Extinction is the rule, survival is the exception. — Carl Sagan
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
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
In pushing other species to extinction, humanity is busy sawing off the limb on which it perches. — Paul R. Ehrlich
What man really fears is not so much extinction, but extinction with insignificance. — Ernest Becker
The only alternative to coexistence is codestruction. — Jawaharlal Nehru
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
A destruction, an annihilation that only man can provoke, only man can prevent. — Elie Wiesel
If man doesn't learn to treat the oceans and the rain forest with respect, man will become extinct. — Peter Benchley
Wildlife of the world is disappearing, not because of a malicious and deliberate policy of slaughter and extermination, but simply because of a general and widespread ignorance and neglect. — Prince Philip
Every individual existence goes out in a lonely spasm of helpless agony. — William James
A widespread taste for pornography means that nature is alerting us to some threat of extinction. — J. G. Ballard
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 Extinction Quotes
I'm quite mad by nature, and it's my craziness that has saved me from extinction. — Marco Pantani
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
If honey bees become extinct, human society will follow in four years. — Ernest A. Fortin
If you do not change, you can become extinct ! — Spencer Johnson
We have no problem with the extinction of domestic animals. — Wayne Pacelle
In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction. — David Mitchell
The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality. — T. S. Eliot
Extinction Image Quotes
Animal Extinction Quotes
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
The physical extinction of the human race is one possibility. — Vernor Vinge
In the long term, it is desirable that the human race, faced with the prospect of extinction on Earth, should prepare an escape route for itself to another inhabitable planet. — Paul Johnson
Dinosaur Extinction Quotes
Technology has a great advantage in that we are capable of creating dinosaurs and show them on the screen even though they are extinct 65 million years. All of a sudden, we have a fantastic tool that is as good as dreams are. — Werner Herzog
Dinosaurs may be extinct from the face of the planet, but they are alive and well in our imaginations. — Steve Miller
I did not set out to explain the extinction of the dinosaurs. I'm a particle physicist, and I was actually thinking about dark matter along with some collaborators. — Lisa Randall
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
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. — Robert T. Bakker
Dinosaurs are extinct today because they lacked opposable thumbs and the brainpower to build a space program. — Neil deGrasse Tyson
The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program. — Larry Niven
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. — Robert Kiyosaki
The only thing we can't buy more of is time." she said. "And dodo birds. We can't buy any more of them. they're extinct. And dinosaurs. — Dean Koontz
The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program. And if we become extinct because we don't have a space program, it'll serve us right! — Larry Niven
Racing Extinction Quotes
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
I will far rather see the race of man extinct than that we should become less than beasts by making the noblest of God's creation, woman, the object of our lust. — Mahatma Gandhi
The race of prophets is extinct. Europe is becoming set in its ways, slowly embalming itself beneath the wrappings of its borders, its factories, its law-courts and its universities. The frozen Mind cracks between the mineral staves which close upon it. — Antonin Artaud
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
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. — John Foster Dulles
As long as the Republican party exists in its present form, our nation cannot endure as a free society. Still worse, under their policies the human race is being rapidly propelled toward its extinction. — Allen W. Wood
The human race may well become extinct before the end of the century. — Bertrand Russell
Everywhere in science the talk is of winners, patents, pressures, money, no money, the rat race, the lot; things that are so completely alien ... that I no longer know whether I can be classified as a modern scientist or as an example of a beast on the way to extinction. — June Goodfield
If nothing were left of an extinct race but a single button, I would be able to infer, form the shape of that button, how these people dressed, built their houses, how they lived, what was their religion, their art, their mentality. — Adolf Loos
The last man! Yes I may well describe that solitary being's feelings, feeling myself as the last relic of a beloved race, my companions extinct before me. — Mary Wollstonecraft
Extinct 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 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
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
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
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
... 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
Nevertheless so profound is our ignorance, and so high our presumption, that we marvel when we hear of the extinction of an organic being; and as we do not see the cause, we invoke cataclysms to desolate the world, or invent laws on the duration of the forms of life! — Charles Darwin
Amidst the vicissitudes of the earth's surface, species cannot be immortal, but must perish, one after another, like the individuals which compose them. There is no possibility of escaping from this conclusion. — Charles Lyell
Extinct Animals Quotes
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
An animal that is very abundant, before it gets extinct it becomes rare. So you don't lose abundant animals. You always lose rare animals. Therefore, they're not perceived as a big loss. — Daniel Pauly
Shelters, conservationists, those concerned about unnecessary cruelty toward the animals we eat, and people working against species extinction fight to preserve the true riches of our planet, our real inheritance. These are big, critical goals. — April Gornik
It's hard not to be kind of pessimistic about human beings generally, because we do tend to mess things up. If you just look at the history of extinctions, we've killed off an awful lot of animals - and I don't think we're doing a very good job of looking after the planet. — Bill Bryson
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. — John Steinbeck
The human race could go extinct and I for one would not shed any tears. — David Foreman
For millions of years, on average, one species became extinct every century.... We are now heaving more than a thousand different species of animals and plants off the planet every year. — Douglas Adams
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
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
So science alone cannot solve this problem [mass extinction of humans]. It's something that we can only tackle by bringing science together with culture, economics, and even politics. — Annalee Newitz
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
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 extinction quotes? Or may be you have a slogan about extinction to suggest. Let us know using our contact form.
Citation
Feel free to cite and use any of the quotes in this collection of extinction quotations. For popular citation styles(APA, Chicago, MLA), please use this citation page.
