“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.” – Carl Sagan.

“Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.”

Mike Tyson

I’ve gone off the post I posted earlier today so here’s a quote instead.

“All men’s miseries stem from not being able to sit quietly in a room alone.”

– Blaise Pascal

“Real concern for the future is always more persuasive in those who have a genuine feeling for the past.” – Nicholas Penny (Director of the National Gallery in London) quoted in the Financial Times.

“The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology. ”
E. O. Wilson.

“The future is there… looking back at us. Trying to make sense of the fiction we will have become.” William Gibson (Pattern Recognition).