John C. Mather Quotes

I want some fact-based evidence about where we came from. Things we consider mysterious need not be attributed to a deity.

Just as it had taken centuries to determine the true nature of the universe, so also the search for the beginning of human life proceeded well into the 20th century.

It is important for all of us to appreciate where we come from and how that history has really shaped us in ways that we might not understand.

If the means were available, we could trace our ancestry - yours and mine - back to the first blob of life-like material that came into being on the planet.

I think we need stories, and we need to tell the stories over and over and over not only to remind us, but to be able to have that clarity of experience that changes us, so that we know who we are now because of who we have been at some other time.

Listening and being curious and wide-eyed in the world, I think, is what allows us to move forward, progress, evolve and learn and alter our behavior and become more self-aware. I think that listening is kind of what it's all about.

It's not going to fill in the potholes. It's not going to put a roof over people's heads. What it does is it helps to address really fundamental questions of who we are, where we came from, by which I mean we can learn how life came about.

I find a tremendous receptivity among the public for the subject matter of, 'Where did we come from and how did we get here?' People are thirsty and hungry for information on our origins. I feel a responsibility as a major figure in the area... to convey to the public the knowledge of human origins in a way that is understandable to them.

When we look for the origins of all humanity today, let's not just look at Europe, because I think Africa was the cradle, the crucible that created us as Homo sapiens.

We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to know ourselves better; that we require knowledge, not just of self and others, but of the way things are.

The background - your own history - is way more important than what you can achieve as a professional.

I want my great-granddaughter to have a fairly good understanding of the world in which I lived for 81 years and also the world before I came into it - all the way back a hundred thousand years, to the beginning of our species.

The marvelous thing about a good question is that it shapes our identity as much by the asking as it does by the answering.

Most of our ancestors were not perfect ladies and gentlemen. The majority of them weren't even mammals.

The progress of evolution, from President Washington to President Grant, was alone evidence enough to upset Darwin.... Grant should have lived in a cave and worn skins.

No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.

Our goal is to move forward, but we know that to avoid falling backward, we must be willing to look backward and to come to terms with what happened in the past.

It's best to know a little about where you're coming from and why you've arrived where you are.

I'm trying to learn the lessons of the past, but not to make speeches about the past.

Sometimes, to move into the future, you must go back the past.

If you don't know your full-throttle history, the whole story of how you came to where you are, it's kind of hard to put things together.

I can't change history but only learn from it.

It is important for us to understand where we came from and how we got here because it would be very foolish of us to get off that horse we rode in on.

I've seen a lot of things and I've experienced a lot of things.

You can't really know where you are going until you know where you have been.