Peter Ustinov Quotes

Some day science may have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race can commit suicide by blowing up the world.

I can't visualize the situation in which we nuke ourselves into extinction.

Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken.

On one hand, I think people are destined for something incredible if we don't wipe ourselves out, but I think we're going to wipe 90 percent of ourselves out.

My own judgment of how the world is gonna end is that there will be a country led by a madman that will build a nuclear bomb with so much force, so much power, that it will be dropped somewhere on the face of this earth and that the earth will lose its place.

The world is in such a bad condition that if they don't find what you call a redeemer, every man, woman and child on this planet will be eliminated.

The human race has today the means for annihilating itself—either in a fit of complete lunacy ... or by a careless handling of atomic technology, through the slow poisoning and of deterioration in its genetic structure.

Ever since the invention of gunpowder.. I continually tremble lest men should, in the end, uncover some secret which would provide a short way of abolishing mankind, of annihilating peoples and nations in their entirety.

We can’t blow up the world because of it.

The machinery of destruction is complete, poised on a hair trigger, waiting for the 'button' to be 'pushed' by some misguided or deranged human being or for some faulty computer chip to send out the instruction to fire. That so much should be balanced on so fine a point--that the fruit of four and a half billion years can be undone in a careless moment--is a fact against which belief rebels.

There is a further advantage [to hydrogen bombs]: the supply of uranium in the planet is very limited, and it might be feared that it would be used up before the human race was exterminated, but now that the practically unlimited supply of hydrogen can be utilized, there is considerable reason to hope that homo sapiens may put an end to himself, to the great advantage of such less ferocious animals as may survive. But it is time to return to less cheerful topics.

The next war... may well bury Western civilization forever.

Many people believe that the current system must inevitably end in total annihilation. They reject, sometimes very emotionally, any attempts to analyze this notion.

The probability of apocalypse soon cannot be realistically estimated, but it is surely too high for any sane person to contemplate with equanimity.

Every adult in the world has some sense that he or she might be obliterated at any time by these weapons that we have created.

We are living on the brink of the apocalypse, but the world is asleep.

Life on Earth is at the ever-increasing risk of being wiped out by a disaster, such as sudden global nuclear war, a genetically engineered virus or other dangers we have not yet thought of.

The world generally speaking is now drifting on a more and more devastating course towards the absurd target of extermination - or rather, to be more exact - of the northern hemisphere's towns, fields, and the people who have developed our civilization.

I could announce one morning that the world was going to blow up in three hours and people would be calling in about my hair!

I've begun to look at the world through apocalypse eyes. Our society, which seems so sturdily built out of concrete and custom, is just a temporary resting place, a hotel our civilization checked into a couple hundred years ago and must one day check out of.

The end of the world is on people's minds. We have the power to destroy or save ourselves, but the question is what do you do with that responsibility.

I think there's a collective consciousness around the world that there are things beyond our control that have the power to annihilate us, as a species, and it's all rather frightening.

Sometimes I still worry that the next day will be the last day of the Earth.

I think that obviously, there is a perverse attraction to a fundamentally changed world or the end of the world. There is a death wish, a perverse death wish. Not just for ourselves, not just for the movie 'Death Wish,' but for the end of all human life.

I almost think it is the ultimate destiny of science to exterminate the human race.