This last chapter .. may have given the impression that somehow man is the ultimate triumph of evolution, that all these millions of years of development have had no purpose other than to put him on earth. There is no scientific evidence whatever to support such a view and no reason to suppose that our stay here will be any more permanent than that of the dinosaur.

It never really occurred to me to believe in God.

[W]hen we look at the graphs of rising ocean temperatures, rising carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and so on, we know that they are climbing far more steeply than can be accounted for by the natural oscillation of the weather ... What people (must) do is to change their behavior and their attitudes ... If we do care about our grandchildren then we have to do something, and we have to demand that our governments do something.

You have to steer a course between not appalling people, but at the same time not misleading them.

It's a moral question about whether we have the right to exterminate species.

The climate, the economic situation, rising birth rates; none of these things give me a lot of hope or reason to be optimistic.

Very few species have survived unchanged. There's one called lingula, which is a little shellfish, a little brachiopod about the size of my fingernail, that has survived for 500 million years, but it's survived by being unobtrusive and doing nothing, and you can't accuse human beings of that.