Top 420 Species Quotes

My premise is that there’s something hardwired into our DNA, that we as a species came and evolved from caves and clans and tribes, and therefore, we as a species care more about the things that are local to us than we care about the things that are ‘over there’ from us.

I read five books on the Constitution. My favorite was ‘Plain, Honest Men’ by Richard Beeman. I went on a science jag in the same way. I kept getting in arguments about evolution and being bested. So I read Charles Darwin’s ‘On the Origin of the Species,’ a fantastic book that is not that difficult.

African elephants have long been thought of as a single species, but a critical mass of genetic studies now proves there are two.

As a species we are always hungry for new knowledge.

It’s always been a dream of mine, of exploring the living world, of classifying all the species and finding out what makes up the biosphere.

Global climate change has become entangled with the problem of invasive species. A warmer climate could allow some invaders to spread farther, while causing native organisms to go extinct in their traditional habitats and making room for invaders.

To many people, ‘biodiversity’ is almost synonymous with the word ‘nature,’ and ‘nature’ brings to mind steamy forests and the big creatures that dwell there. Fair enough. But biodiversity is much more than that, for it encompasses not only the diversity of species, but also the diversity within species.

Without even knowing why, we believe that to learn how to be human – which we have many years to do, for human beings have longer childhoods than any other species, a feature that to biologists and philosophers alike is one of our race’s distinguishing characteristics – children must be surrounded by animal imagery.

Every decently-made object, from a house to a lamp post to a bridge, spoon or egg cup, is not just a piece of ‘stuff’ but a physical embodiment of human energy, testimony to the magical ability of our species to take raw materials and turn them into things of use, value and beauty.

We’re the only species who hunts for sport.

The Endangered Species Act was designed to preserve biodiversity, not enrich trial lawyers and political activists.

Other species help children develop empathy.

Concord, solidarity, and mutual help are the most important means of enabling animal species to survive.

I think Darwinism as a theory explaining evolution within species is incredibly brilliant – just unbelievably, incredibly brilliant.

Colombia has a huge variety of plant and animal species, and we have enormous potential. Small and mid-sized companies should come to Colombia. From here, they have access to the entire Latin American market.

It’s a fair guess that at the rate we’re destroying habitat, especially but not exclusively in the tropics, we’re pushing to extinction about one species every hour. That doesn’t count the species whose populations are being reduced so greatly that diversity within the population is essentially gone.

Discovering new species is a passion. A day without collecting plants is painful for me.

You have to be able to love members of your own species before you can branch out and apply that to other species.

Getting inside the mind of a terrorist wasn’t difficult at all. Even as children, human beings fabricate elaborate revenge fantasies. We’re not a particular species. Check out popular video games.

If vampires were a separate species, and they were into genetic engineering, what would they engineer for?

Man is more than merely an animal to exist and propagate his species. His mind gives him capacity to search out the great truths in God’s arrangement and this lifts him far above the other animal creation.

Experiments with animals have long been handicapped by our anthropocentric attitude: We often test them in ways that work fine with humans but not so well with other species.

If you want psychic gratification, one of the greatest ways is to know that you’ve made a real contribution to saving a species from blinking out during your lifetime.

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

I feel that we have a responsibility to try to do everything we can to protect species, and the best way to do that is to uphold international conservation law.

Once you have become permanently startled, as I am, by the realization that we are a social species, you tend to keep an eye out for the pieces of evidence that this is, by and large, good for us.

Forecasting is simply not a strength of the species; we are much better with tools and narrative storytelling.

I think when you think of death as being part of the life cycle and recognize that death is an inevitability for our species because the world has to be renewed with each death, then the hope becomes when it is renewed it will be renewed by people on whom I have had some influence for good.

While many alien species are harmless, others pose expensive threats to seas and fields and forests.

Nature is indifferent to the survival of the human species, including Americans.

The living world has become impoverished. Species are being lost every day. Energy and other resources are nearing exhaustion. The environment is deteriorating. Pollution is everywhere. Climate is changing. Natural balances are threatened.

I think when you work on fossils, and you realize that a species is there, and it’s abundant for quite a long period of time, and then at some point it’s no longer there – and so, when you look at that bigger picture, yes, you realize that either you change and adapt, or, as a species, you go extinct.

I think as a species we’re not designed to be able to think more than one year into the future – if that. Even trying to imagine one year from now makes most people feel like they’ve been given a huge boring chunk of homework that’s too hard to do.

I read the ‘Old Testament’ all the way through when I was about 13 and was horrified. A few months afterwards I read ‘The Origin Of Species’, hallucinating very mildly because I was in bed with flu at the time. Despite that, or because of that, it all made perfect sense.

We wonder why we have got the Freemen or the militants. We wonder why we have got unrest in this country. It is because our government, in fact, has got out of hand and out of line, with the Endangered Species Act.

Ants make up two-thirds of the biomass of all the insects. There are millions of species of organisms and we know almost nothing about them.

The hallmark of the human species is great adaptability.

What’s happened with society is that we have created these devices, computers, which already can register and process huge amounts of information, which is a significant fraction of the amount of information that human beings themselves, as a species, can process.

The fate of the vast majority of species on this planet has been extinction, eventually.

The mineral world is a much more supple and mobile world than could be imagined by the science of the ancients. Vaguely analogous to the metamorphoses of living creatures, there occurs in the most solid rocks, as we now know, perpetual transformation of a mineral species.

We are evolving as one species – not only as Americans, Syrians, Russians, Chinese, and jihadists. We cannot attack one without inflicting forms of violence and destruction upon ourselves. This is our new reality.

I suggest that going to Mars means permanence on the planet – a mission by which we are building up a confidence level to become a two-planet species.

The fidelity question is difficult for me. Society has made us believe we’re supposed to be monogamous when we’re not killer whales, or whatever the monogamous species is.

Think of all the different features from Asian to African to Aboriginal to Caucasian. But we are all within the same species, Homo Sapiens.

So much of the habitat destruction and pollution is based on the simple principle that we somehow have been given free license over other species to degrade the planet.

Our oceans are facing innumerable threats – from overfishing and pollution to ocean acidification and invasive species – yet we haven’t had a blueprint for its use and development, incredible as that seems.

Cirque du Soleil distinguished itself by being a circus with no animals. Before then, circus was partly about showing how man can tame other species.

Mushrooms are miniature pharmaceutical factories, and of the thousands of mushroom species in nature, our ancestors and modern scientists have identified several dozen that have a unique combination of talents that improve our health.

My father so appropriately put it that we are certainly the only animal that makes conscious choices that are bad for our survival as a species.

Theatre people, who are an adaptive species, know that to remain sane in the process of production where everyone and his uncle has an opinion about how to fix a show, you must pick the people whose knowledge and taste you trust and stick only to these few. The Tweetocracy is no place to look.