Desmond Morris Quotes

The growing possibility of our destroying ourselves and the world with our own neglect and excess is tragic and very real.

My world, my Earth is a ruin. A planet spoiled by the human species. We multiplied and fought and gobbled until there was nothing left, and then we died. We controlled neither appetite nor violence; we did not adapt. We destroyed ourselves. But we destroyed the world first.

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.

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

I want to see what technology's going to be like in a few hundred years, if the human race hasn't completely obliterated itself by then.

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

Man has mounted science, and is now run away with. I firmly believe that before many centuries more, science will be the master of men. The engines he will have invented will be beyond his strength to control. Someday science may have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race commit suicide, by blowing up the world.

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.

There's no question that if we stay on planet Earth and never leave, that eventually we'll be wiped out.

If I had to predict, the way things are going, I'd say the chances are about 50-50 that humanity will be extinct or nearly extinct within 50 years. Weapons of mass destruction, disease, I mean this global warming is scaring the living daylights out of me.

We're told, often enough, that as a species we are poised on the edge of the abyss. It's possible that our puffed-up, prideful intelligence has outstripped our instinct for survival and the road back to safety has already been washed away. In which case there's nothing much to be done. If there is something to be done, then one thing is for sure: those who created the problem will not be the ones who come up with a solution.

The human race may well become extinct before the end of the century.

Science seems ready to confer upon us, as its final gift, the power to erase human life from this planet.

We could not wipe ourselves out with a nuclear war. I do not want so sound too positive. It would be a catastrophe, but it would not be a final one. We are not powerful enough for that. An asteroid could be that powerful. That is why we need to do our homework.

Our presence on this planet does not seem to be sustainable. Our technical civilization makes up particularly vulnerable. There is talk all over the scientific community about climate change. Many of them [scientists] agree, the end of human life on earth is assured.

We hope that as a species we're capable of dealing with environmental catastrophe before it actually does collectively kill most of us.

If current tendencies persist, the outcome will be disastrous before too long. Large parts of the world will become barely habitable affecting hundreds of millions of people, along with other disasters that we can barely contemplate.

Do they see the lethal insanity of a race to the brink of oblivion, and then over the edge? Apparently not. If they did, surely they wouldn't be racing to begin with. Or is it a simple failure of imagination? One doesn't like to think such a rudimentary failing could bring about the end, yet...

The world came so close to self-destruction during my lifetime. I was serving in the American Army, in the Pacific, at the time they bombed Hiroshima and then Nagasaki, and I felt there something like a foretaste of the end of the world.

Clouds of a different sort signal an environmental holocaust without precedent. Once again, world leaders waffle, hoping the danger will dissipate. Yet today the evidence is as clear as the sounds of glass shattering in Berlin.

We all live under the constant threat of our own annihilation. Only by the most outrageous violation of ourselves have we achieved our capacity to live in relative adjustment to a civilization apparently driven to its own destruction.

I've given up reading the papers. Since the world's so obviously bent on killing itself, I decided months ago to sit back and let it.

There is a very real danger that we will kill everything on this planet now that we have the technological power to do so.

To the eyes of a god, mankind must appear as a species of bacteria which multiply and become progressively virulent whenever they find themselves in a congenial culture, and whose activity diminishes until they disappear completely as soon as proper measures are taken to sterilize them.

The end of the world has come often, and continues to come.