E. O. Wilson Quotes

We all see that, today, man can destroy the foundation of his existence: his Earth.

I don't think the planet can survive people. It's not the other way around. I don't think the planet can survive.

Man has lost the capacity to foresee and to forestall. He will end by destroying the earth.

Class of 2009: you are going to have to figure out what it means to be a human being on Earth at a time when every living system is declining, and the rate of decline is accelerating. Kind of a mind-boggling situation... but not one peer-reviewed paper published in the last thirty years can refute that statement.

We're finally going to get the bill for the Industrial Age. If the projections are right, it's going to be a big one: the ecological collapse of the planet.

Here we are, the most clever species ever to have lived. So how is it we can destroy the only planet we have?

Here we are, arguably the most intelligent being that's ever walked planet Earth, with this extraordinary brain ... and yet we're destroying the only home we have.

We’re destroying the world because we are, in a very literal and deliberate way, at war with it.

We would destroy ourselves and the planet if no change happens, because of the amplification of the egoic state through science and technology.

It was once religion which told us that we are all sinners because of original sin. It is now the ecology of our planet which pronounces us all to be sinners because of the excessive exploits of human inventiveness.

This is a wonderful planet, and it is being completely destroyed by people who have too much money and power and no empathy.

Because we're not in harmony with the environment, we're destroying the environment that supports us.

We are a plague on the Earth.

The truth is that our race survived ignorance; it is our scientific genius that will do us in.

We are in danger of destroying ourselves by our greed and stupidity. We cannot remain looking inwards at ourselves on a small and increasingly polluted and overcrowded planet.

We're in a war, the war of industrial civilization against the natural world.

Hour by hour, minute by minute, I make decisions that seem like the right things to do at the time, but which prevent me from reflecting on the most significant, most critical fact in my life: Every day I participate in a system that is weaponizing our big, gorgeous planet against our kids.

You can certainly make the case that we're devolving, that it may already be too late to save the rain forests, let alone the planet.

The earth is going to survive, it's the people that aren't.

We are killing life on Earth, we're in the sixth mass extinction event and it's possible that human beings will go extinct. We're in a culture that doesn't want you to think about that.

The species will continue, whatever apocalypse we manage to unleash. It just won't be much fun to live through.

For years I have engaged with this ecological crisis on an intellectual level, the mounting evidence, the science... but now I have engaged with the potential destruction of this world on an emotional level and there is a fundamental difference. There is huge feeling of grief, of loss.

The planet isn't going anywhere. We are.

I'm very pessimistic about the future of the human species. We have been so indifferent to life on the whole that it will take its toll. It's not just the polar bears that are having a hard time; what we're doing is gradually impoverishing and poisoning the whole of the rest of life.

In reality, the main thing that keeps me awake at night is probably the destruction of the planet that's what gets me pretty upset.