Species Quotes (page 9)
There is, I am sensible, an age at which every individual of you would choose to stop; and you will look out for the age at which, had you your wish, your species had stopped. Uneasy at your present condition for reasons which threaten your unhappy posterity with still greater uneasiness, you will perhaps wish it were in your power to go back; and this sentiment ought to be considered, as the panegyric of your first parents, the condemnation of you contemporaries, and a source of terror to...
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Overall, it seems now possible to draw a reasonably good explanation of why the human condition is a singularity, why the likes of it has occurred only once and took so long in coming. The reason is simply the extreme improbability of the preadaptations necessary for it to occur at all. Each of the evolutionary steps has been a full-blown adaptation in its own right. Each has required a particular sequence of one or more preadaptations that occurred previously. Homo sapiens is the only...
E. O. Wilson
For some days I haunted the spot where these scenes had taken place, sometimes wishing to see you, sometimes resolved to quit the world and its miseries forever. At length I wandered towards these mountains, and have ranged through their immense recesses, consumed by a burning passion which you alone can gratify. We may not part until you have promised to comply with my requisition. I am alone and miserable; man will not associate with me; but one as deformed and horrible as myself would not...
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
They . . . are . . . so. . . sorry, ” she whispered. “The machine brings back no . . . pictures . . . only the food and air and water. It is programmed . . . as you suggested, Dem Lia . . . to eliminate infestations. They are . . . so . . . so . . . sorry for the loss of Ouster life. They offer the suicide of . . . of their species . . . if it would atone for the destruction.
Dan Simmons
I wanted to destroy everything beautiful I’d never have. Burn the Amazon rain forests. Pump chlorofluorocarbons straight up to gobble the ozone. Open the dump valves on supertankers and uncap offshore oil wells. I wanted to kill all the fish I couldn’t afford to eat, and smother the French beaches I’d never see. I wanted the whole world to hit bottom. I really wanted to put a bullet between the eyes of every endangered panda that wouldn’t screw to save its species and every whale and dolphin...
Chuck Palahniuk