Quotes & Sayings About Humans Destroying Themselves

What are humans meant to do; why are we here? Are we a mutation on the earth destroying its host? Are we a cancer destined to kill what supports us? I think not. So exploring this question is a powerful exercise in meaning; what is the meaning of human existence? — David W. Earle

Many of you would like to take evil and step on it, destroying it like you would a bug. Squish, smash! Begone into another reality! This practice of eliminating human life because it is perceived as evil does you no good. In the end your history and experience are filled with war of one kind or another; humans fighting one another for the right to speak their truth and share their perception.And one human or another is always wanting to suppress someone else's ideas, someone else's thinking. — Barbara Marciniak

Her hope was to preserve what she called The Way, to keep it alive, for that future moment when the current obsession with excess and hierarchy imploded. Wilma said many Native people believed that the earth as a living organism would just one day shrug off the human species that was destroying it - and start over. In a less cataclysmic vision, humans would realize that we are killing our home and each other, and seek out The Way. That's why Native people were guarding it. — Gloria Steinem

This is not just an abstract point. What I mean is that power has a social function. Its role is not just to enforce domination or to create winners and losers: it also organizes communities, societies, marketplaces, and the world. Hobbes explained this well. Because the urge for power is primal, he argued, it follows that humans are inherently conflictual and competitive. Left to express that nature without the presence of power to inhibit and direct them, they would fight until there was nothing left to fight for. But if they obeyed a "common power," they could put their efforts toward building society, not destroying it. "During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war," Hobbes wrote, "and such a war as is of every man against every man. — Moises Naim

Certainly on this planet it is not apparent that there are beings more intelligent than humans, although a case can be made for dolphins and whales, and in fact if humans succeed in destroying themselves with nuclear weapons, a case can be made that ALL other animals are smarter than humans. — Carl Sagan

Long after the traces of the human animal have disappeared, many of the species it is bent on destroying will still be around, along with others that have yet to spring up.

The Earth will forget mankind. The play of life will go on. — John N. Gray

We are rendering many species extinct; we may even succeed in destroying ourselves. But this is nothing new for the Earth. Humans would then be just the latest in a long sequence of upstart species that arrive on-stage, make some alterations in the scenery, kill off some of the cast, and then themselves exit stage-left forever. New players appear in the next act. The Earth abides. It has seen all this before. — Carl Sagan

Unfortunately for the existing mature systems in nature, the rapid expansion of the human bubble is destroying them. Unfortunately for us, we can't exist without them any more than a living person can exist without oxygen or a body can exist without a head. In this sense, it is actually a conceptual error to define the environment as the rest of the biosphere save humans, and think of ourselves as apart from it, since we can't exist without it. — Jacob Lund Fisker

Nature is seen by humans through a screen of beliefs, knowledge, and purposes, and it is in terms of their images of nature, rather than of the actual structure of nature, that they act. Yet, it is upon nature itself that they do act, and it is nature itself that acts upon them, nurturing or destroying them. — Roy Rappaport

Because the urge for power is primal, he argued, it follows that humans are inherently conflictual and competitive. Left to express that nature without the presence of power to inhibit and direct them, they would fight until there was nothing left to fight for. But if they obeyed a "common power," they could put their efforts toward building society, not destroying it. "During the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war," Hobbes wrote, "and such a war as is of every man against every man."23 — Moises Naim

Who would you rather live with, a bunch of bonobos feeling good? Or chimpanzees eating each other's babies? Or humans waterboarding each other and destroying the planet? — Francine Prose

Because it worked really well for some people," I said. "Let's not lie, Hart. It worked really well for us. For humans. And more specifically for the Colonial Union. A system of government, stable for centuries, predicated on killing the shit out of everyone else and taking their land. That's practically the modus operandi of every successful human civilization to date. No wonder some of us wanted to return to it, even at the risk of destroying the Colonial Union itself. Because if we got back, we'd be meaner than ever before. — John Scalzi

Technology is both a tool for helping humans and for destroying them. This is the paradox of our times which we're compelled to face. — Frank Herbert

Destroying species is like tearing pages out of an unread book, written in a language humans hardly know how to read, about the place where they live. — Holmes Rolston III

What if, however, humans exceed animals in their capacity for violence precisely because they speak? As Hegel was already well aware, there is something violent in the very symbolisation of a thing, which equals its mortification. This violence operates at multiple levels. Language simplifies the designated thing, reducing it to a single feature. It dismembers the thing, destroying its organic unity, treating its parts and properties as autonomous. It inserts the thing into a field of meaning which is ultimately external to it. When we name gold "gold," we violently extract a metal from its natural texture, investing into it our dreams of wealth, power, spiritual purity, and so on, which have nothing whatsoever to do with the immediate reality of gold. — Slavoj Zizek

Human activity is destroying the natural systems that we depend upon for our survival. Our most basic instinct as humans is to survive; yet we continue to destroy our life-support machine. Connected humans understand this terrible contradiction; disconnected humans are not able to.

Not all humans are responsible: just those who are part of Industrial Civilization. Industrial Civilization depends on economic growth and the unsustainable use of natural resources, so it has developed a complex set of tools for keeping people disconnected from the real world and living a life that keeps civilization running. Humans have been manipulated in order to be part of a destructive system.

The only way to prevent global ecological collapse and thus ensure the survival of humanity is to rid the world of Industrial Civilization. — Keith Farnish

Humans may be destroying their chances for decent survival. It won't kill everybody, but it would change the world dramatically. — Noam Chomsky

It honestly didn't matter how we humans got to be the way we are, whether evolution or special creation was responsible. What mattered and mattered desperately was our future development. Were we going to go on destroying God's creation, fighting each other, hurting the other creatures of the His planet? — Jane Goodall

The bigger question is how does a rogue species called humans - whose population just blew through the seven billion mark on it's way to nine billion members - manage to survive the next century on a planet with finite resources, without destroying its delicate balance in the process. — Edward Burtynsky

I hear it's better to use animal products than synthetics, which are harmful to humans and the earth ... but destroying one segment of the creation to allegedly save another is the idea of fools!!! — Adela Popescu

HUMANS don't generate toxic wastes - but our culture certainly does. HUMANS aren't toxic to the face of the earth - but our culture certainly is. It's vitally important for our children to know that the curse that needs to be lifted from the earth is not humanity. It's important for them to know that we may be a doomed culture, but we are not a doomed species. It's important for them to understand that it's not being HUMAN that is destroying the world. It's living this way that is destroying the world. It's important for them to know that humans have lived other ways, because it's important for them to know that it's possible to live other ways. Otherwise they can only repeat the falsehood spoken by that waste disposal engineer, that the only way to stop poisoning the world is to get rid of humanity. — Daniel Quinn

Seeing that humans in modern cultures were destroying their environment for the sake of self-indulgence, the Dokkalfar focused their attention on poorer nations, whose terrain still flourished. A century of ethnic cleansing, deforestation, and war assured the land weakened and humans stayed in abject poverty. The result was a perfect contrast. In certain parts of the world, millions of children died of starvation and disease while other countries held excesses and riches never before seen. Earth became a place of greedy extremes. Societies lost the ability to relate to one another, choosing instead to focus on their own. No one noticed the one common theme every culture held.
The world itself was dying. — Elizabeth Isaacs

As technology enables us to upgrade humans, overcome old age and find the key to happiness, won't people care less about fictional gods, nations and corporations, and focus instead on deciphering the physical and biological reality? It might seem so, but in fact things are far more complicated. Modern science certainly changed the rules of the game, yet it did not simply replace myths with facts. Myths continue to dominate humankind, and science only makes these myths stronger. Instead of destroying the intersubjective reality, science will enable it to control the objective and subjective realities more completely than ever before. Thanks to computers and bioengineering, the difference between fiction and reality will blur, as people reshape reality to match their pet fictions. — Yuval Noah Harari

I look at it this way ... For centuries now, man has done everything he can to destroy, defile, and interfere with nature: clear-cutting forests, strip-mining mountains, poisoning the atmosphere, over-fishing the oceans, polluting the rivers and lakes, destroying wetlands and aquifers ... so when nature strikes back, and smacks him on the head and kicks him in the nuts, I enjoy that. I have absolutely no sympathy for human beings whatsoever. None. And no matter what kind of problem humans are facing, whether it's natural or man-made, I always hope it gets worse. — George Carlin

What's with all the cheering over the apocalypse, anyway? Oh, yay, we get to kill poor helpless humans."
"The excitement over the apocalypse had nothing to do with humans."
"Could have fooled me."
"Humans are incidental."
"Killing and destroying an entire species is incidental?" I can't help but sound like I'm accusing him (Raffe), even though I know he wasn't part of the plan to wipe us out.
Or at least, I think he wasn't personally involved, but I don't really know that, do I?
"Your people have been doing it to all kinds of species."
"That's not the same."
"Why not? — Susan Ee

It's strange, isn't it? How humans can protect their own with such fierceness and loyalty, yet not blink an eye when it comes to destroying someone else. — Caroline Fyffe

Look at them, the bugs. Humans have used everything in their power to extinguish them: every kind of poison, aerial sprays, introducing and cultivating their natural predators, searching for and destroying their eggs, using genetic modification to sterilize them, burning with fire, drowning with water. Every family has bug spray, every desk has a fly-swatter under it... this long war has been going on for the entire history of human civilization. But the outcome is still in doubt. The bugs have not been eliminated. — Liu Cixin