Carl Sagan Quotes

It is simply not feasible for sovereignty to be exercised unilaterally by individual nation-states, however powerful. It is a principle which will yield only slowly and reluctantly to the imperatives of global environmental cooperation.

The time has passed when nations should be allowed to do as they individually wish with regard to global matters, each striving solely in its own interests, with the more powerful now able to destroy all humanity and more. For the common good, we need to frame and abide by a higher system of law and justice, designed with less national, more godlike, perspectives for the preservation and welfare of the biosphere as a whole.

There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.

How pathetic indeed are the efforts of those leaders of human institutions who, in utter disregard of the spirit of the age, are striving to adjust national processes, suited to the ancient days of self-contained nations, to an age which must either achieve the unity of the world … or perish.

… my unity with all people cannot be destroyed by national boundaries and government orders

No nation is so great as to be able to afford, in the long run, to remain outside an increasingly universal League of Nations.

To contrast national solidarity and international cooperation as two opposites seems foolish to me.

As we have seen, the wireless and the airplane have made the world so small and nations so dependent on each other that the only alternative to war is the United States of the World.

Reagan was all about America, and you talked about it. Obama is, 'We are above that now. We're not just parochial, we're not just chauvinistic, we're not just provincial. We stand for something.' I mean, in a way, Obama's standing above the country, above - above the world. He's sort of God. He's going to bring all different sides together.

People need to be made conscious of a very simple reality: we have no choice but to share this planet, this small blue sphere floating in the vast reaches of space, with all of our fellow 'passengers.'

I believe that national sovereignties will shrink in the face of universal interdependence.

Above all nations is humanity.

More than ever before in human history, we share a common destiny. We can master it only if we face it together. And that, my friends, is why we have the United Nations.

Here we encounter two conflicting concepts with which we must come to grips in our time: the idea of national solidarity and the idea of international cooperation.

We collaborate with other countries on issues like public health and climate change because we understand these issues affect our collective welfare.

I really do hope that the Millennium Summit gives new impetus to the work of the United Nations.

There are no national strategies any longer. There's only national poverty. With the global economy there are only global strategies. We're moving from a world of enemies that are national to a world of global dangers. Can you place boundaries on pollution?

Humanity requires that nationalisms be overcome.

All the human kind is but one family, dispersed over the face of the whole earth; all men are brothers, and ought to love each other as such.

International policy does not aim at exploiting local, specific conditions to widen zones of influence and create difficulties for another country. The goal of international policy is to insure universal fulfillment of the "Declaration of the Rights of Man" and to prevent a sharpening of international tensions and a strengthening of militarist and nationalist tendencies.

For weal or for woe, the peoples of mankind are knit together far closer than ever before..

The "State" was substituted for humanity; cosmopolitan gave way to nationalism.

If nationalism were the world's ruling passion, could the British Commonwealth, with its manifold variety of peoples, have been held together?

Our country is the world — our countrymen are all mankind

I no longer see my world as delineated by countries with borders or language, but as seven billion humans living off a single, finite planet.