Endangered Species Quotes

“One saw a bird dying, shot by a man. It was flying with rhythmic beat and beautifully, with such freedom and lack of fear. And the gun shattered it; it fell to the earth and all the life had gone out of it. A dog fetched it, and the man collected other dead birds. He was chattering with his friend and seemed so utterly indifferent. All that he was concerned with was bringing down so many birds, and it was over as far as he was concerned. They are killing all over the world. Those marvellous, great animals of the sea, the whales, are killed by the million, and the tiger and so many other animals are now becoming endangered species. Man is the only animal that is to be dreaded.”
― Jiddu Krishnamurti, Krishnamurti to Himself: His Last Journal

“David had been photographing endangered species in the Hawaiian rainforest and elsewhere for years, and his collections of photographs and Suzie's tarot cards seemed somehow related. Because species disappear when their habitat does, he photographed them against the nowhere of a black backdrop (which sometimes meant propping up a black velvet cloth in the most unlikely places and discouraging climates), and so each creature, each plant, stood as though for a formal portrait alone against the darkness. The photographs looked like cards too, card from the deck of the world in which each creature describes a history, a way of being in the world, a set of possibilities, a deck from which cards are being thrown away, one after another. Plants and animals are a language, even in our reduced, domesticated English, where children grow like weeds or come out smelling like roses, the market is made up of bulls and bears, politics of hawks and doves. Like cards, flora and fauna could be read again and again, not only alone but in combination, in the endlessly shifting combinations of a nature that tells its own stories and colors ours, a nature we are losing without even knowing the extent of that loss.”
― Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost

“Celebrity chefs are the leaders in the field of food, and we are the led. Why should the leaders of chemical businesses be held responsible for polluting the marine environment with a few grams of effluent, which is sublethal to marine species, while celebrity chefs are turning out endangered fish at several dozen tables a night without enduring a syllable of criticism?”
― Charles Clover, The End of the Line: How Overfishing Is Changing the World and What We Eat

“When it comes to looking after all the species that are already endangered, there's such a lot to do that sometimes it might all seem to be too much, especially when there are so many other important things to worry about. But if we stop trying, the chances are that pretty soon we'll end up with a world where there are no tigers or elephants, or sawfishes or whooping cranes, or albatrosses or ground iguanas. And I think that would be a shame, don't you?”
― Martin Jenkins, Can We Save the Tiger?

“Living wild species are like a library of books still unread. Our heedless destruction of them is akin to burning that library without ever having read its books.”
― John Dingell

“We cannot live in a world where the Monarch Butterfly does not exist. Period.”
― Tarisa Parrish, The Adventures of Johnny Butterflyseed

“Right now, in the amazing moment that to us counts as the present, we are deciding, without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will forever be closed. No other creature has ever managed this and it will, unfortunately, be our most enduring legacy.”
― Elizabeth Kolbert

“The rarer they get, the fewer meanings animals can have. Eventually rarity is all they are made of. The condor is an icon of extinction. There's little else to it now but being the last of its kind. And in this lies the diminution of the world. How can you love something, how can you fight to protect it, if all it means is loss?”
― Helen Macdonald, H is for Hawk

“I once saw two endangered species about to have sex, but I had to put a stop to it because I suspected one of them of being a prostitute. Then I went to the ATM and took out some cash just to be certain.”
― Jarod Kintz, I design saxophone music in blocks, like Stonehenge

“The more a species is rare
the more we like and protect it...
So what about humans?”
― Erik Tanghe

“Plant More Milkweed!”
― Tarisa Parrish, The Adventures of Johnny Butterflyseed

“Poaching of one kind or another is, of course, the single most serious threat to the survival of the mountain gorillas, but it's hard not to wonder whether declaring open season on human beings is the best plan for solving the problem. We are not an endangered species ourselves yet, but this is not for lack of trying.”
― Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See

“Exploiting nature has no real benefits; only irreversible consequences.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, These Words Burn Like Fire

“Dams also tend to be built in remote areas which are the last refuge for species that have been displaced by development in other regions.”
― Patrick McCully, Silenced Rivers: The Ecology and Politics of Large Dams

“Although justifications for wild meat harvest in terms of food for impoverished communities must be weighed seriously, it is critical to acknowledge that the terms ‘protein’ and ‘meat’ are not synonymous.”
― William J. Ripple

“Nonhuman primates have been crowded out of diminishing forests, hunted for food or “medicine,” kidnapped for the lucrative pet/tourist trade, and bred for science. As a result, every primate species on the planet—aside from human beings—is either endangered or threatened.”
― Lisa Kemmerer, Primate People: Saving Nonhuman Primates through Education, Advocacy, and Sanctuary

“International trade in primates flourishes because we exploit primates for science.”
― Lisa Kemmerer, Primate People: Saving Nonhuman Primates through Education, Advocacy, and Sanctuary

“Nonhuman primates are many and wondrous, yet few and endangered.”
― Lisa Kemmerer, Primate People: Saving Nonhuman Primates through Education, Advocacy, and Sanctuary

“Perhaps to them and their peers their ecological consciousness is a bigger sign of prestige than a fur coat. Perhaps they feel on more equal terms with the world. I admit I saw the future in them. But they were aggressive and I didn't like it, in spite of their concern for animals. On the other hand, perhaps they are too young to understand that human beings are an endangered species and that they too have a right to protection - particularly in some parts of the world. I hope they learn this soon.”
― Slavenka Drakulić, How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed

“I remembered Lorenzo telling me that CNN had approached him to do a piece on vaquita, but they wanted them leaping out of the water. He had to say, no, vaquitas don’t do that. So, CNN never came.”
― Brooke Bessesen, Vaquita: Science, Politics, and Crime in the Sea of Cortez

“Barb once told me, “You’d think that with the most endangered marine mammal on Earth, that you’d be able to get someone like National Geographic or Animal Planet to be interested. But they won’t touch it. They want full-frame underwater video, and if they can’t have that, tough, the species gets to go extinct.”
― Brooke Bessesen, Vaquita: Science, Politics, and Crime in the Sea of Cortez

“Conservation castes do exist. They influence the direction of public funds and attention, and they create professional competition. After all, it is hard for an egg-laying fish to contend with a baby-birthing porpoise, just as it is hard for a shy porpoise to contend with a gregarious dolphin or for a sea-dwelling dolphin to contend with a cuddly home- raised dog. As George Orwell surmised, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”
― Brooke Bessesen, Vaquita: Science, Politics, and Crime in the Sea of Cortez

“I see the extinction of a species as an assault against the evolutionary history of this planet,” Tom Jefferson of VIVA Vaquita once told me. “For a species that has been evolving for millions of years to be snuffed out by our stupidity and greed, to me that is like the worst crime that can be committed.”
― Brooke Bessesen, Vaquita: Science, Politics, and Crime in the Sea of Cortez

“Dogs' olfactory intelligence could make the job of finding endangered wildlife much faster and easier.”
― Jennifer S. Holland, Dog Smart: Life-Changing Lessons in Canine Intelligence

“The greatest evil the world has ever done is killing nature after consuming from its generous hands.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, These Words Pour Like Rain

“As I watched the wind ruffling over the bilious surface of the Yangtze, I realised with the vividness of shock that somewhere beneath or around me there were intelligent animals whose perceptive universe we could scarcely begin to imagine, living in a seething, poisoned, deafening world, and that their lives were probably passed in continual bewilderment, hunger, pain, and fear.”
― Douglas Adams, Last Chance to See

“Outsider artists like Poe, Van Gogh, and Kafka had so much to say—yet no one to say it to. Their voices were soft, uncertain, lost in the noise of their own era. Only now are they truly heard—at last, and loud, and with a clarity that shakes the very ground beneath us. Not just posthumously, but long after their generations have vanished into dust. Their deaths were not only personal losses, but warnings—so stark and so human, they’ve placed the entire species on the endangered list.”
― Jason Daniel Chaplin

“As I write, in early July 2025, threatening plumes of smoke sweep across the horizon. Dava Moor, twelve miles from Laikenbuie Ecology Trust, is on fire. The wildfire currently spans over nine miles. As well as the terrible impact on local people, I grieve for the animals. Endangered northern damselflies and white-faced darters live in lochs now surrounded by flames. Never has it felt more pressing to restore health to our habitats and increase Scotland's resilience to climate change.”
― Genevieve Tompkins, Reforesting Scotland 72: Autumn/Winter 2025

“Feliz is our lone jaguar. The last jaguar we had before him died of despair. That wasn't the official cause of death, of course not, but we all knew it. The rumor goes that the zoo's owners, the Pinkton family, paid an obscene amount to acquire another jaguar, probably the only one on Earth, given the state of the countries in which the creature's natural habitat once existed. Feliz was plucked out of the last few acres of the Amazon as the bulldozers waited, like customers impatiently hovering while a buffet is prepared. So Feliz is kind of a big deal. He doesn't appear cognizant of this fact, however. If anything, he looks to be on a mission to wear away the floor of his enclosure until he drops right through the earth and out of this life. He paces without cease. His nails are worn to stubs and his mouth hangs open in a perpetual rictus that wrecks your heart. He longs to forget all this, and to be forgotten.”
― Emma Sloley, The Island of Last Things

“The Bible is the most dangerous weapon to ever be set against women, in my opinion.”
― Mitta Xinindlu