Best 162 quotes in «extinction quotes» category

Looking at everything, I started to feel nauseous, as if the seventies had taken refuge here against extinction and were preparing to take over the world.

More than at any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly. I speak, by the way, not with any sense of futility, but with a panicky conviction of the absolute meaninglessness of existence which could easily be misinterpreted as pessimism. It is not. It is merely a healthy concern for the predicament of modern man.

Oil is dead, on its way to extinction.

No historian can take part with--or against--the forces he has to study. To him even the extinction of the human race should merely be a fact to be grouped with other vital statistics.

On an overcrowded planet where more species slip toward extinction every day, should one species have the right to multiply and consume at will, even as it nudges others to oblivion?

One of the laws of paleontology is that an animal which must protect itself with thick armour is degenerate. It is usually a sign that the species is on the road to extinction.

One in eight plant species face extinction.

Quite clearly, our task is predominantly metaphysical, for it is how to get all of humanity to educate itself swiftly enough to generate spontaneous social behaviors that will avoid extinction.

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

The choice, however, is as clear now for nations as it was once for the individual: peace or extinction.

The diminution of public virtue is usually attended with that of public happiness, and the public liberty will not long survive the total extinction of morals.

The folly of war is that it can have no natural end except in the extinction an entire people.

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.

The physical extinction of the human race is one possibility.

The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication.

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

Precise adaptation, with each part finely honed to perform a definite function in an optimal way, can only lead to blind alleys, dead ends, and extinction.

Racism, pollution and the rest of it are themselves very close to extinction.

Since after extinction no one will be present to take responsibility, we have to take full responsibility now.

The buffaloes are gone. And those who saw the buffaloes are gone.

The extinction of the human race will come from its inability to EMOTIONALLY comprehend the exponential function.

There are certain prehistoric things that swim beyond extinction.

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

The short-lived self, teetering on the edge of extinction, is the only thing that can ever really matter.

There is a beginning and end to all life - and to all human endeavors. Species evolve and die off. Empires rise, then break apart. Businesses grow, then fold. There are no exceptions. I'm OK with all that. Yet it pains me to bear witness to the sixth great extinction, where we humans are directly responsible for the extirpation of so many wonderful creatures and invaluable indigenous cultures. It saddens me to observe the plight of our own species; we appear to be incapable of solving our problems.

The technical definition of the Holocene has to do with the extinction of a snail species in Sicily.

The public image of dinosaurs is tainted by extinction. It's hard to accept dinosaurs as a success when they are all dead. But the fact of ultimate extinction should not make us overlook the absolutely unsurpassed role dinosaurs played in the history of life.

There is a peculiar pathos in the extinction of a nation.

To dismiss the current extinction wave on the grounds that extinctions are normal events is like ignoring a genocidal massacre on the grounds that every human is bound to die at some time anyway.

Today, due to the massive Chinese population transfer, the nation of Tibet truly faces the threat of extinction, along with its unique cultural heritage of Buddhist spirituality.

We advocate biodiversity for biodiversity's sake. It may take our extinction to set things straight.

We are in the midst of the 6th largest extinction event in the history of the plant and the first caused by human action.

This is the whole point of technology. It creates an appetite for immortality on the one hand. It threatens universal extinction on the other. Technology is lust removed from nature. - Murray (WN 285)

We have decisively changed the carbon cycle, the nitrogen cycle, and the rate of extinction.

We live in a time where we have more extinction happening on our planet than since the dinosaurs were wiped out 50 million years ago.

What I really wanted was to travel and see all the different animals that were on the verge of extinction.

What is the extinction of a condor to a child who has never seen a wren?

What man really fears is not so much extinction, but extinction with insignificance.

... why are so many religious people arguing about the origin of the species but so few concerned about the extinction of the species?

A 24,000-year sequence recorded in a marine core from the Santa Barbara Basin, off the coast of California, exhibits the highest peak in biomass burning precisely at the onset of the Younger Dryas. ... This anomalously high peak correlates with intense biomass burning documented from the nearby Channel Islands. ... The peak also coincides with the extinction of pygmy mammoths on the islands and with the beginning of an apparent 600-800-year gap in the archaeological record, suggesting a sudden collapse in island human populations.

Although justifications for wild meat harvest in terms of food for impoverished communities must be weighed seriously, it is critical to acknowledge that the terms ‘protein’ and ‘meat’ are not synonymous.

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death.

And I've been thinking: if the human race manages to destroy itself, as it often seems to want to do, or if some great disaster comes, as it did for the dinosaurs, then the birds will still manage to survive. When our gardens and fields and farms and woods have turned wild, when the park at the end of Falconer Road has turned into a wilderness, when our cities are in ruins, the birds will go on flying and singing and making their nests and laying their eggs and raising their young. It could be that the birds will exist for ever and for ever until the earth itself comes to an end, no matter what might happen to the other creatures. They'll sing until the end of time. So here's my thought: If there is a God, could it be that He's chosen the birds to speak for Him. Could it be true? The voice of God speaks through the beaks of birds.

Yet it is necessary to hope, though hope should always be deluded, for hope itself is happiness, and its frustrations, however frequent, are yet less dreadful than its extinction.

But the Anthropocene isn’t a novel phenomenon of the last few centuries. Already tens of thousands of years ago, when our Stone Age ancestors spread from East Africa to the four corners of the earth, they changed the flora and fauna of every continent and island on which they settled. They drove to extinction all the other human species of the world, 90 per cent of the large animals of Australia, 75 per cent of the large mammals of America and about 50 per cent of all the large land mammals of the planet – and all before they planted the first wheat field, shaped the first metal tool, wrote the first text or struck the first coin.

Data that did not fit the commonly accepted assumptions of a discipline would either be discounted or explained away for as long as possible. The more contradictions accumulated, the more convoluted the rationalizations became. 'In science, as in the playing card experiment, novelty emerges only with difficulty,' Kuhn wrote. But then, finally, someone came along who was willing to call a red spade a red spade. Crisis led to insight, and the old framework gave way to a new one. This is how great scientific discoveries or, to use the term Kuhn made so popular, 'paradigm shifts' took place.

Do not avert your eyes. It is important that you see this. It is important that you feel this.

Don’t believe what you hear about those penguins. A species of lazy waddlers. Their extinction is immanent.

Few problems are less recognized, but more important than, the accelerating disappearance of the earth's biological resources. In pushing other species to extinction, humanity is busy sawing off the limb on which it is perched.

We have no problem with the extinction of domestic animals.