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Extinction Quotes

Browse 464 quotes about Extinction.

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Extinction Quotes

“God's will is often not done. We despoil rivers and lakes. We pollute land and air. We drive species into extinction. Given time we can do worse - or we can, by God's grace, do better. The late Reinhold Niebuhr (1892 - 1971), who was a wiser theologian than Senator Inhofe, urged us to pray for "the wisdom to distinguish between those things that can and those things that cannot be changed and for the courage to change those things that should be changed". Certainly the distinction between those things that can and those things that cannot be changed is an important part of the understanding scientists seek. What we all need is the courage to change those things that should be changed.”

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Book:Seeing Physics: 2,600 Years from Thales to Higgs
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“Thus we may perhaps be forced to become reconciled to the idea that it is quite impossible to adjust the claims of the sexual instinct to the demands of civilization; that in consequence of its cultural development renunciation and suffering, as well as the danger of extinction in the remotest future, cannot be avoided by the human race.”

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Book:On the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love
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“Do not avert your eyes. It is important that you see this. It is important that you feel this.”

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Author:Kamand Kojouri
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“We should always be clear that animal exploitation is wrong because it involves speciesism. And speciesism is wrong because, like racism, sexism, homophobia, anti-semitism, classism, and all other forms of human discrimination, speciesism involves violence inflicted on members of the moral community where that infliction of violence cannot be morally justified. But that means that those of us who oppose speciesism necessarily oppose discrimination against humans. It makes no sense to say that speciesism is wrong because it is like racism (or any other form of discrimination) but that we do not have a position about racism. We do. We should be opposed to it and we should always be clear about that.”

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Author:GaryLFrancione
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“I am opposed to animal welfare campaigns for two reasons. First, if animal use cannot be morally justified, then we ought to be clear about that, and advocate for no use. Although rape and child molestation are ubiquitous, we do not have campaigns for “humane” rape or “humane” child molestation. We condemn it all. We should do the same with respect to animal exploitation. Second, animal welfare reform does not provide significant protection for animal interests. Animals are chattel property; they are economic commodities. Given this status and the reality of markets, the level of protection provided by animal welfare will generally be limited to what promotes efficient exploitation. That is, we will protect animal interests to the extent that it provides an economic benefit.”

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Author:GaryLFrancione
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“The notion that we should promote “happy” or “humane” exploitation as “baby steps” ignores that welfare reforms do not result in providing significantly greater protection for animal interests; in fact, most of the time, animal welfare reforms do nothing more than make animal exploitation more economically productive by focusing on practices, such as gestation crates, the electrical stunning of chickens, or veal crates, that are economically inefficient in any event. Welfare reforms make animal exploitation more profitable by eliminating practices that are economically vulnerable. For the most part, those changes would happen anyway and in the absence of animal welfare campaigns precisely because they do rectify inefficiencies in the production process. And welfare reforms make the public more comfortable about animal exploitation. The “happy” meat/animal products movement is clear proof of that. We would never advocate for “humane” or "happy” human slavery, rape, genocide, etc. So, if we believe that animals matter morally and that they have an interest not only in not suffering but in continuing to exist, we should not be putting our time and energy into advocating for “humane” or “happy” animal exploitation.”

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Author:GaryLFrancione
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“If we are ever going to see a paradigm shift, we have to be clear about how we want the present paradigm to shift. We must be clear that veganism is the unequivocal baseline of anything that deserves to be called an “animal rights” movement. If “animal rights” means anything, it means that we cannot morally justify any animal exploitation; we cannot justify creating animals as human resources, however “humane” that treatment may be. We must stop thinking that people will find veganism “daunting” and that we have to promote something less than veganism. If we explain the moral ideas and the arguments in favor of veganism clearly, people will understand. They may not all go vegan immediately; in fact, most won’t. But we should always be clear about the moral baseline. If someone wants to do less as an incremental matter, let that be her/his decision, and not something that we advise to do. The baseline should always be clear. We should never be promoting “happy” or “humane” exploitation as morally acceptable.”

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Author:GaryLFrancione
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“I go to the pages on the coffee table, curious to see what upset my sister. The more I read the more it becomes clear that my mother is now an advocate for the voluntary human extinction movement. The problem with every utopia, my mother writes, is that they are designed for people. When in fact there cannot be a utopia with people in it. When in fact we are the problem.”

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Book:State of Paradise
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“I shall not assess arguments and evidence for competing views about when human extinction will occur. We know it will occur, and this fact has a curious effect on my argument. In a strange way it makes my argument an optimistic one. Although things are now not the way they should be—there are people when there should be none—things will someday be the way they should be—there will be no people. In other words, although things are now bad, they will be better, even if they first get worse with the creation of new people. Some may wish to be spared this kind of optimism, but some optimists may take a measure of comfort in this observation.”

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Book:Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence
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“Any species that devours its natural environment will eventually fall victim to the resulting silence and I call the toxicity of silence: Extinction Silence”

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Book:Curing Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity
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“Cloning must be sacrilege to the doctrines of metempsychosis, as it interrupts the sequence of reincarnations and the migration of souls. But it is also sacrilegious where the laws of evolution are concerned, since it is tantamount to an unlimited perpetuation of the species. In the body, a will to help begins to form. It is the body that chooses, among the innumerable pathogenic elements at its disposal, the illness that will purify you by diet and fever.”

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Book:Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004
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“The addition of certain chemicals to the atmosphere will destroy wavelengths of light and it may only be a matter of time before one of these wavelengths of light that is critical for human survival is eliminated. This is called: The Extinction Wavelength”

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Book:Solar Radiation, Global Warming and Human Disease
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“We poetically construct our identity as human beings, together with our values, largely through reciprocal relationships with animals. They provide us with essential points of reference, as well as illustrations of the qualities that we may choose to emulate or avoid in ourselves. Any major change in our relationships with animals, individual or collective, reverberates profoundly in our character as human beings, in ways that go far beyond immediately pragmatic concerns. When a species becomes extinct, something perishes in the human soul as well.”

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Book:The Mythical Zoo: An Encyclopedia of Animals in World Myth, Legend, and Literature
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“One saw a bird dying, shot by a man. It was flying with rhythmic beat and beautifully, with such freedom and lack of fear. And the gun shattered it; it fell to the earth and all the life had gone out of it. A dog fetched it, and the man collected other dead birds. He was chattering with his friend and seemed so utterly indifferent. All that he was concerned with was bringing down so many birds, and it was over as far as he was concerned. They are killing all over the world. Those marvellous, great animals of the sea, the whales, are killed by the million, and the tiger and so many other animals are now becoming endangered species. Man is the only animal that is to be dreaded.”

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Book:Krishnamurti to Himself: His Last Journal
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“It is not that species become extinct – all species will eventually become extinct. It is that we hasten extinction for so many species before we even know them or understand them, before we have grasped the way of the world and our place in it – when so much suffering could be avoided, with just a little pause and meditation on this journey of life. We are not wiser than the animals we kill and the species we are driving to extinction. We are like rampaging bulls, goaded into action by forces we do not understand, trampling through fields full of priceless treasures. We are able to deviate from this thoughtless, violent mediocrity. We must if we are to survive.”

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Book:Ethics of Life: freedom and diversity
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“Much of the world’s scripture denigrates what would ultimately steer an honest life, one that sanctifies gnomic courage without sacrifice to the will of He who watches from afar like a colosseum of resentment, like a festering cradle, entertaining incredible patience for the whole charade, the agonising anthill, the starving labyrinth, the enclosure of His vain architectural prominence erected in order for more abject varieties of vying death, blind and maimed, to appease prolonged viewing till the whole extinction of man.”

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Book:The Tedium Lies
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“لقد كنت الناجي الوحيد من شعب منقرض وهو يطأ أرضاً جديدة، كنت كقادم من زمن آخر، مسافر كوني، أو حتى كائن من كوكب آخر هبط على الأرض، وفضلاً عن ذلك كنت مجرداً من كلّ القوى. شعرتُ بالتيه لكأنّي أحد الإسرائيليين في سيناء، ولكنها كانت غابة خضراء هذه المرة.”

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Book:صراع الأقنعة
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“I once spoke to someone who had survived the genocide in Rwanda, and she said to me that there was now nobody left on the face of the earth, either friend or relative, who knew who she was. No one who remembered her girlhood and her early mischief and family lore; no sibling or boon companion who could tease her about that first romance; no lover or pal with whom to reminisce. All her birthdays, exam results, illnesses, friendships, kinships—gone. She went on living, but with a tabula rasa as her diary and calendar and notebook. I think of this every time I hear of the callow ambition to 'make a new start' or to be 'born again': Do those who talk this way truly wish for the slate to be wiped? Genocide means not just mass killing, to the level of extermination, but mass obliteration to the verge of extinction. You wish to have one more reflection on what it is to have been made the object of a 'clean' sweep? Try Vladimir Nabokov's microcosmic miniature story 'Signs and Symbols,' which is about angst and misery in general but also succeeds in placing it in what might be termed a starkly individual perspective. The album of the distraught family contains a faded study of Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths—until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about.”

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Book:Hitch 22: A Memoir
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“When I worry about the birds, I am also worrying about watching all my possible selves go extinct. And when I worry that no one will see the value of these murky waters, it is also a worry that I will be stripped of my own unusable parts, my own mysteries, and my own depths.”

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Book:How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
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“Perhaps this is what life is - just being with each other. And perhaps this is also what death is, because the fossils of the amphibian and the mammal were found, curled up together: perhaps because of broken ribs and shared heat, or perhaps because of the universal need we have for each other. A flood buried the two together, alive, and although they sang unheard pleas, they were singing together.”

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Book:Push and Pull
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“It is possibly true that intelligent life with a sophisticated technology is needed for the eventual survival of life. Dinosaurs and many other species became extinct because they could not adapt themselves to changes in the environment. Of course many other species have lived through many crises. But it is doubtful that any species, other than human beings (or atany rate, intelligent beings) can survive.”

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Book:The Ultimate Fate of the Universe
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