Species Quotes
-
The living is a species of the dead; and not a very attractive one.
Friedrich Nietzsche
-
For a solitary animal egoism is a virtue that tends to preserve and improve the species: in any kind of community it becomes a destructive vice.
Erwin Schrodinger
-
There is today a frightful disappearance of living species, be they plants or animals. And it's clear that the density of human beings has become so great, if I can say so, that they have begun to poison themselves. And the world in which I am finishing my existence is no longer a world that I like.
Claude Levi-Strauss
-
Obviously, the fate of our own species concerns us disproportionately. But at the risk of sounding anti-human—some of my best friends are humans!—I will say that it is not, in the end, what’s most worth attending to. Right now, in the amazing moment that to us counts as the present, we are deciding, without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will forever be closed. No other creature has ever managed this, and it will, unfortunately, be our most enduring legacy. The Sixth Extinction will continue to determine the course of life long after everything people have written and painted and built has been ground into dust and giant rats have—or have not—inherited the earth.
Elizabeth Kolbert
-
Our health relies entirely on the vitality of our fellow species on Earth.
Harrison Ford
-
The sexes in each species of being... are always true equivalents - equals but not identical.
Antoinette Brown Blackwell
-
I suppose if there were a part of the world in which mastodon still lived, somebody would design a new gun, and men, in their eternal impudence, would hunt mastodon as they now hunt elephant. Impudence seems to be the word. At least David and Goliath were of the same species, but, to an elephant, a man can only be a midge with a deathly sting.
Beryl Markham
-
For conservation to succeed, we must embrace conservation models where people use their natural resources to create jobs, to grow economies, and to feed their people while protecting wildlife and Africa's iconic species.
David Jeremiah Barron
-
The retreat of the Arctic sea ice, the warming of the oceans, the rapid shrinking of the glaciers, the redistribution of species, the thawing of the permafrost—these are all new phenomena. It is only in the last five or ten years that global warming has finally emerged from the background “noise” of climate variability. And even so, the changes that can be seen lag behind the changes that have been set in motion. The warming that has been observed so far is probably only about half the amount required to bring the planet back into energy balance. This means that even if carbon dioxide were to remain stable at today’s levels, temperatures would still continue to rise, glaciers to melt, and weather patterns to change for decades to come.
Elizabeth Kolbert
-
Think what cowards men would be if they had to bear children. Women are altogether a superior species.
George Bernard Shaw
-
The reason humans experience so much more stress than other species isn't just because we think more, but also because we think differently.
Andrew Bernstein
-
Man desired concord; but nature knows better what is good for his species; she desires discord. Man wants to live easy and content; but nature compels him to leave ease... and throw himself into roils and labors.
Immanuel Kant
-
The fate of hundreds of thousands of species on this planet may be decided in the next decade. To slow the rush to extinction, we need to achieve real, substantive political power, and we need to get there fast.
Eban Goodstein
-
We are the most dangerous species of life on the planet, and every other species, even the earth itself, has cause to fear our power to exterminate. But we are also the only species which, when it chooses to do so, will go to great effort to save what it might destroy.
Wallace Stegner
-
My nonviolence does recognize different species of violence, defensive and offensive.
Mahatma Gandhi
-
An unjust law is itself a species of violence. Arrest for its breach is more so. Now the law of nonviolence says that violence should be resisted not by counter-violence but by nonviolence. This I do by breaking the law and by peacefully submitting to arrest and imprisonment.
Mahatma Gandhi
-
We may smile and the dog may wag the tail, but in essence, we have a set program and those programs are similar across individuals in the species.
Antonio Damasio
-
Evolutionary biologists often appeal to parsimony when they seek to explain why organisms "match" with respect to a given trait. For example, why do almost all the organisms that are alive today on our planet use the same genetic code? If they share a common ancestor, the code could have evolved just once and then been inherited from the most recent common ancestor that present organisms share. On the other hand, if organisms in different species share no common ancestors, the code must have evolved repeatedly.
Elliott Sober