Quotes About Extinction

When asked what he wants for his tombstone epitaph ] Since I'm an atheist, and have no belief whatsoever in life after death, I couldn't care less -- it's not like it'll have any impact on me, since by definition I will be completely extinguished. I guess if someone twisted my arm and forced me to provide an epitaph, it would be 'Don't forget.' Sound advice...

My definition of a sin is for humans to allow a species to die out. Animals cannot speak for themselves – it is up to all of us to protect them and their habitats.

It is a sad fact that to many people the loss of a plant species is of less moment than the loss of a football match. I hate the thought that the only record of a beautiful plant might yet be the grave of the herbarium sheet.

Trilobites survived for a total of three hundred million years, almost the whole duration of the Palaeozoic era:

Extinction) Twelve million or more species, less than a tenth of them counted. And half of them will snuff out in her lifetime.

Too many species to count. Reefs bleach and wetlands dry. Things are going lost that have not yet been found. Kinds of life vanish a thousand times faster than the baseline extinction rate. Forest larger than most countries turns to farmland. Look at the life around you; now delete half of what you see.

Are you worried about a species-threatening event?" He stared at me. "What the hell do you mean by that?" "I mean a virus that wipes us out." "Well, I think it could happen. Certainly it hasn't happened yet. I'm not worried. More likely it would be a virus that reduces us by some percentage. By thirty percent. By ninety percent.

If most of the area of habitat is destroyed, and a fraction of the area is saved as a reserve, the reserve will initially contain more species than it can hold at equilibrium. The excess will gradually go extinct. The smaller the reserve, the higher will be the extinction rates…. Different species require different minimum areas to have a reasonable chance of survival.

Her niece had the parenting skills of a … Rose didn't even know how to finish that sentence. Any creature in nature so incapable of caring for its young would have died out centuries ago.

Men were the only animals that slaughtered their own kind by the million, and turned the landscape into a waste of shell craters and barbed wire. Perhaps the human race would wipe itself out completely, and leave the world to the birds and trees

Mass extinctions may not threaten distant futures, but they are decidedly unpleasant for species caught up in the throes of their power.

I love and adore men. I think their energy is so sexy, and fabulous, and active. But the imbalance in the male and female power is deadly. It is literally taking us to extinction.

The tragedy of power like mine is that there is no way down. There can only be extinction. Dust to dust rags to rags fear to fear.

We stand today at a crossroads: One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other leads to total extinction. Let us hope we have the wisdom to make the right choice.

The purest thought is totally ignorant of death. Death means the perpetual extinction of impertinent sparks. But it is the key of life.

A high jeopardy of extinction comes with territory. Islands are where species go to die.

As we besiege them, as we corner them, as we exterminate them and eat them, we're getting their diseases.

A parasitic microbe, thus jostled, evicted, deprived of its habitual host, has two options—to find a new host, a new kind of host . . . or to go extinct.

The song of the dodo, if it had one, is forever unknowable because no human from whom we have testimony ever took the trouble to sit in the Mauritian forest and listen.

Trophic cascades, as defined by Diamond in his "Rosetta Stone" paper, are the secondary effects that can ramify from level to level in consequence of a single extinction.

We know that ecological isolation—either by seawater or by other sorts of delimitation—correlates strongly with risk of extinction

A parasitic microbe, thus jostled, evicted, deprived of its habitual host, has two options—to find a new host, a new kind of host . . . or to go extinct. I

Imagine the life of the last human. Someone was the last Neanderthal. One day, Homo sapien's time will come too. Someone will be the last of our species. What a strange fate that is. They won't have anyone to tell their tale to

The damage that climate change is causing and that will get worse if we fail to act goes beyond the hundreds of thousands of lives, homes and businesses lost, ecosystems destroyed, species driven to extinction, infrastructure smashed and people inconvenienced.