Best 162 quotes in «extinction quotes» category

In pushing other species to extinction, humanity is busy sawing off the limb on which it perches.

In the landscape of extinction, precision is next to godliness.

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.

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.

It is even harder to realize that this present universe has evolved from an unspeakably unfamiliar early condition, and faces a future extinction of endless cold or intolerable heat. The more the universe seems comprehensible, the more it seems pointless.

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.

It's a matter of life and death for this country. The Kenyan forests are facing extinction and it is a man-made problem.

It is peoples' fantasies of what is true that is so extraordinary. That that we were born and that we face eternal extinction after death is an extraordinary fantasy.

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

Its haunting to realize that half of the languages of the world are teetering on the brink of extinction.

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.

Oil is dead, on its way to extinction.

One in eight plant species face extinction.

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?

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

The physical extinction of the human race is one possibility.

There are certain prehistoric things that swim beyond extinction.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

We have no problem with the extinction of domestic animals.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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