Diane Ackerman Quotes

That difficult place to put your finger on about the world - it needs to be illustrated.

I consider myself to be a citizen of the world.

Man must rise above the Earth -- to the top of the atmosphere and beyond -- for only thus will he fully understand the world in which he lives

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.

Time is not a road - it is a room.

Time is but the space between our memories; as soon as we cease to perceive this space, time has disappeared.

Flying has torn apart the relationship of space and time: it uses our old clock but with new yardsticks.

Once a photograph of the Earth, taken from outside, is available, once the sheer isolation of the Earth becomes known, a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose.

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.

Our little Spaceship Earth is only eight thousand miles in diameter, which is almost a negligible dimension in the great vastness of space.

Transmitted at the speed of light, all events on this planet are simultaneous. In the electric environment of information all events are simultaneous, there is no time or space separating events.

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.

The crossing of space ... may do much to turn men's minds outwards and away from their present tribal squabbles. In this sense, the rocket, far from being one of the destroyers of civilisation, may provide the safety-value that is needed to preserve it.

I sometimes subscribe to the belief that all historical events occur simultaneously, like a dream in the mind of God. Perhaps it is only man who views time sequentially and tries to impose a solar calendar upon it. What if other people, both dead and unborn, are living out their lives in the same space we occupy, without our knowledge or consent?" The Glass Rainbow, p. 138

It's been written about as "the overview effect." All I can give you is my perspective, but most all of the people who have been in space start to see the world without boundaries. You start to think about how we can keep doing these things we're doing that are destructive of the environment and destructive of the planet. It causes you to start to think things in a quite different way than we had before.

People knew less of each other, perhaps, but they felt more free of each other, and so were more individual. The entire world was not for them only a push or a switch away. Strangers were strange, and sometimes with an exciting, beautiful strangeness. It may be better for humanity that we should communicate more and more.

One generation's idea of fast pace might be different from a later generation's.

When seen from outer space, our beautiful blue planet has no national boundaries.

while the scientist sees everything that happens in one point of space, the poet feels everything that happens in one point of time.

Time is the supreme illusion. It is but the inner prism by which we decompose being and life, the mode under which we perceive successively what is simultaneous in idea.

The period of childhood is a stage on which time and space become entangled.

And along with indifference to space, there was an even more complete indifference to time. "There seems to be plenty of it", was all I would answer when the investigator asked me to say what I felt about time. Plenty of it, but exactly how much was entirely irrelevant. I could, of course, have looked at my watch but my watch I knew was in another universe. My actual experience had been, was still, of an indefinite duration. Or alternatively, of a perpetual present made up of one continually changing apocalypse.

Years were passing through the spaces between moments.

There is no difference between Time and any of the three dimensions of Space except that our consciousness moves along it.

The greatest fallout of the space program, ... was not the close-up view of the moon, but a look at spaceship Earth from afar. For the first time in the history of humanity, we were able to see our planet for what it really is.