The Earth was small, light blue, and so touchingly alone, our home that must be defended like a holy relic. The Earth was absolutely round. I believe I never knew what the word round meant until I saw Earth from space.
What is the use of a house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?
Climate change — I had that question, all you climate-change people. We just — you know, again, we knew that the economy was still the main thing.
All living souls welcome whatever they are ready to cope with; all else they ignore, or pronounce to be monstrous and wrong, or deny to be possible.
The more immoral we become in big ways, the more puritanical we become in little ways.
Life . . . punishes those who try to compartmentalize it. Thus if, for any reason whatsoever, moral standards are conspicuously and unprecedentedly breached in one area of society, such as the political, it will follow as the night the day that those standards will start collapsing all down the line — in sports, entertainment, education, the armed forces, business, and government.
The moral high ground is wreathed in fog.
I once wanted to save the world. Now I just want to leave the room with some dignity.
Why the toil, yearning, honesty, aesthetics, exaltation, love, hate, deceit, brilliance, hubris, humility, shame, and stupidity that collectively define our species?
I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them.
To transform the world, we must begin with ourselves; and what is important in beginning with ourselves is the intention. The intention must be to understand ourselves, and not to leave it to others to transform themselves . . . This is our responsibility, yours and mine; because, however small may be the world we live in, . . . if we can bring about a radically different point of view in our daily existence, then perhaps we shall affect the world at large.
It is the greatest of all mistakes to do nothing because you can only do little.
You can’t leave footprints in the sands of time if you’re sitting on your butt — and who wants to leave butt prints in the sands of time?
You have much more power when you are working for the right thing than when you are working against the wrong thing.
Our salvation is in striving to achieve what we know we’ll never achieve.
Right actions in the future are the best apologies for bad actions in the past.
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.
I look for what needs to be done. . . . After all, that’s how the universe designs itself.
When we grow old, there can only be one regret — not to have given enough of ourselves.
