Top 70 Extinction Quotes

Human extinction in our children’s lifetime, it should be your top news item every single day, what’s happening, you should be holding politicians to account.

The struggle for existence holds as much in the intellectual as in the physical world. A theory is a species of thinking, and its right to exist is coextensive with its power of resisting extinction by its rivals.

Most evolving lineages, human or otherwise, when threatened with extinction, don’t do anything special to avoid it.

Life on our planet has been a constant series of cataclysmic events, and we are more suitable for extinction than a trilobite or a reptile. So we will vanish. There’s no doubt in my heart.

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.

Don’t forget this club nearly went out of extinction last year.

It’s a matter of life and death for this country. The Kenyan forests are facing extinction and it is a man-made problem.

In the history of the world, all five mass extinctions have been accompanied by massive climate change, so we are facing an incredibly serious threat. In fact, we are technically in the sixth mass extinction right now, and it is the first mass extinction being attributed to humans.

You need not fear my extinction. Fear my proliferation! I’ve already reproduced!

‘Man is an endangered species,’ announces one of the titles at the beginning of the sci-fi lump ‘Battlefield Earth.’ And after about 20 minutes of this amateurish picture, extinction doesn’t seem like such a bad idea.

Hatred is a feeling which leads to the extinction of values.

I want to interpret the natural world and our links to it. It’s driven by the belief of many world-class scientists that we’re in the midst of an extinction crisis… This time it’s us that’s doing it.

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.

Extinction was a difficult concept for a 10-year-old.

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.

Shouldn’t the cascades of extinction and rapid planetary warming register in our literature?

Wild fish are under threat of extinction because they’re hunted to feed us. Yet land animals that we farm are under no threat of extinction. Shifting from hunting fish to farming fish – where the farmers have the incentive to keep their stocks healthy – could do a tremendous amount of good for wild fish.

Protecting eagles from the threat of extinction is a conservation success story that we must prudently safeguard for future generations to come.

Vaccines don’t cause autism. Vaccines, instead, prevent disease. Vaccines have wiped out a score of formerly deadly childhood diseases. Vaccine skepticism has helped to bring some of those diseases back from near extinction.

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.

Death is not extinction. Neither the soul nor the body is extinguished or put out of existence.

Egypt is home to the largest Christian population in the Middle East, largely because they’ve been persecuted to brink of extinction everywhere else in the region.

Twelve years ago, when I was on the Pine Ridge Reservation for ‘Thunderheart,’ I was dong research into Native American horses that had come into extinction. I was tracing certain Lakota bloodlines, and it became an obsession.

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.

In the area of national security, I urge the swift passage of an anti-terrorism law that will protect rather than subvert, enhance rather than weaken, the rights and liberties that terrorism precisely threatens with extinction.

The threat of extinction is more real than many realise. And the damage done to elephants directly leads to destruction of the ecosystem.

With our evolved busy hands and our evolved busy brains, in an extraordinarily short period of time we’ve managed to alter the earth with such geologic-forcing effects that we ourselves are forces of nature. Climate change, ocean acidification, the sixth mass extinction of species.

I don’t think college wrestling is in danger of extinction by any means. But I am concerned if one program drops.

The choice, however, is as clear now for nations as it was once for the individual: peace or extinction.

An asteroid can literally destroy 80 or 90 percent of the species that are alive on Earth. These are big events. I mean, this is called extinction.

The mountain gorilla faces grave danger of extinction – primarily because of the encroachments of native man upon its habitat – and neglect by civilized man, who does not conscientiously protect even the limited areas now allotted for the gorilla’s survival.

We’ll lose more species of plants and animals between 2000 and 2065 than we’ve lost in the last 65 million years. If we don’t find answers to these problems, we’re gonna be victims of this extinction event that we’re at fault for.

There is a one-in-300 chance that Earth will be struck on March 16, 2880, by an asteroid large enough to destroy civilization and possibly cause the extinction of the human race. But, on the bright side, Prince could re-release his hit song with the new refrain ‘We’re gonna party like its twenty-eight seventy-nine.’

If our extinction proceeds slowly enough to allow a moment of horrified realization, the doers of the deed will likely be quite taken aback on realizing that they have actually destroyed the world. Therefore I suggest that if the Earth is destroyed, it will probably be by mistake.

Sharks are being driven to extinction because people want to eat their fins and their flesh.

Doctors, dressed up in one professional costume or another, have been in busy practice since the earliest records of every culture on earth. It is hard to think of a more dependable or enduring occupation, harder still to imagine any future events leading to its extinction.

Preventing ongoing extinction of elephants, rhinoceroses, and other threatened species is critically important. By all means, we must set priorities for allocating finite conservation resources.

Humans regard animals as worthy of protection only when they are on the verge of extinction.

We are killing life on Earth, we’re in the sixth mass extinction event and it’s possible that human beings will go extinct. We’re in a culture that doesn’t want you to think about that.

There are so many issues in our oceans – like the near extinction of blue fin tuna – that should be taken more seriously worldwide.

The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication.

America faces a fundamental choice: either the blessings of liberty or the servitude of liberalism. In the political struggle for survival, one or the other is headed for extinction.

Either the opponents of slavery will arrest the further spread of it and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in course of ultimate extinction, or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the States – old as well as new – North as well as South.

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.

In recent years, our planet has been warming at an alarming rate and seen record-breaking temperatures. We are now witnessing the sixth mass extinction event in the earth’s geologic history. Our sea levels are rising at an alarming rate, threatening our largest cities, like New York, Los Angeles, and Miami.

Once again, stock markets have been threatened with extinction for almost 75 years, and I have found that stock markets are harder to kill than roaches.

If the worst comes true, and the paper book joins the papyrus scroll and parchment codex in extinction, we will miss, I predict, a number of things about it.

I can’t visualize the situation in which we nuke ourselves into extinction.

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

Nature doesn’t need people – people need nature; nature would survive the extinction of the human being and go on just fine, but human culture, human beings, cannot survive without nature.

But the main thing is to give people permission to feel it and to put grief at the heart of what Extinction Rebellion’s about.