#extinction

I once spoke to someone who had survived the genocide in Rwanda, and she said to me that there was now nobody left on the face of the earth, either friend or relative, who knew who she was. No one who remembered her girlhood and her early mischief and family lore; no sibling or boon companion who could tease her about that first romance; no lover or pal with whom to reminisce. All her birthdays, exam results, illnesses, friendships, kinships—gone. She went on living, but with a tabula rasa as her diary and calendar and notebook. I think of this every time I hear of the callow ambition to 'make a new start' or to be 'born again': Do those who talk this way truly wish for the slate to be wiped? Genocide means not just mass killing, to the level of extermination, but mass obliteration to the verge of extinction. You wish to have one more reflection on what it is to have been made the object of a 'clean' sweep? Try Vladimir Nabokov's microcosmic miniature story 'Signs and Symbols,' which is about angst and misery in general but also succeeds in placing it in what might be termed a starkly individual perspective. The album of the distraught family contains a faded study of Aunt Rosa, a fussy, angular, wild-eyed old lady, who had lived in a tremulous world of bad news, bankruptcies, train accidents, cancerous growths—until the Germans put her to death, together with all the people she had worried about. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#anonymity #born-again #clean-slate #extinction #family

The dinosaurs became extinct because they didn't have a space program. And if we become extinct because we don't have a space program, it'll serve us right! ↗

— Larry Niven

#extinction #insightful #space-exploration #insight

Land bridges were everywhere during the extinction, many species were spreading, and there were many diseases. ↗

— Robert T. Bakker

#diseases #during #everywhere #extinction #land

Man steps on an ant when he can't catch the fly. ↗

— Bill Gaede

#economic-collapse #environmentalism #extinction #gaede #globalization

There are so many issues in our oceans - like the near extinction of blue fin tuna - that should be taken more seriously worldwide. ↗

— Heston Blumenthal

#extinction #issues #like #many #more

The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality. ↗

— T. S. Eliot

#continual #extinction #personality #progress #self-sacrifice

America has faced much more difficult times, including potential national extinction, without flinching. ↗

— Nick Clooney

#difficult #difficult times #extinction #faced #flinching

The government of the United States is a device for maintaining in perpetuity the rights of the people, with the ultimate extinction of all privileged classes. ↗

— Calvin Coolidge

#device #extinction #government #maintaining #people

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

— John Keegan

#i #into #ourselves #situation #visualize

The extinction of race consciousness as between Muslims is one of the outstanding achievements of Islam, and in the contemporary world there is, as it happens, a crying need for the propagation of this Islamic virtue. ↗

— Arnold J. Toynbee

#between #consciousness #contemporary #contemporary world #crying