Ellison

"The great lizards owned the planet for something like 130,000,000 years, but they didn't have slant-well drilling, pesticides, pollution, fast breeders, defoliants, demagogues, thermonuclear warheads, non-biodegradable plastics, The Pentagon, The Kremlin, The General Staff of the Peoples' Army, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon and the FBI.... Had they not been so culturally deprived, they might have sunk into the swamps in a mere three thousand years."

-- Harlan Ellison, Reaping the Whirlwind