Yuval Noah Harari Quotes

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.

About 15,000 years ago, humans colonised America, wiping out in the process about 75% of its large mammals. Numerous other species disappeared from Africa, from Eurasia, and from the myriad islands around their coasts. The archaeological record of country after country tells the same sad story.

In pushing other species to extinction, humanity is busy sawing off the limb on which it perches.

We are in the midst of the 6th largest extinction event in the history of the plant and the first caused by human action.

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.

We must recognize that we're all part of a web of life around the world. Anytime you extinguish a species, the consequences are serious.

Humans have changed ecosystems more rapidly and extensively than in any comparable period of time in human history, largely to meet rapidly growing demands for food, fresh water, timber, fiber and fuel. This has resulted in a substantial and largely irreversible loss in the diversity of life on Earth.

The Dodo never had a chance. He seems to have been invented for the sole purpose of becoming extinct and that was all he was good for.

Nature stopped being natural decades ago.

The losses of the natural world are our loss, their silence silences something within the human mind.

There's money to be made by driving a species extinct.

Over the last several decades, human activity have so altered the basic chemistry of the seas that they are now experiencing evolution in reverse to the barren primeval waters of hundreds of millions of years ago.

If you think about it, every single species is endangered. Homo sapiens at the front of the line, mosquitoes and lawyers at the back.

Our planetary system is affected by a magnitude of force as powerful as any naturally occurring global catastrophe, but one caused solely by a single species: us.

We're losing a species every few seconds. We cannot put them back. If we change our mind and say, 'Oops, we made a mistake' - it's too late. This is the world we live with.

There is a beginning and end to all life - and to all human endeavors. Species evolve and die off. Empires rise, then break apart. Businesses grow, then fold. There are no exceptions. I'm OK with all that. Yet it pains me to bear witness to the sixth great extinction, where we humans are directly responsible for the extirpation of so many wonderful creatures and invaluable indigenous cultures. It saddens me to observe the plight of our own species; we appear to be incapable of solving our problems.

We who revel in nature's diversity and feel instructed by every animal tend to brand Homo sapiens as the greatest catastrophe since the Cretaceous extinction.

It's the next annihilation of vast numbers of species. It is happening now, and we, the human race, are its cause

We are the only species systematically destroying its own habitat.

Common man has at long last got himself so far out of gear with nature and his environment that he is beginning to see the shape of extinction, whether he recognizes it as such or not.

I just wonder what it would be like to be reincarnated in an animal whose species had been so reduced in numbers than it was in danger of extinction. What would be its feelings toward the human species whose population explosion had denied it somewhere to exist. I must confess that I am tempted to ask for reincarnation as a particularly deadly virus.

I don't know if human activity is the only cause, but mostly, in great part, it is man who has slapped nature in the face, we have in a sense taken over nature.

I was reading about how countless species are being pushed toward extinction by man's destruction of forests. . . . Sometimes I think the surest sign that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us.

When I hear of the destruction of a species, I feel just as if all the works of some great writer have perished.

In the past few decades, Earth's natural systems have endured more pressure than in all preceding human history.