Species Quotes - Page 17

• Of the many species that have existed on earth - estimates run as high as fifty billion - more than ninety-nine per cent have disappeared. In the light of this, it is sometimes joked that all of life today amounts to little more than a rounding error.

  Elizabeth Kolbert

  Running, Errors, Light

  "The Sixth Extinction?" by Elizabeth Kolbert, www.newyorker.com. May 25, 2009.

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• My sister and I may have been crafted of the same genetic clay, baked in the same uterine kiln, but we were disparate species, doomed never to love each other except blindly.

  Judith Kelman

  Clay, May, My Sister

  Judith Kelman (2005). “Where Shadows Fall”, Jove

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• Women were the slave class that maintained the species in order to free the other half for the business of the world.

  Shulamith Firestone

  Women, Order, Class

  SHULAMITH FIRESTONE (1970). “THE DIALECTIC OF SEX”

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• If we can move together as a species, I think that there is a possibility that we can make the world a better place.

  Dave Sitek

  Moving, Thinking, Together

  "TV on the Radio". Interview with Chris Dahlen, pitchfork.com. October 2, 2006.

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• Our society is turning toward more and more needless consumption. It is a vicious circle that I compare to cancer . . . . Should we eliminate suffering, diseases? The idea is beautiful, but perhaps not a benefit for the long term. We should not allow our dread of diseases to endanger the future of our species. . . . In order to stabilize world population, we need to eliminate 350,000 people a day. It is a horrible thing to say, but it's just as bad not to say it.

  Jacques Yves Cousteau

  Beautiful, Cancer, Order

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• Is the destiny of the human species to sit back and play with our mouse and computer and imagine, fantasize?

  Buzz Aldrin

  Destiny, Play, Computer

  "Buzz Aldrin: The Right Stuff". Interview with Jim Clash, www.askmen.com.

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• One of the most irresponsible things we can do is eat in ignorance, without any awareness of what our eating is doing to the world or to other species.

  Michael Pollan

  Ignorance, World, Eating

  "Michael Pollan: The Omnivore’s Dilemma". Interview with Anne E. McBride, leitesculinaria.com. March 20, 2007.

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• Conscience is the still small voice that has been trying since the infancy of our species to tell us that we are evolutionarily, emotionally, and spiritually One, and that if we seek peace and happiness, we must behave that way.

  Martha Stout

  Voice, Trying, Way

  Martha Stout, Ph.D. (2005). “The Sociopath Next Door”, p.216, Harmony

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• Suffice to say, many women find their first appearance on a comedy panel show to be their last. Second chances seem to be given less often to the female of the species.

  Jo Brand

  Second Chance, Lasts, Firsts

  "Women - beware panel shows!". www.theguardian.com. June 9, 2009.

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• What happens to other species also happens to us.

  Bill Nye

  Happens

  Bill Nye (2014). “Undeniable: Evolution and the Science of Creation”, p.4, St. Martin's Press

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• We are on red alert when it comes to how we are perceiving ourselves as a species. There's no desire to be an adult. Adulthood is not a goal. It's not seen as a gift.

  Frances McDormand

  Goal, Desire, Adults

  "A Star Who Has No Time for Vanity" by Frank Bruni, www.nytimes.com. October 15, 2014.

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• The tendency of life is not the preservation of the species, but solely the preservation of each individual organism, as long as it is in existence at all, and is able to carry on its life processes.

  Boris Sidis

  Long, Able, Life Is

  "Nervous Ills their Cause and Cure" by Boris Sidis, (p. 20), 1922.

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• No one is shallow and vulgar forever; sooner or later the whole species likes to be profound.

  Carol Bly

  Profound, Forever, Likes

  Carol Bly (2000). “My Lord Bag of Rice: New and Selected Stories”, p.51, Milkweed Editions

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• If we drive our fellow species to extinction, we will leave a far more desolate planet for our descendants than the world we inherited from our elders.

  James Hansen

  Nature, Climate, World

  "Coal-fired power stations are death factories. Close them". www.theguardian.com. February 15, 2009.

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• Climate change is not a major issue because it will cause sea level rises or temperature increases, since we know how to live at higher elevations and regulate the temperature within our homes. It is a major issue because ecosystems are finding it difficult to adapt to the rapidity of the climate and environmental changes and are dying off, thereby accelerating the species extinction that is already underway due to our consumption habits.

  Shailesh Rao

  Nature, Home, Sea

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• Species evolve to meet the environment. An intelligent species changes the environment to suit itself. As soon as a species becomes intelligent, it should stop evolving.

  Larry Niven

  Intelligent, Suits, Environment

  Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle (1991). “The Mote in God's Eye”, p.31, Simon and Schuster

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• I believe all sin, love, glory are this: when you slide down the knotted sheets, escaping from Gestapo headquarters, and she hugs you, there, suspended, and she whispers that she's always dreamed of you. The rest is just sex, copulation, the perpetuation of the vile species.

  Umberto Eco

  Sex, Believe, Escaping

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• The facts of variability, of the struggle for existence, of adaptation to conditions, were notorious enough; but none of us had suspected that the road to the heart of the species problem lay through them, until Darwin and Wallace dispelled the darkness.

  Thomas Huxley

  Struggle, Heart, Darkness

  Leonard Huxley, Thomas Henry Huxley (2011). “Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley”, p.246, Cambridge University Press

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• Elohim was, in logical terminology, the genus of which ghosts, Chemosh, Dagon, Baal, and Jahveh were species. The Israelite believed Jahveh to be immeasurably superior to all other kinds of Elohim. The inscription on the Moabite stone shows that King Mesa held Chemosh to be, as unquestionably, the superior of Jahveh.

  Thomas Huxley

  Kings, Stones, Elohim

  Thomas Henry Huxley (1892). “Essays Upon Some Controverted Questions”

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• Indeed, the whole human species is endangered, by nuclear weapons or by other means of wholesale destruction which further advances in science are likely to produce.

  Joseph Rotblat

  Mean, Nuclear, Weapons

  Joseph Rotblat, Daisaku Ikeda (2007). “A Quest for Global Peace: Rotblat and Ikeda on War, Ethics and the Nuclear Threat”, p.134, I.B.Tauris

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• Human can surprise you sometimes. An unpredictable species, Homo sapiens

  Katherine Applegate

  Sometimes, Surprise, Unpredictable

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• Human beings are remarkably resilient. When you think about it, our species has been teetering upon the edge of the existential cliff since Hiroshima. In short, we endure.

  Rick Yancey

  Thinking, Hiroshima And Nagasaki, Cliffs

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• We need to take a leaf out of natures book. Any species that clones itself will eventually be attacked by a parasite, leading to an inevitable population crash.

  Daniel Suarez

  Book, Population, Needs

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• The Human is the most insane species

  Hubert Reeves

  Insane, Humans

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• I feel overawed by quantity where counting no longer makes sense. By unrepeatability within such a quantity. By creatures of nature gathered in herds, droves, species, in which each individual, while subservient to the mass, retains some distinguishing features. A crowd of people, birds, insects, or leaves is a mysterious assemblage of variants of certain prototype. A riddle of nature's abhorrence of exact repetition or inability to produce it. Just as the human hand cannot repeat its own gesture, I invoke this disturbing law, switching my own immobile herds into that rhythm.

  Magdalena Abakanowicz

  Hands, Law, People

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