Elizabeth Kolbert Quotes
The anthropologist Richard Leakey has warned that “Homo sapiens might not only be the agent of the sixth extinction, but also risks being one of its victims.” A sign in the Hall of Biodiversity offers a quote from the Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich: IN PUSHING OTHER SPECIES TO EXTINCTION, HUMANITY IS BUSY SAWING OFF THE LIMB ON WHICH IT PERCHES.
Quotes to Explore
-
With the past, I have nothing to do; nor with the future. I live now.
-
Money is finite; it's limited by a number and what you can buy with it. Power has no limits if you're willing to go far enough in order to get as much of it as you can.
-
I try and take the commonplace - and some of it is writ large, like death - take the commonplace and make it universally resonant, revelatory, and beautiful at the same time.
-
Even though I'm Hispanic, I'm so white.
-
He who prays five times a day is in the protection of God, and he who is protected by God cannot be harmed by anyone.
-
I used to dress like an eight-year-old boy. Traveling has inspired me to be more experimental.
-
A new idea is delicate. It can be killed by a sneer or a yawn; it can be stabbed to death by a quip and worried to death by a frown on the right man's brow.
-
If this whole acting thing doesn't work out, I'll just get a talk show.
-
It takes a while for executives to understand that every company is a spatial company, fundamentally: where are our assets, where are our customers, where are our sales. But when they get it, they light up and say, 'I want to get the geographic advantage.'
-
The more we study Art, the less we care for Nature. What Art really reveals to us is Nature's lack of design, her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition.
-
It is so rare to meet with a man out-doors who cherishes a worthy thought in his mind, which is independent of the labor of his hands.
-
The settlement of America had its origins in the unsettlement of Europe. America came into existence when the European was already so distant from the ancient ideas and ways of his birthplace that the whole span of the Atlantic did not widen the gulf.
-
I think extreme heterosexuality is a perversion.
-
Value will always be on top of everyone's lists now, right along with safety.
-
I always try to have a positive and warm intention that is not about me. It is easy to make everything about yourself. But you take the weight off when we make it about the audience. It's about the joy you can bring to somebody else instead of the joy that you get from doing it.
-
Life presents you with so many decisions. A lot of times, they're right in front of your face and they're really difficult, but we must make them.
-
I've grown up surrounded by Americans and to a very large extent feel American. It sounds strange because I seem to be so quintessentially English in everyone's mind - and perhaps I am. Perhaps it's quintessentially English to have a fascination with America.
-
When you reach the editing stage, it is often the case that you can get too involved with the story to detect errors. You can see words in your head that aren't actually there on the page, sentences blur together and errors escape you, and you follow plot threads and see only the images in your skull.
-
We have to always hope in humanity that people will make the right choices.
-
In you, humanity is precarious; and so, in dread and in shame, you kill the animal in you. And its slaughter poisons you.
-
The laws that forbid the carrying of arms...disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes. Can it be supposed that those who have the courage to violate the most sacred laws of humanity...will respect the less important and arbitrary ones... Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants, they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.
-
The anthropologist Richard Leakey has warned that “Homo sapiens might not only be the agent of the sixth extinction, but also risks being one of its victims.” A sign in the Hall of Biodiversity offers a quote from the Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich: IN PUSHING OTHER SPECIES TO EXTINCTION, HUMANITY IS BUSY SAWING OFF THE LIMB ON WHICH IT PERCHES.
