Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

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.

Would the last animal, eating garbage and living on the last scrap of land, his mate dead, would he still forgive you?

I want to challenge all of you as people of deep conscience, people who are environment stewards of the earth and oceans ... By changing what you eat, you will change the entire contract between the human species and the natural world.

Biological diversity is messy. It walks, it crawls, it swims, it swoops, it buzzes. But extinction is silent, and it has no voice other than our own.

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

Every species becomes extinct; at some point, we will go extinct. The question is, as Homo sapiens, are we going to be able to adapt to the change that we're actually part of? We're causing such dramatic changes to the planet, so yes, you do stop and think, 'I wonder where we're headed.'

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

I don't believe in a biological apocalypse, but I think there is stormy biological weather ahead as the human population continues to grow.

There is no scientific reason to think that we, even with space travel, are going to survive as a species for ever, certainly not by biting off the hand that feeds us, which is exactly what we are doing.

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.

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.

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

Primates will continue to play social games without the least insight into what is killing them.

I believe that the end of things man-made cannot be very far away - must be near at hand.

The earth we abuse and the living things we kill will, in the end, take their revenge; for in exploiting their presence we are diminishing our future.

We have killed off nature, that world entirely independent of us which was here before we arrived and which encircled and supported our human society

We may well blow each other up with atomic weapons before we wipe out all species of life including our own with more gradual means.

Human beings are just animals who will just eat and take advantage of any source of energy until it runs out, and then there'll be catastrophe.

What I'm interested in is the conversations going on about the Anthropocene and what it means to view ourselves as a part of Earth's geological history.

Typhoon damage happens when they hit land, and as humans, we've decided to destroy mangroves and hurt coral reefs. If we don't have barriers, the devastation is worse, and that is scary.

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.

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

We should feel an urgency about our environment and what's been done to it by human action and inaction. I wouldn't say there's a resurgence - I think it's been with us all along, and especially since the 1960s and 1970s, but it is true that there's almost a subsection of the bookstore devoted to it now. Personally, I've been addressing these issues in my long and short fiction since the late 1980s - basically since the beginning of my career.

When geologists announced the beginning of a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, humans destroying the environment, one of the main things they pointed to is the use of plastics in the earth.