Edgar Mitchell Quotes

It is crucial that we develop real awareness of ourselves as citizens of Earth, linked by mutual and indissoluble bonds. When we clearly recognize this reality and ground ourselves in it, we are compelled to take a strict accounting of our way of life.

You might have heard about a transformation that can occur when someone first sees Earth from space - how it becomes harder to think about 'my country' or 'my people' and harder not to think about 'our planet.' I can tell you, that transformation is real.

National boundaries are not evident when we view the Earth from space. Fanatical ethnic or religious or national chauvinisms are a little difficult to maintain when we see our planet as a fragile blue crescent fading to become an inconspicuous point of light against the bastion and citadel of the stars.

There's something happening in the world that didn't happen before. We are acting like one big brain.

I believe the world is one big family, and we need to help each other.

I give lectures on globalization. I have lived on three continents. I have no quarrel with a global consciousness.

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.'

What I'd love to do is work with kids in the U.S. to raise their awareness and encourage them to be global citizens. We're all connected these days; we can listen to the same music as kids all around the world and share our ideas.

The only thing I want is to awaken all humans on the planet that we are living on Mother Earth.

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

If you take me out of it, I find 'six degrees' to be a beautiful concept that we should try to live by. It's about compassion and responsibility for everyone on the planet.

Never have we stolen the intelligences of other peoples. On the contrary, in Cuba we have trained tens of thousands of doctors and other top-level professionals, for free, in order to send them back to their own countries.

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.

You must be an artist and a citizen of the world. You must speak to this stuff that's happening. You must do what you can to shine a light on it, help people through it.

We have to learn to become a new kind of entity on this world that has the maturity and the awareness to handle being a global species with the power to change our planet and use that power in a way that is conducive to the kind of global society we want to have.

I think progressives understand that we are Americans at the same time as we are global citizens. We are interested first and foremost in creating peace and prosperity here at home, but we aren't blind to the fact that injustice anywhere in the world is meaningful, important, and worth thinking about.

It was Apollo 8 that first showed us the tiny blue marble of Earth floating in the void of space, one of the great psychological shifts in human history. From out there, we can both appreciate and begin to solve the problems of our world in ways unavailable to us otherwise.

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.

Our mission in this new century is clear. For good or ill, we live in an interdependent world. We can't escape each other. Therefore, we have to spend our lives building a global community of shared responsibilities, shared values, shared benefits.

The idea of a world commonweal has to be established as the criterion of political institutions, and also as the criterion of general conduct in hundreds of millions of brains. It has to dominate education everywhere in the world. When that end is achieved, then the world state will be achieved.

We need to assert our allegiance to the human race, and not to any one nation.

We are challenged to develop a world perspective. No individual can live alone, no nation can live alone, and anyone who feels that he can live alone is sleeping through a revolution. The world in which we live is geographically one.

Too often we participate in the globalization of indifference. May we strive instead to live global solidarity.

We defend and we build a way of life, not for America alone, but for all mankind.

We need to infuse politics with ideas like compassion and empathy, and a sense that we live in an interdependent world.