140 Extinct Quotes

Following is our list of extinct quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about human extinction.

Quick Jump To

Famous Extinct Quotes

Extinction is the rule, survival is the exception. — Carl Sagan

Often extinctions in the ocean occur at the same time as those on land. Then again, the ice age extinctions lost many big animals, but not many sea faring ones. — Robert T. Bakker

The extinction of Homo Sapiens would mean survival for millions, if not billions, of Earth-dwelling species. Phasing out the human race will solve every problem on Earth - social and environmental. — Ingrid Newkirk

I might be an endangered species. — Waylon Jennings

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

All the rhinos are dead, for the most part. I think that's really sad. — Vince Staples

Destroying species is like tearing pages out of an unread book, written in a language humans hardly know how to read, about the place where they live. — Holmes Rolston III

If man doesn't learn to treat the oceans and the rain forest with respect, man will become extinct. — Peter Benchley

If elephants didn't exist, you couldn't invent one. They belong to a small group of living things so unlikely they challenge credulity and common sense. — Lyall Watson

In ten years [i.e., 1980] all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish. — Paul R. Ehrlich

It's coexistence or no existence. - Bertrand Russell

It's coexistence or no existence. — Bertrand Russell

You're not allowed to call them dinosaurs any more," said Yo-less. "It's speciesist. You have to call them pre-petroleum persons. — Terry Pratchett

If you want to see an endangered species, get up and look in the mirror. — John Young

Wildlife is something which man cannot construct. Once it is gone, it is gone forever. Man can rebuild a pyramid, but he can't rebuild ecology, or a giraffe. — Joy Adamson

All over the world the wildlife that I write about is in grave danger. It is being exterminated by what we call the progress of civilization. — Gerald Durrell

Short Extinct Quotes

  • I'm quite mad by nature, and it's my craziness that has saved me from extinction. — Marco Pantani
  • A widespread taste for pornography means that nature is alerting us to some threat of extinction. — J. G. Ballard
  • Even though we may all become extinct, we can still leave our footprint in the sand. — Dr. Seuss
  • Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. — Ronald Reagan
  • If raising children was less rewarding than not doing it, the human race would have gone extinct. — Naval Ravikant
  • What man really fears is not so much extinction, but extinction with insignificance. — Ernest Becker
  • If honey bees become extinct, human society will follow in four years. — Ernest A. Fortin
  • He who refuses to learn deserves extinction. — Hillel the Elder
  • If you do not change, you can become extinct ! — Spencer Johnson
  • We have no problem with the extinction of domestic animals. — Wayne Pacelle

Powerful Quotes

The media's the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that's power. Because they control the minds of the masses. — Malcom X

If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment. — Marcus Aurelius

Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power. — Abraham Lincoln

A very wise quote is a spectacular waterfall! When you see it, you feel its power! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world. - Nelson Mandela

Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world. — Nelson Mandela

Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas. — Josef Stalin

A waterfall cannot be silent, just as the wisdom! When they speak, the voice of power speaks! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Allow failure to teach you A supreme lesson: Each sunset is the beginning Of a very, very bright And powerful sunrise. — Sri Chinmoy

Love is man's natural endowment, but he doesn't know how to use it. He refuses to recognize the power of love because of his love of power. — Dick Gregory

You have power over your mind - not outside events. Realize this, and you will find strength. — Marcus Aurelius

Human Extinction Quotes

As long as hierarchy persists, as long as domination organises humanity around a system of elites, the project of dominating nature will continue to exist and inevitably lead our planet to ecological extinction. — Murray Bookchin

An asteroid ten km in diameter, slightly smaller than SF, made the most dominant species extinct. Our asteroid defense systems need to grow exponentially if humanity hopes to survive. — Peter Diamandis

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. — Richard Buckminster Fuller

We have no ethical obligation to preserve the different breeds of livestock produced through selective breeding One generation and out. We have no problems with the extinction of domestic animals. They are creations of human selective breeding. — Wayne Pacelle

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. — Stewart Brand

In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction. — David Mitchell

It can be fairly argued that the highest priority for mankind is to save itself from extinction. However, it can also be argued th at a society that neglects its children and robs them of their human potential can extinguish itself without an external enemy. — Selma Fraiberg

All of humanity is in peril of extinction if each one of us does not dare, now and henceforth, always to tell only the truth, and all the truth, and to do so promptly - right now. — Richard Buckminster Fuller

The future of humanity is going to bifurcate in two directions: Either it's going to become multiplanetary, or it's going to remain confined to one planet and eventually there's going to be an extinction event. — Elon Musk

There's a fundamental difference, if you sort of look into the future, between a humanity that is a space-faring civilization, that's out there exploring the stars...compared with one where we are forever confined to Earth until some eventual extinction event. — Elon Musk

How We Disappeared Quotes

How can we expect our students to become bold and fearless in thought and action if we encase them in sentimental shrines feigning a culture which has long since disappeared? — Walter Gropius

People love destroying mankind, for some strange reason. You make a movie about mankind's destruction, you're going to fill seats. People just love the idea. For a couple thousand years, we've been dreaming up how we're all going to disappear and fade away from this planet. — Michelle Rodriguez

They will often tell me they can't love themselves because they are so fat, or as one girl put it, 'too round at the edges.' I explain that they are fat because they don't love themselves. When we begin to love and approve of ourselves, it's amazing how weight just disappears from our bodies. — Louise Hay

Well the themes for me were and remain sex and love and grief and death - the things that make us and undo us, create and destroy, how we breed and disappear and the emotional context that surrounds these events. — Thomas Lynch

When we feel sad, all we need to do is to count our blessings, no matter how few we notice, so we can feel grateful for what we have been given. Sadness soon disappears and, in return, we get inspired to bless others. — Akiane Kramarik

The thought for us [street photographers] was always: How much could we absorb and embrace of a moment of existence that would disappear in an instant? And, Could we really make it live as art? There was an almost moral dimension. — Joel Meyerowitz

I think that the photos that we like were made when the photographer knew how to disappear. If there were a secret, certainly that would be it. — Edouard Boubat

No matter how close we got to a station or a disc jockey ... they could disappear into the ether without so much as a wave goodbye or a farewell song. — Ben Fong-Torres

One of the sadder things, I think, Is how our birthdays slowly sink: Presents and parties disappear, The cards grow fewer year by year, Till, when one reaches sixty-five, How many care we're still alive? — Philip Larkin

Good kids are like sunsets. We take them for granted. Every evening they disappear. Most parents never imagine how hard they try to please us, and how miserable they feel when they think they have failed. — Erma Bombeck

Extinction Quotes

Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same. — Ronald Reagan

People forget the good that zoos do. If it weren't for zoos, we would have so many species that would be extinct today. — Betty White

Nature does not know extinction; all it knows is transformation. ... Everything science has taught me-and continues to teach me-strengthens my belief in the continuity of our spiritual existence after death. Nothing disappears without a trace. — Wernher Von Braun

Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people. Those who have known freedom, and then lost it, have never known it again. — Ronald Reagan

We torture and kill two billion sentient living beings every week. 10,000 entire species are wiped out every year because of the actions of one, and we are now facing the sixth mass extinction in cosmological history. If any other organism did this, a biologist would consider them a virus. — Philip Wollen

More than 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. — Woody Allen

The Celts were fearless warriors because they wish to inculcate this as one of their leading tenets, that souls do not become extinct, but pass after death from one body to another. — Julius Caesar

The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property - either as a child, a wife, or a concubine - must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men. — Winston Churchill

The extinction of race consciousness as between Muslims is one of the outstanding achievements of Islam, and in the contemporary world there is, as it happens, a crying need for the propagation of this Islamic virtue. — Arnold J. Toynbee

The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment. — Robert Maynard Hutchins

Species Extinction Quotes

Overpopulation in the United States will become THE single greatest issue facing Americans in the 21st century. We either solve it proactively or nature will solve it brutally for us via water shortages, energy crisis, air pollution, gridlock, species extinction and worse. — Frosty Wooldridge

Species go extinct because there are historical contraints built into a given body or a given design. — Kevin Kelly

Dr. S. Dillon Ripley, secretary of the Smithsonian Institute, believes that in 25 years, somewhere between 75 and 80 percent of all the species of living animals will be extinct. — Gaylord Nelson

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. — David Suzuki

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. — Elizabeth Kolbert

I think it inevitably follows, that as new species in the course of time are formed through natural selection, others will become rarer and rarer, and finally extinct. The forms which stand in closest competition with those undergoing modification and improvement will naturally suffer most. — Charles Darwin

Certainly paleontologists have found samples of an extremely small fraction, only, of the earth's extinct species, and even for groups that are most readily preserved and found as fossils they can never expect to find more than a fraction. — George G. Simpson

It is a fact that the ecological devastation of the planet can be traced to the consumption of meat and dairy, which contributes to water, soil, and air pollution as well as global warming and the mass extinction of many species of plant and animal forms. — Sharon Gannon

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

If enough species are extinguished, will the ecosystems collapse, and will the extinction of most other species follow soon afterward? The only answer anyone can give is: possibly. By the time we find out, however, it might be too late. One planet, one experiment. — Sayings

Extinct Animals Quotes

Most people know that forests are the lungs of our planet, literally playing a critical role in every breath we take. And that they're also home to incredible animals like the orangutan and elephant, which will go extinct if we keep cutting down their forests. — Chris Noth

It's like the animal kingdom. Adapt or go extinct. — Brett Hull

Well lose more species of plants and animals between 2000 and 2065 than weve lost in the last 65 million years. If we dont find answers to these problems, were gonna be victims of this extinction event that were at fault for. — Paul Watson

I laughed when Steven Spielberg said that cloning extinct animals was inevitable. But I'm not laughing anymore, at least about mammoths. This is going to happen. It's just a matter of working out the details. — Hendrik Poinar

You know, at times like this one feels, well, perhaps extinct animals should be left extinct. — Michael Crichton

I think we must ask ourselves if this is really what we want to do to God's creation, to drive it to extinction? Because extinction really is irreversible; species that go extinct are lost forever. This is not like Jurassic Park. We can't bring them back. — Stuart L. Pimm

Ninety-nine percent of all species that ever lived are now extinct. — E. O. Wilson

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

We who revel in nature's diversity and feel instructed by every animal tend to brand Homo sapiens as the greatest catastrophe since the Cretaceous extinction. — Stephen Jay Gould

Let's not be too quick to blame the human race for everything. A great many species of animals became extinct before man ever appeared on earth. — Will Cuppy

Mass Extinction Quotes

There is one living organism, called a tardigrade, that has survived the five great mass extinctions on Earth, and it can survive in vacuums in space and boiling hot water and freezing subzero temperatures. — Alycia Debnam Carey

If we don't cut carbon's money pipeline, we will pay for their gasoline with floods, droughts, fires, super storms, drowned cities, mass extinctions, wars, and collapsing civilizations. — Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

No matter what we call it, poison is still poison, death is still death, and industrial civilization is still causing the greatest mass extinction in the history of the planet. — Derrick Jensen

The extinctions ongoing worldwide promise to be at least as great as the mass extinction that occurred at the end of the age of dinosaurs. — E. O. Wilson

If I had to predict, the way things are going, I'd say the chances are about 50-50 that humanity will be extinct or nearly extinct within 50 years. Weapons of mass destruction, disease, I mean this global warming is scaring the living daylights out of me. — Ted Turner

For wisest ends this universal Power Gave appetites, from whose quick impulse life Subsists, by which we only live, all life Insipid else, unactive, unenjoy'd. Hence to this peopled earth, which, that extinct, That flame for propagation, soon would roll A lifeless mass, and vainly cumber heaven. — John Armstrong

Our planet is currently undergoing a mass extinction of species called the Anthropocene - the Age of Man. — Louie Psihoyos

If we are to save humanity and the planet from the worst mass extinction of all time, worse even than that at the end of the Permian, we must stop at two degrees. — Mark Lynas

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

I would want us to start our quest to survive mass extinction by rethinking how we build cities. Cities should be commonplaces of production, rather than consumption - they should be producing food, and fuel. — Annalee Newitz

People Writing About Extinct

Name Quotes Likes
Read quotes by Paul R. Ehrlich

Paul R. Ehrlich
quotes on leadership, paul revere and religion

48 375
Read quotes by Carl Sagan

Carl Sagan
quotes on love, death and education

571 5077
Read quotes by Robert T. Bakker

Robert T. Bakker
quotes on leadership, education and freedom

22 258
Read quotes by Ingrid Newkirk

Ingrid Newkirk
quotes on education, life and leadership

80 817
Read quotes by Waylon Jennings

Waylon Jennings
quotes on life

66 1049
Read quotes by Vince Staples

Vince Staples
quotes on leadership, education and success

90 715

More Extinct Quotes

If bottled water is bad for the environment and isn’t healthier than tap water, does it at least taste better? Probably not, although it’s wholly subjective. Blind tastings have even shown that tap water scores higher than most mineral waters. The wine magazine Decanter ran a famous blinded taste comparison with twenty-four bottled waters in London in 2007 using wine-tasting experts. Good old London tap water came in at third, costing less than 0.1p per litre. The losers included New Zealand bottled water, which ranked a dismal eighteenth place despite coming from an extinct volcano and costing 50,000 times more than tap water. — Tim Spector

I am sorry to say that there is too much point to the wisecrack that life is extinct on other planets because their scientists were more advanced than ours. — John F. Kennedy

Salamander: Originally a reptile inhabiting fire; later, an anthropomorphous immortal, but still a pyrophile. Salamanders are now believed to be extinct, the last one of which we have an account having been seen in Carcassonne by the Abbe Belloc, who exorcised it with a bucket of holy water. — Ambrose Bierce

You don't know how to fix the holes in our ozone layer. You don't know how to bring salmon back up a dead stream. You don't know how to bring back an animal now extinct. And you can't bring back forests that once grew where there is now desert. If you don't know how to fix it, please stop breaking it! — Severn Cullis-Suzuki

The thing that fascinates me is that the way I came to film and television is extinct. Then there were gatekeepers, it was prohibitively expensive to make a film, to be a director you had to be an entrepreneur to raise money. — Tom Hooper

In view of the fading animals the proliferation of sewers and fears the sea clogging, the air nearing extinction we should be kind, we should take warning, we should forgive each other Instead we are opposite, we touch as though attacking, the gifts we bring even in good faith maybe warp in our hands to implements, to manoeuvres — Margaret Atwood

What is your personal carrying capacity for grief, rage, despair? We are living in a period of mass extinction. The numbers stand at 200 species a day. That's 73,000 a year. This culture is oblivious to their passing, feels entitled to their every last niche, and there is no roll call on the nightly news. — Lierre Keith

People shop and learn in a whole new way compared to just a few years ago, so marketers need to adapt or risk extinction. — Brian Halligan

Unless one says goodbye to what one loves, and unless one travels to completely new territories, one can expect merely a long wearing away of oneself and an eventual extinction. — Jean Dubuffet

The State of liberated Being can be reached only by "dying"; but (this) dying does not consist in destruction of the body; one should understand that true death is the extinction of the ideas "I" and "mine." — Ramana Maharshi

No magic bullet, not even the Internet, can save us from population explosion, deforestation, climate disruption, poison by pollution, and wholesale extinction of plant and animal species. We are going to have to want different things, seek different pleasures, pursue different goals than those that have been driving us and our global economy. — Joanna Macy

Now they [the Powers] have started the aggression, and the extinction of our nation is imminent. If we just fold our arms and yield to them, I would have no face to see our ancestors after death. If we must perish, why not fight to the death? — Empress Dowager Cixi

There are stars whose radiance is visible on Earth though they have long been extinct. There are people whose brilliance continues to light the world even though they are no longer among the living. These lights are particularly bright when the night is dark. They light the way for humankind. — Hannah Szenes

What does it say about our churches today that God birthed the church in a prayer meeting, and prayer meetings today are almost extinct? — Jim Cymbala

Cheetah genes cooperate with cheetah genes but not with camel genes, and vice versa. This is not because cheetah genes, even in the most poetic sense, see any virtue in the preservation of the cheetah species. They are not working to save the cheetah from extinction like some molecular World Wildlife Fund. — Richard Dawkins

If we do not save the environment, then whatever we do in civil rights will be of no meaning, because then we will have the equality of extinction. — James L. Farmer, Jr.

We have a planet that is at risk, where resources don't have a permanent life. We are going to have to make the decision: are we going to survive or are we waiting for our extinction? One day we will wake up and find people are fighting not for oil but water. — Desmond Tutu

In Conclusion

Which quotation resonated with you best? Did you enjoy our collection of extinct quotes? Or may be you have a slogan about extinct to suggest. Let us know using our contact form.

Citation

Feel free to cite and use any of the quotes in this collection of extinct quotations. For popular citation styles(APA, Chicago, MLA), please use this citation page.

Embed HTML Link

Copy and paste this HTML code in your webpage