“Maybe you are a poet and a dreamer, but don't you realize that those two species are extinct now?”

“Don’t believe what you hear about those penguins. A species of lazy waddlers. Their extinction is immanent.”

“Of the four billion life forms which have existed on this planet, three billion, nine hundred and sixty million are now extinct. We don't know why. Some by wanton extinction, some through natural catastrophe, some destroyed by meteorites and asteroids. In the light of these mass extinctions it really does seem unreasonable to suppose that Homo sapiens should be exempt. Our species will have been one of the shortest-lived of all, a mere blink, you may say, in the eye of time.”

“There are two kinds of people in the world: those who are dreamers and those who are being dreamed.”

“In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for the human species, selfishness is extinction.”

“I am fully convinced that species are not immutable; but that those belonging to what are called the same genera are lineal descendants of some other and generally extinct species, in the same manner as the acknowledged varieties of any one species are the descendants of that species. Furthermore, I am convinced that natural selection has been the most important, but not the exclusive, means of modification.”