Quotes About Extinction

By way of contrast, on uninhabited Wrangell Island, an isolated scrap of land in the Chukchi Sea north of Siberia, mammoths survived until about 4,000 years ago.

Every two weeks, a language dies. The world is diminished when it loses its human sayings, just as when it loses its diversity of plants and beasts.

One of the most painful things in the Western States and Territories is the extinction of childhood. I have never seen any children - only debased imitations of men and women, cankered by greed and selfishness, and asserting and gaining complete independence of their parents at ten years old.

Historically, grizzlies ranged from Alaska to Mexico, with at least 50,000 bears living in the western half of the contiguous United States. With European colonization, the bears were shot, poisoned, and trapped to the brink of extinction.

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

Extinction isn't pretty, especially when you know it's coming and do nothing about it.

Is this how it is for a species that senses it is going extinct? Is there a feeling of loneliness, or unease, each morning, upon awakening?

Ecosystems function locally, not globally. Local extinction, the disappearance of a species within, say, the woodlot down the street, or even your front yard, is now predicted to compromise the productivity of that woodlot and your yard.

According to a report in the New York Times of November 16, 1999, recent research suggests that even without the white hunters, the buffalo would have become extinct. Among the factors involved in the decline of the species:

Man beset by anarchy, banditry, chaos and extinction must at last resort turn to that chamber of horrors, human enlightenment. For he has nowhere else to turn.

How often had life begun on Earth, and been scalded from its face, and formed again?

It is folly to think that we can destroy one species and ecosystem after another and not affect humanity. When we save species, we're actually saving ourselves.

Life is a copiously branching bush, continually pruned by the grim reaper of extinction, not a ladder of predictable progress.

I personally cannot discern a shred of evidence for '[intelligent] design.' If 97% of all creatures have gone extinct, some plan isn't working very well!

If honey bees become extinct, human society will follow in four years.

spluttering and gasping, coughing and retching, trying to clear the painfully burning fluid from his lungs. And suddenly, the dread that lurks in every Australian's mind brought panic. Sharks! But there were no sharks, he knew that. The protein-rich predators had been fished out all along the east coast, were virtually extinct. All

I've pressed so far away from my desire that if you asked me what I want I would, accepting the harmonious completion of the drift, say annihilation, probably.

In the near term, such compromises made possible a continental union of North and South that provided bountiful benefits to freeborn Americans. But in the long run, the Founders' failure to put slavery on a path of ultimate extinction would lead to massive military conflict on American soil—the very sort of conflict whose avoidance was, as we shall now see, literally the primary purpose of the Constitution of 1788.

We endanger species.

La destrucción voluntaria de una jirafa africana o de un kagú de Nueva Caledonia, en la medida en que compromete la supervivencia misma de tales especies, es el plano filosófico y científico, quizás tan grave como el asesinato de un hombre y tan irreparabale como la laceración de un cuadro de Rafael. Acaba para siempre con un fragmento del pasado. Roger Hein.

Today only a handful of apes survive— the orangutan and gibbon in Asia, and the chimpanzee, bonobo, and gorilla in Africa— and most of them are hanging in the balance, thanks to human pressures. During the Miocene, however, as many as one hundred ape species flourished throughout the Old World. One of these gave rise to the human lineage.

We must realize that we're all part of a web of life around the world. Anytime you extinguish a species, the consequences are serious.

Intelligence, which is used without the control of the mind, can lead people to dangers up to extinction. Utilitarian intelligence, which the mind cannot control, is dangerous as much as it is sharp.

Traditional religion turned the consciousness of sin into a condition for salvation; but the tortured sense of nothingness of the neurotic qualifies him now only for miserable extinction, for merciful release in lonely death.