"If you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys & sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies & economic doctrines, every hunter & forager, every hero & coward, every creator & destroyer of civilizations, every king & peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother & father, every inventor & explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint & sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam."



"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. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known." - Carl Sagan