Rusty Schweickart Quotes

You get this overview effect where you realize how small we are and how fragile our planet is and how we're really all in it together. You don't see borders from space, you don't see diversity and differences in people on Earth.

It is not easy to see how the more extreme forms of nationalism can long survive when men have seen the Earth in its true perspective as a single small globe against the stars.

The age of nations has passed. Now, unless we wish to perish, we must shake off our old prejudices and build the Earth. The more scientifically I regard the world, the less can I see any possible biological future for it except in the active consciousness of its unity.

To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold - brothers who know now they are truly brothers.

Not enough people in this world, I think, carry a cosmic perspective with them. It could be life-changing.

Mankind's salvation lies exclusively in everyone's making everything his business, in the people of the East being anything but indifferent to what is thought in the West, and in the people of the West being anything but indifferent to what happens in the East.

We recognize and accept our own deep involvement in the destiny of men everywhere.

The really wonderful thing that happened to me when I was in space was this feeling of belonging to the entire universe.

Anyone who goes to space tried to look at his own country first, but soon it appears that there is no boundary between the countries and the entire world is one family where our destinies are integrated.

My space expedition has changed my perspective towards people. Looking down at the Earth, we could not see borders or people with different nationalities. It was then that realisation dawned on us that all of us are a group of human beings and citizens of the universe.

One thing that flying in space does for you is it gives you a change in perspective. We all have to live in the same place.

That's what a family is, isn't it? Making space and time for one another.

All living things on earth are kindred.

If you look at Earth from space you see a dot, that's here. That's home. That's us. It underscores the 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.

SETI is a mirror, a mirror that can show ourselves from an extraordinary perspective and can help to trivialize the differences among us.

If we looked down at the world from space, we would not see any demarcations of national boundaries. We would simply see one small planet, just one.

Never in all their history have men been able truly to conceive of the world as one: a single sphere, a globe, having the qualities of a globe, a round earth in which all the directions eventually meet, in which there is no center because every point, or none, is center - an equal earth which all men occupy as equals. The airman's earth, if free men make it, will be truly round: a globe in practice, not in theory.

I think the one overwhelming emotion that we had was when we saw the Earth rising in the distance over the lunar landscape - it makes us realize that we all do exist on one small globe. For from 230,000 miles away, it really is a small planet.

We are all together in this, we are all together in this single living ecosystem called planet earth.

The old emphasis upon superficial differences that separate peoples must give way to education for citizenship in the human community.

You know harmony only exists in music-isn't that amazing? I think that if you see earth from very far away, the color is blue. That is very interesting because blue is the color of communication.

There really is no such thing as race. We all came from Africa. We are all of the same stardust. We are all going to live and die on the same planet, a Pale Blue Dot in the vastness of space. We have to work together.

Our world hangs like a magnificent jewel in the vastness of space. Every one of us is a part of that jewel. A facet of that jewel. And in the perspective of infinity, our differences are infinitesimal.

We are part of a great whole. All living things are our brothers and sisters.