Human Extinction Quotes

Any relationship, no matter how fulfilling and restorative it may be, can always be enlivened and enriched. Regardless of how elated or deflated you feel about your work, what can you do to breathe new life into it - to make it more rewarding than it has ever been? Do you need to leave your current work and answer another calling? What is your spiritual employment, dear reader, carrier of so many gifts? ~ Carolyn Baker

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. ~ David Benatar

Plant life is like the canary in the cage. When it starts to die off, we know we have problems. To ignore plant die off would be like the human race committing suicide. Human extinction would surely follow. ~ Steven Magee

Quality parenting in a Last Emergency world requires our letting go of control and trusting what we have instilled in our offspring. A part of them already knows or senses what lies ahead; whether they wish to consciously acknowledge it or not or discuss it openly with us or not, our emotional availability and love surpass all else we may be able to provide. ~ Carolyn Baker

No influence of ours can save your species from destruction. Nothing could save it but a profound change in your own nature; and that cannot be. Wandering among you, we move always with fore-knowledge of the doom which your own imperfection imposes on you. Even if we could, we would not change it; for it is a theme required in the strange music of the spheres. ~ Olaf Stapledon

A post-petroleum world will necessitate walking long distances and exerting much more physical energy to accomplish even routine tasks than we are now accustomed to. Most of our bodies in current time are not up to the task. Yet preparing the body for living in a collapsing world is one of the most fundamental of preparations. Although we may not be able to store vast quantities of food or water, may not have our homes or property equipped as much as we would prefer in preparation for collapse, and may not have learned all the skills we would like to master, becoming present in our bodies and keeping them healthy and fit are factors over which we have control. ~ Carolyn Baker

What, then, is the soul of community? It is a desire to be connected with something greater than the egos of other people and the projects in which we might engage with them. Fundamentally, a successful human community is the unfolding of a spiritual dynamic. It cannot be contrived or made to happen. Rather, it erupts from our desire for the depths, and that desire is certain to constellate the shadow in ourselves and the other. ~ Carolyn Baker

One common strategy on which we should all be able to agree is to take steps to reduce the risk of human extinction when those steps are also highly effective in benefiting existing sentient beings. For example, eliminating or decreasing the consumption of animal products will benefit animals, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and lessen the chances of a pandemic resulting from a virus evolving among the animals crowded into today's factory farms, which are an ideal breeding ground for viruses. That therefore looks like a high-priority strategy. Other ~ Peter Singer

For those of us who have come to believe that unless we are thinking we are wasting time, it may be challenging to simply linger with a beautiful sunset, an exquisite painting, or an arresting piece of music. The intellect often reacts to the seductions of beauty by attempting to recapture us. ~ Carolyn Baker

Industrial civilization has held us in a subhuman state all our lives, and we now have the opportunity to discover the powers of the universe coursing through us and our environment. Likewise, we have the extraordinary privilege as consciously self-aware humans of intentionally participating with those powers in an intimate, passionate, caring relationship with the universe. ~ Carolyn Baker

The extraction of deep wisdom can be done at any age, and if we are to love the time of our life, it must be. Imbedded within us is the deeper story we came to live, and the core issue at every age for any awakened human being is the extent to which we are living that story in the present moment. ~ Carolyn Baker

The ultimate aim of the human mind, in all its efforts, is to become acquainted with Truth. ~ Eliza Farnham

Loyalty cannot be blueprinted. It cannot be produced on an assembly line. In fact, it cannot be manufactured at all, for its origin is the human heart -- the center of self-respect and human dignity. It is a force which leaps into being only when conditions are exactly right for it -- and it is a force very sensitive to betrayal. ~ Maurice Franks

Is there security? Is there permanency which man is seeking all the time? As you notice for yourself, your body changes, the cells of the body change so often. As you see for yourself in your relationship with your wife, with your children, with your neighbor, with your state, with your community, is there anything permanent? You would like to make it permanent.

The relationship with your wife - you call it marriage, and legally hold it tightly. But is there permanency in that relationship? Because if you have invested permanency in your wife or husband, when she turns away, or looks at another, or dies, or some illness takes place, you are completely lost….

The actual state of every human being is uncertainty. Those who realize the actual state of uncertainty either see the fact and live with it there or they go off, become neurotic, because they cannot face that uncertainty. They cannot live with something that demands an astonishing swiftness of mind and heart, and so they become monks, they adopt every kind of fanciful escape. So you have to see the actual, and not escape in good works, good action, going to the temple, talking. The fact is something demands your complete attention. The fact is that all of us are insecure; there is nothing secure. ~ Jiddu Krishnamurti

What Kant refers to as depression is simply this stark realization: that thought is only incidentally human. It would take a later generation of philosophers to derive the conclusion of this: that thought thinks us, not the reverse. Legend ~ Eugene Thacker

North Americans do not understand that you do not throw down human rights like bombs on the Iraqis. ~ Shirin Ebadi

So where will the children of the future come from? Increasingly they will come from people who are at odds with the modern world. Such a trend, if sustained, could drive human culture off its current market-driven, individualistic, modernist course, gradually creating an anti-market culture dominated by fundamentalism - a new dark ages. ~ Philip Longman

You may remember that the Lord God appeared to His people at Mount Sinai. That encounter was His great theo-phany, His foundational appearance to the children of Israel. Yet it happened in a strange way. His glory, His visible gracious presence, was veiled in a cloud that was dark by day and bright at night. He concealed Himself in that deep dark cloud so that He could reveal Himself safely while speaking. So, from a human point of view, the closer they came to Him, the deeper they came into the darkness. Thus in Exodus 20:21 we read that "the people stood far off, while Moses drew near to the thick darkness where God was." The ~ John W. Kleinig

If you're like most members of the Baby Boom generation, you decided somewhere along the line, probably after about four margaritas, to have children. This was inevitable. Mother Nature, in her infinite wisdom, has instilled within each of us a powerful biological instinct to reproduce; this is her way of assuring that the human race, come what may, will never have any disposable income. ~ Dave Barry

As one who knows many things, the humanist loves the world precisely because of its manifold nature and the opposing forces in itdo not frighten him. Nothing is further from him than the desire to resolve such conflictsand this is precisely the mark of the humanist spirit: not to evaluate contrasts as hostility but to seek human unity, that superior unity, for all that appears irreconcilable. ~ Stefan Zweig

If we try every day to find that place inside us that can see a little more light and give a little more love, the quality of our life will improve significantly. We all long for love. It is the human inheritance to have such a longing. However, we must discover that in order to find it, we must give it. And when we learn to give it, we find that it is, quite amazingly, everywhere around us. ~ Donna Goddard

Is it possible, finally, for one human being to achieve perfect understanding of another? We ~ Haruki Murakami

This is the moment when we have to decide: does a world exist outside ourselves and is that world worth fighting for? Another 200 species went extinct today. They were my kin. They were yours, too. If we know them as such, why aren't we fighting to save them with everything we've got? ~ Lierre Keith

Human life as a whole is not inundated by technique. It has room for activities that are not rationally or systematically ordered. But the collision between spontaneous activities and technique is catastrophic for the spontaneous activities. ~ Jacques Ellul

The doors will be opened to those who are bold enough to knock. ~ Tony Gaskins

Perhaps the body was not a cage that held the soul, but a hand that gripped it like a cane, appearing to guide it, to command it, but all the while dependent upon it, gripping it all the tighter the more that it needed it, finally letting it go. ~ Christopher R. Beha

While in the Florida legislature, I strongly opposed the Stand Your Ground law because I believed it would provide defenses to people who had created the scenarios they sought protection from. Or it would leave juries without the proper rules of engagement that ought govern predictable human interactions. ~ Dan Gelber

Everything on earth is beautiful, everything
except what we ourselves think and do when we forget the higher purposes of life and our own human dignity. ~ Anton Chekhov

Adults make mistakes too. ~ Elizabeth Brundage

But once you cross the Shannon - even though geographically you have only come a short distance - different rules of time apply, and most people still understand the crucial secret of human happiness: that it's better to do a few things slowly, than a lot of things fast. ~ Pete McCarthy

The first step to the knowledge of the wonder and mystery of life is the recognition of the monstrous nature of the earthly human realm as well as its glory, the realization that this is just how it is and that it cannot and will not be changed. Those who think they know how the universe could have been had they created it, without pain, without sorrow, without time, without death, are unfit for illumination. ~ Joseph Campbell

Science is as corruptible a human activity as any other. ~ Michael Crichton

You are a human being now, not like them [the animals]. ~ Herbert Mason

Without the interplay of human against human, the chief interest in life is gone; most of the intellectual values are gone; most of the reason for living is gone. ~ Isaac Asimov

This book is dedicated to all the women - and men - who know that the human desire for romance, love, and sexual passion has nothing to do with age. ~ Pamela Clare

It is proposed that a form of free dialogue may well be one of the most effective ways of investigating the crisis which faces society, and indeed the whole of human nature and consciousness today. Moreover, it may turn out that such a form of free exchange of ideas and information is of fundamental relevance for transforming culture and freeing it of destructive misinformation, so that creativity can be liberated. ~ David Bohm

The barriers between animal and human come down very easily. We belong to a single great family, and if we are lonely and unhappy we gladly accept the friendship of our distant relations. ~ Marlen Haushofer

They address the questions that are proper to us, not as this or that kind of specialist, this or that kind of professional, but as individuals as such - the very questions we are apt to ask when we look up from our work and think about our lives. Questions of love, death, family, morality, time, truth, God, and everything else within the wide, starred universe of human experience. ~ William Deresiewicz

Western science is approaching a paradigm shift of unprecedented proportions, one that will change our concepts of reality and of human nature, bridge the gap between ancient wisdom and modern science, and reconcile the differences between Eastern spirituality and Western pragmatism. ~ Stanislav Grof

I'm an odd portrait painter in that I'm not just interested in human faces. I consider almost all of my paintings to be portraits. ~ Jamie Wyeth

What motivates Olympic athletes to train for years for one event - in some cases, for just seconds of actual competition? It's the same thing that kept my friend Pete nosing around old bookstores for years. It's the same thing that makes a person venture out of a comfortable job to start a new business. We see it in the artist who spends day after day in a studio chipping away at a block of stone. Look closely and you'll find it in the shopper who passes up the good deal in search of the best deal. It's one of the things that makes us most human. We consciously pursue what we value. It's not simply a matter of being driven by biology or genetics or environmental conditioning to satisfy instinctive cravings. Rather, we perceive something, prize it at a certain value, then pursue it according to that assigned value because we were created that way. This ability to perceive, prize, and pursue is part of our essential humanness, and it's the essence of ambition. ~ Dave Harvey

The world now understands the concept of a 'desk murderer.' We know that one doesn't need to be fanatical, sadistic, or mentally ill to murder millions; that it is enough to be a loyal follower eager to do one's duty. ~ Simon Weisenthal

Sometimes, the most healing thing we can do for another human being, is to listen to them, just ... LISTEN. ~ Jaeda DeWalt

I like real problems, the human condition - twisted, darker stuff. ~ Drea De Matteo

One can imagine a sane, healthy, cheerful human society based on no more than the principles of common sense, as validated each day by work, play, and living experience. But this remains the most utopian and fantastic of ideals. ~ Edward Abbey