... but clairvoyant power perishes under the influence of this mixing of blood, or exogamy.

  Rudolf Steiner

  Animal, Men, Blood

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• The humanity and the humility, which are very different than the biological species homo sapiens. Humanity versus homo sapiens - very different things. We are biological creatures, we are animals, no doubt, but when you talk about "humando," you're talking about that particular kind of animals who are aware of their impending extinction, who have the capacity to be sensitive to catastrophe and disaster and calamity and profound crisis.

  Cornel West

  Humility, Animal, Talking

  Source: blogs.ssrc.org

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• The purpose of adolescence is to revise the past, not to obliterate it. . . . Adolescence entails the deployment of family passions to the passions and ideals that bind individuals to new family units, to their communities, to the species, to nature, to the cosmos. Therefore, given half a chance, the revolution at issue in adolescence becomes a revolution of transformation, not of annihilation.

  Louise J. Kaplan

  Passion, Past, Issues

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• Adolescents are the bearers of cultural renewal, those cycles of generation and regeneration that link our limited individual destinies with the destiny of the species.

  Louise J. Kaplan

  Destiny, Generations, Links

  Louise J. Kaplan (1995). “Adolescence: The Farewell to Childhood”, Touchstone Books

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• My father so appropriately put it that we are certainly the only animal that makes conscious choices that are bad for our survival as a species.

  Louise Leakey

  Father, Animal, Choices

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