Naomi Alderman Quotes

As my early drawings warned me, where humans go, lions and tidal waves follow.

It was once religion which threatened us with a last judgment at the end of days. It is now our tortured planet which predicts the arrival of such a day without any heavenly intervention.

During the first million years of its existence, mankind survived five apocalypses without succumbing to extinction. It endured the Apocalypse of Steel, the Apocalypse of Hydrogen, the Apocalypse of Serotonin, and both Apocalypses of Water, the second of which occurred despite certain contracts to the contrary.

Once people realized that, 'Hey, we're going to be left on Earth here, and everything is going to hell quickly,' sci-fi soon became about our own self-destruction.

The stakes in my books tend to be kind of ridiculously high. In 'Kid vs. Squid,' the question is whether or not the California coast will be subsumed by the ocean in favor of the creation of a new Atlantis. In 'The Boy at the End of the World,' what's at stake is the survival of the human species.

Nature is the worst terrorist you can imagine.

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

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

I think that thing about the destruction of the world is there all the time, it's there every day when we look out the window.

The impacts of extreme weather are already creating chaos.

If you’re listening to this, congratulations! You survived Doomsday. I’d like to apologize straightaway for any inconvenience the end of the world may have caused you. The earthquakes, rebellions, riots,tornadoes, floods, tsunamis, and of course the giant snake who swallowed the sun—I’m afraid most of that was our fault. Carter and I decided we should at least explain how it happened.

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

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

Civilisations have been destroyed many times, and this civilisation is no different. It can be destroyed. We can think of time in terms of millions of years and life will resume little by little. The cosmos operates for us very urgently, but geological time is different.

The end of the human race will be that it will eventually die of civilization.

If we destroy the biosphere, then mankind will die. We all waste our time worrying about stupid wars and petty jealousy and greed, and all the time, we're sitting on a time bomb.

The earth is a fickle place for all life, not least the human project of civilization.

Nightmares of a capital city overwhelmed by tsunami, war or plague transfix us, but catastrophe is first felt locally, and there are many homes outside the city.

We, Homo sapiens, destroyed the majority of the large mammalian species in North America and Australasia just over 10,000 years ago. We, Homo sapiens, now are destroying the other species that presently exist on this planet at a rate of about 15,000 to 20,000 per year.

We are a plague on the Earth.

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.

As a species, we've somehow survived large and small ice ages, genetic bottlenecks, plagues, world wars and all manner of natural disasters, but I sometimes wonder if we'll survive our own ingenuity.

What region of the earth is not full of our calamities?

Blizzards, floods, volcanoes, hurricanes, earthquakes: They fascinate because they nakedly reveal that Mother Nature, afflicted with bipolar disorder, is as likely to snuff us as she is to succor us

In the apocalypse, I think those average, mediocre folks are the ones who are going to live.