Best 162 quotes in «extinction quotes» category

By 2050, at bio-extinction's current rate, between 25 per cent and 50 per cent of all species will have disappeared or be too few in numbers to survive. There'll be a few over-visited parks, the coral reefs will be beaten up, grasslands overgrazed. Vast areas of the tropics that have lost their forests will have the same damn weeds, bushes and scrawny eucalyptus trees so that you don't know if you're in Africa or the Americas.

China cares about its reputation and doesn't want to be known as the nation whose preferences drove the extinction of elephants.

Deeper than temperature and the extinction of the polar bear is the idea that we all share this beautiful, ailing planet, Democrats and Republicans alike.

Every good journalist is aware that his trade may one day go the way of phrenology-and, what's more, the population will hardly protest the extinction.

But when we are following the light, even its extinction is a guide.

EXTINCTION, n. The raw material out of which theology created the future state.

Corporate America is a 20th-century dinosaur, trembling on the edge of extinction, and the only way for you to have a genuinely secure future is for you to take control of that future.

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.

Extinction is the beginning of the path: it is traveling to God Most High. Guidance comes afterwards. What I mean by guidance is the guidance of God, as described by the Friend of God, Abraham: "Lo! I am going unto my Lord Who will guide me.

Evolution crawls to imperfection. It ends in extinction.

Humans have made a huge hole in nature in the last 10,000 years. [With de-extinction,] we have the ability now, and maybe the moral obligation, to repair some of the damage.

I can't visualize the situation in which we nuke ourselves into extinction.

If in your lifetime you watch a species go extinct, or plummet almost to the point of extinction, that is a sign that something really serious is going on.

If mankind is to escape its programmed self-extinction the God who saves us will not descend from the machine: he will rise up again in the human soul.

I do not think that the government, under the guise of some phony, alarmist, pseudo-scientific rhetoric, should attempt to control the evolution of consciousness. After all, if these things truly are consciousness-expanding, it doesn't take too much intelligence to realize that it is the absence of consciousness that is causing our flirtation with extinction and planetary disaster.

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.

If we somehow put a value on species extinction and factor that into our costs that bottom line would look very different. IF we put any resource depletion into costs our bottom line would change. So what we have is a dishonest market that does not take into account all the costs when it establishes its prices. We need an honest marketplace before we can let the market work for sustainability rather than against it as it works today.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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 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.

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?

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.

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.

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

One in eight plant species face 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.

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

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 physical extinction of the human race is one possibility.

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

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