TODAY IN SCIENCE HISTORY ®  •  TODAYINSCI ®
Celebrating 25 Years on the Web
Find science on or your birthday

Today in Science History - Quickie Quiz
Who said: “I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, ... finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell ... whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.”
more quiz questions >>
Home > Category Index for Science Quotations > Category Index W > Category: Wipe Out

Wipe Out Quotes (4 quotes)

[Overfishing—] it’s not just that we’re taking too many out, it’s how we’re doing it. We are wiping out their nurseries, … [because some huge boats] … bottom trawl … [with] nets that 50 years ago you’d have to lift when you came to coral reefs or rocks or nooks and crannies. Now they’re so sophisticated and so heavy, the equipment, and the boat’s so powerful they can just drag right over the coral reefs and the rocks and the nooks and crannies, and turn them into a gravel pit. … The trouble is those are the nurseries. That’s where the little fish hide and get bigger and get big enough for us to eat.
From transcript of PBS TV interview by Tavis Smiley (28 Mar 2011).
Science quotes on:  |  Bigger (5)  |  Boat (18)  |  Bottom (36)  |  Coral Reef (15)  |  Cranny (2)  |  Destroy (191)  |  Doing (277)  |  Drag (8)  |  Eat (109)  |  Enough (341)  |  Equipment (45)  |  Fish (130)  |  Gravel (3)  |  Grow (248)  |  Heavy (25)  |  Hide (71)  |  Huge (30)  |  Lift (58)  |  Little (723)  |  Net (12)  |  Overfishing (27)  |  Pit (20)  |  Powerful (145)  |  Right (481)  |  Rock (179)  |  Sophisticated (16)  |  Trawling (6)  |  Trouble (119)  |  Turn (457)  |  Year (971)

It was strangely like war. They attacked the forest as if it were an enemy to be pushed back from the beachheads, driven into the hills, broken into patches, and wiped out. Many operators thought they were not only making lumber but liberating the land from the trees...
[On the first logging of the U.S. Olympic Peninsula.]
The Last Wilderness (1955). In William Dietrich, The Final Forest: the Battle for the Last Great Trees of the Pacific Northwest (1992), 21.
Science quotes on:  |  Attack (86)  |  Back (395)  |  Broken (56)  |  Deforestation (50)  |  Driving (28)  |  Enemy (86)  |  First (1309)  |  Forest (161)  |  Hill (24)  |  Land (143)  |  Liberation (12)  |  Logging (3)  |  Lumber (5)  |  Making (300)  |  Operator (4)  |  Patch (9)  |  Push (66)  |  Strangeness (10)  |  Thought (1004)  |  Tree (273)  |  War (236)

On the Enquirer I specialized in news of organized labor. … The dock and timber workers and the migratory farm laborers…were drawn to communism. The California State Legislature had passed a strong bill defining criminal syndicalism and making it a felony. The politicians were looking for a place to use it. On November 9, 1919, I was the only reporter from a conservative paper to cover the organization meeting of the Communist Labor Party of California, as it was then called. I wrote lurid and sensational stories about this small group of…persons, which resulted in indictments against them, and which required that I had to testify against them, in trial after trial, over the next several years. In this connection I became aware of open boasting by a police detective of his having framed some of the defendants in a matter where I knew the facts to be otherwise. The effect of this involvement on me was to wipe out any desire to be…[a] newspaperman; so I entered the university and went into physical science largely as a means of escape from the corruption of the world, in addition to the fact that I was genuinely interested in physical science.
As a high school student in Oakland, California, Condon had rival interests in journalism and science, and became a reporter for the Oakland Enquirer. That had a lasting effect on his attitude toward government and society. As described in his autobiographical 'Reminiscences of a Life in and out of Quantum Mechanics', Proceedings of the International Symposium on Atomic, Molecular, Solid State Theory and Quantum Biology, Sanibel Island, Florida' (22 Jan 1973), published in International Journal of Quantum Chemistry (1973), 7, 7-22; collected in Asim O. Barut, Halis Odabasi and Alwyn van der Merwe (eds.), Selected Popular Writings of E.U. Condon (1991), 316-317.
Science quotes on:  |  Awareness (43)  |  Bill (15)  |  Boast (23)  |  California (10)  |  Communism (12)  |  Conservative (17)  |  Corruption (18)  |  Cover (41)  |  Criminal (19)  |  Defendant (3)  |  Define (55)  |  Desire (219)  |  Detective (12)  |  Effect (418)  |  Escape (90)  |  Fact (1265)  |  Farm (34)  |  Frame (28)  |  Genuine (55)  |  Indictment (3)  |  Interest (420)  |  Involvement (5)  |  Know (1546)  |  Labor (204)  |  Laborer (10)  |  Legislature (5)  |  Matter (825)  |  Means (590)  |  Meeting (23)  |  News (37)  |  Newspaper (42)  |  Organization (121)  |  Organize (35)  |  Otherwise (28)  |  Pass (247)  |  Physical Science (106)  |  Police (6)  |  Politician (41)  |  Reporter (6)  |  Require (231)  |  Sensational (3)  |  Specialize (5)  |  State (510)  |  Story (125)  |  Strong (185)  |  Testify (8)  |  Trial (60)  |  University (131)  |  Worker (36)  |  Write (254)

One would like to see mankind spend the balance of the century in a total effort to clean up and groom the surface of the globe – wipe out the jungles, turn deserts and swamps into arable land, terrace barren mountains, regulate rivers, eradicate all pests, control the weather, and make the whole land mass a fit habitation for Man. The globe should be our and not nature’s home, and we no longer nature’s guests.
In The Temper of Our Time (1967), 94.
Science quotes on:  |  Balance (91)  |  Barren (33)  |  Century (321)  |  Clean (52)  |  Clean Up (5)  |  Control (187)  |  Desert (59)  |  Effort (246)  |  Eradicate (6)  |  Fit (137)  |  Globe (54)  |  Guest (5)  |  Habitation (8)  |  Home (186)  |  Jungle (24)  |  Land (143)  |  Long (783)  |  Man (2250)  |  Mankind (361)  |  Mass (162)  |  Mountain (203)  |  Nature (2050)  |  Regulate (11)  |  River (144)  |  See (1097)  |  Spend (99)  |  Surface (225)  |  Swamp (9)  |  Terrace (2)  |  Total (95)  |  Turn (457)  |  Weather (50)  |  Whole (759)


Carl Sagan Thumbnail In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion. (1987) -- Carl Sagan
Quotations by:Albert EinsteinIsaac NewtonLord KelvinCharles DarwinSrinivasa RamanujanCarl SaganFlorence NightingaleThomas EdisonAristotleMarie CurieBenjamin FranklinWinston ChurchillGalileo GalileiSigmund FreudRobert BunsenLouis PasteurTheodore RooseveltAbraham LincolnRonald ReaganLeonardo DaVinciMichio KakuKarl PopperJohann GoetheRobert OppenheimerCharles Kettering  ... (more people)

Quotations about:Atomic  BombBiologyChemistryDeforestationEngineeringAnatomyAstronomyBacteriaBiochemistryBotanyConservationDinosaurEnvironmentFractalGeneticsGeologyHistory of ScienceInventionJupiterKnowledgeLoveMathematicsMeasurementMedicineNatural ResourceOrganic ChemistryPhysicsPhysicianQuantum TheoryResearchScience and ArtTeacherTechnologyUniverseVolcanoVirusWind PowerWomen ScientistsX-RaysYouthZoology  ... (more topics)
Sitewide search within all Today In Science History pages:
Visit our Science and Scientist Quotations index for more Science Quotes from archaeologists, biologists, chemists, geologists, inventors and inventions, mathematicians, physicists, pioneers in medicine, science events and technology.

Names index: | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |

Categories index: | 1 | 2 | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |
Thank you for sharing.
- 100 -
Sophie Germain
Gertrude Elion
Ernest Rutherford
James Chadwick
Marcel Proust
William Harvey
Johann Goethe
John Keynes
Carl Gauss
Paul Feyerabend
- 90 -
Antoine Lavoisier
Lise Meitner
Charles Babbage
Ibn Khaldun
Euclid
Ralph Emerson
Robert Bunsen
Frederick Banting
Andre Ampere
Winston Churchill
- 80 -
John Locke
Bronislaw Malinowski
Bible
Thomas Huxley
Alessandro Volta
Erwin Schrodinger
Wilhelm Roentgen
Louis Pasteur
Bertrand Russell
Jean Lamarck
- 70 -
Samuel Morse
John Wheeler
Nicolaus Copernicus
Robert Fulton
Pierre Laplace
Humphry Davy
Thomas Edison
Lord Kelvin
Theodore Roosevelt
Carolus Linnaeus
- 60 -
Francis Galton
Linus Pauling
Immanuel Kant
Martin Fischer
Robert Boyle
Karl Popper
Paul Dirac
Avicenna
James Watson
William Shakespeare
- 50 -
Stephen Hawking
Niels Bohr
Nikola Tesla
Rachel Carson
Max Planck
Henry Adams
Richard Dawkins
Werner Heisenberg
Alfred Wegener
John Dalton
- 40 -
Pierre Fermat
Edward Wilson
Johannes Kepler
Gustave Eiffel
Giordano Bruno
JJ Thomson
Thomas Kuhn
Leonardo DaVinci
Archimedes
David Hume
- 30 -
Andreas Vesalius
Rudolf Virchow
Richard Feynman
James Hutton
Alexander Fleming
Emile Durkheim
Benjamin Franklin
Robert Oppenheimer
Robert Hooke
Charles Kettering
- 20 -
Carl Sagan
James Maxwell
Marie Curie
Rene Descartes
Francis Crick
Hippocrates
Michael Faraday
Srinivasa Ramanujan
Francis Bacon
Galileo Galilei
- 10 -
Aristotle
John Watson
Rosalind Franklin
Michio Kaku
Isaac Asimov
Charles Darwin
Sigmund Freud
Albert Einstein
Florence Nightingale
Isaac Newton


by Ian Ellis
who invites your feedback
Thank you for sharing
on Blue Sky.
Today in Science History
Sign up for Newsletter
with quiz, quotes and more.