Samuel Adams
Politician
"Liberty will not long survive the total extinction of morals."
Extinction quotes
Extinction
74 quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
Hillel the Elder
Religious Leader, Scholar
"He who refuses to learn deserves extinction."
Samuel Beckett
Playwright, Novelist
"In the landscape of extinction, precision is next to godliness."
Stewart Brand
Environmentalist, Author
"Humans have made a huge hole in nature in the last 10,000 years. [With de-extinction,] we have the ability now, and maybe the moral obligation, to repair some of the damage."
Wade Davis
Anthropologist, Author
"Its haunting to realize that half of the languages of the world are teetering on the brink of extinction."
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside extinction — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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Extinction quotes (page 1 of 4)
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"The problems of this world are only truly solved in two ways: by extinction or duplication."
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"There are certain prehistoric things that swim beyond extinction."
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"This fundamental subject of Natural Selection will be treated at some length in the fourth chapter; and we shall then see how Natural Selection almost inevitably causes much Extinction of the less improved forms of life and induces what I have called Divergence of Character."
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"The diminution of public virtue is usually attended with that of public happiness, and the public liberty will not long survive the total extinction of morals."
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"Yet it is necessary to hope, though hope should always be deluded, for hope itself is happiness, and its frustrations, however frequent, are yet less dreadful than its extinction."
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"Corporate America is a 20th-century dinosaur, trembling on the edge of extinction, and the only way for you to have a genuinely secure future is for you to take control of that future."
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"A society where the simple many obey the few seers can live; a society where all were seers could live even more fully. But a society where the mass is still simple and the seers are no longer attended to can achieve only superficiality, baseness, ugliness, and in the end extinction. On or back we must go: to stay here is death."
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"I do not think that the government, under the guise of some phony, alarmist, pseudo-scientific rhetoric, should attempt to control the evolution of consciousness. After all, if these things truly are consciousness-expanding, it doesn't take too much intelligence to realize that it is the absence of consciousness that is causing our flirtation with extinction and planetary disaster."
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"Only sometimes you can't feel anything about a subject without hypothesizing its extinction."
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"What I really wanted was to travel and see all the different animals that were on the verge of extinction."
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"The buffaloes are gone. And those who saw the buffaloes are gone."
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"Precise adaptation, with each part finely honed to perform a definite function in an optimal way, can only lead to blind alleys, dead ends, and extinction."
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"Looking at everything, I started to feel nauseous, as if the seventies had taken refuge here against extinction and were preparing to take over the world."
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"The folly of war is that it can have no natural end except in the extinction an entire people."
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"There is a peculiar pathos in the extinction of a nation."
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