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Since, in the long run, every planetary civilization will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become space...more

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A new consciousness is developing which sees the earth as a single organism and recognizes that an organism at war with itself is doomed. We are one p...more

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We are the only species on the planet, so far as we know, to have invented a communal memory stored neither in our genes nor in our brains. The wareho...more

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Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the sh...more

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In all our searching, the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable is each other.

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Does trying to understand the universe at all betray a lack of humility? I believe it is true that humility is the only just response in a confrontati...more

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I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue. But much as I want to be...more

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To live in the hearts we leave behind is to live forever.

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[an encounter in space] "Some celestial event. No--no words--no words to describe it. Poetry! They should have sent a poet. So beautiful. So beautiful...more

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The dangers that we face are part of the process, now well underway, of the unification of the planet--in language, culture, science, and commerce. Th...more

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Perhaps the depth of love can be calibrated by the number of different selves that are actively involved in a given relationship.

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The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home. In a...more

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The old exhortations to nationalist fervor and jingoist pride have begun to lose their appeal. Perhaps because of rising standards of living, children...more

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If we long for our planet to be important, there is something we can do about it. We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by...more

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We have held the peculiar notion that a person or society that is a little different from us, whoever we are, is somehow strange or bizarre, to be dis...more