Species Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

We must then be guided everywhere by natural affinities in composing the groups which result by dividing each kingdom into classes, each class into orders, each order into sections or families, each family into genera, and each genus into different species if there is occasion for it.

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck

In the 24 hours since this time yesterday, over 200,000 acres of rainforest have been destroyed in our world. Fully 13 million tons of toxic chemicals have been released into our environment. Over 45,000 people have died from starvation, 38,000 of them children. And more than 130 plant and animal species have been driven to extinction by the actions of humans. And all this just since yesterday.

The law of nature instructs most animals to cherish and educate their infant progeny. The law of reason inculcates to the human species the returns of filial piety.

Looking back now on the whole sexual scene we can see that our species has remained much more loyal to its basic biological urges than we might at first imagine. Its primate sexual system with carnivore modifications has survived all the fantastic technological advances remarkably well.

It is the acquisition of skills in particular, irrespective of their utility, that is potent in making life meaningful. Since man has no inborn skills, the survival of the species has depended on the ability to acquire and perfect skills. Hence the mastery of skills is a uniquely human activity and yields deep satisfaction.

We seem, these days, much more willing to recognize the perils before us than we were even a decade ago. The newly recognized dangers threaten all of us, equally. No one can say how it will turn out down here. But this is also, we may note, the first time that a species has become able to journey to the planets and the stars. Sailors on a becalmed sea, we sense a stirring of the breeze.

Isaiah (41-9) seems to have had some knowledge of forest types and the ecological relations of species. He quotes Jehovah in this manner: "I will plant in the wilderness the cedar, the Shittah-tree [Hebrew for acaia tree], and the myrtle, and the oil tree; I will set in the desert the fir tree, the pine, and the box tree together."

The facts of variability, of the struggle for existence, of adaptation to conditions, were notorious enough; but none of us had suspected that the road to the heart of the species problem lay through them, until Darwin and Wallace dispelled the darkness.

Thomas Henry Huxley

The question then becomes: If we have been around painting cave walls and designing artifacts for some 30,000 years at least, how long will it be until Homo sapiens becomes something else? When will a future descendent species look back on us as their naive predecessors?

Fish are very easy to understand because only about thirteen thousand kinds or species have been discovered up to now.

The rule is that no species prevails for long as measured in the units of eras by which our planet conducts its affairs.

Animals belonging to the same species are like-minded, just as they are like-headed, like-bellied, like-limbed.

Henry Jones Ford

Love is a very ancient force, which served its purpose in its day but no longer is essential for the survival of the species.

Mousse was a Labrador retriever, which is a large enthusiastic bulletproof species of dog made entirely from synthetic materials. This is the kind of dog that, if it takes an interest in your personal regions (which of course it does) you cannot fend it off with a blowtorch.

Species are merely those strongly marked races or local forms which, when in contact, do not intermix, and when inhabiting distinct areas are generally regarded to have had a separate origin, and to be incapable of producing a fertile hybrid offspring.

Alfred Russel Wallace

We are all proprietary toward cities we love. 'Ah, you should have seen her when I loved her!' we say, reciting glories since faded or defiled, trusting her to no one else; that others should know and love her in her present fallen state (for she must fall without our vigilant love) is a species of betrayal.

Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

It is a paradox of Life that all species breed past mere replacement. Any paradise of plenty soon fills to become paradise no more.

To speak highly of one with whom we are intimate is a species of egotism. Our modesty as well as our jealousy teaches us caution on this subject.

William Hazlitt

Despite one or two minority appeals our society is not outraged at man's unremitting use of the animal world. Ecologists and environmentalists may talk of "ecological consciousness" or "environmental responsibility" but seldom, if ever, is this responsibility articulated towards other non-human species in particular.

As a general rule of biology, migratory species are less 'aggressive' than sedentary ones.

The basic problem with the new species of global institutions is that they have not yet become aware of themselves as living. Once they do, they can become a place for the presencing of the whole as it might be, not just as it has been.

Betty Sue Flowers

We console ourselves with the comfortable fallacy that a single museum piece will do, ignoring the clear dictum of history that a species must be saved in many places if it is to be saved at all.

We are one of only three species on our planet that can claim to be self-aware, yet self-delusion may be a more significant characteristic of our kind.

Michael Crichton

Man is more than merely an animal to exist and propagate his species. His mind gives him capacity to search out the great truths in God's arrangement and this lifts him far above the other animal creation.

Joseph Franklin Rutherford

If it be so interesting to us to follow, in the infancy of our species, the almost obliterated traces of extinct nations, why should it not also be so, to search, amid the darkness of the infancy of the Earth, for the traces of revolutions which have taken place anterior to the existence of all nations?