Science is but a perversion of itself unless it has as its ultimate goal the betterment of humanity. Nikola Tesla
April 11th 1862: I firmly believe that before many centuries more, Science will be the master of man. The engines he will have invented will be beyond his strength to control. Some day Science will have the existence of mankind in his power, and the human race commit suicide by blowing up the world. Henry Brooks Adams
We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special. Stephen Hawking
Descartes proposed that humans are made of two distinct components – the body and the mind. Stephen Hawking’s Grand Design: The Meaning of Life, Discovery 2012
If the human race is to continue for another million years we will have to boldly go where no-one has gone before. Spreading out into space will completely change the future of the human race and maybe determine whether we have any future at all. We could have a base on the Moon within thirty years and reach Mars in fifty years, and explore the moons of the outer planets in two-hundred years. Stephen Hawking
The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies. We are so insignificant that I can’t believe the whole universe exists for our benefit. That would be like saying that you would disappear if I closed my eyes. Stephen Hawking, Reality on the Rocks, 1995
From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: that we are here for the sake of each other – above all for those upon whose smile and well-being our own happiness depends, and also for the countless unknown souls with whose fate we are connected by a bond of sympathy. Many times a day I realize how much my own outer and inner life is built upon the labours of my fellow men, both living and dead, and how earnestly I must exert myself in order to give in return as much as I have received. Albert Einstein
My passionate sense of social justice and social responsibility has always contrasted oddly with my pronounced lack of need for direct contact with other human beings and human communities. Albert Einstein
A human being is a part of the whole called by us ‘Universe’, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest – a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. The striving to free oneself from this delusion is the one issue of true religion. Not to nourish it but to try to overcome it is the way to reach the attainable measure of peace of mind. Albert Einstein, letter 12 February 1950, cited and translated Calaprice
The really valuable thing in the pageant of human life seems to me not the political state, but the creative, sentient individual, the personality; it alone creates the noble and the sublime, while the herd as such remains dull in thought and dull in feeling. Albert Einstein, Ideas and Opinions
If we all did the things we are capable of, we would astound ourselves. Thomas A Edison
Humans are not proud of their ancestors, and rarely invite them round to dinner. Douglas Adams
Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun. Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea. Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Human beings, who are almost unique in having the ability to learn from the experience of others, are also remarkable for their apparent disinclination to do so. Douglas Adams
I am pessimistic about the human race because it is too ingenious for its own good. Our approach to nature is to beat it into submission. We would stand a better chance of survival if we accommodated ourselves to this planet and viewed it appreciatively instead of sceptically and dictatorially. E B White
It is a slightly arresting notion that if you were to pick yourself apart with tweezers, one atom at a time, you would produce a mound of fine atomic dust, none of which had ever been alive but all of which had once been you. Bill Bryson, A Short History of Everything
How can a three-pound mass of jelly that you can hold in your palm imagine angels, contemplate the meaning of infinity, and even question its own place in the cosmos? Especially awe inspiring is the fact that any single brain, including yours, is made up of atoms that were forged in the hearts of countless, far-flung stars billions of years ago. These particles drifted for eons and light-years until gravity and change brought them together here, now. These atoms now form a conglomerate – your brain – that can not only ponder the very stars that gave it birth but can also think about its own ability to think and wonder about its own ability to wonder. With the arrival of humans, it has been said, the universe has suddenly become conscious of itself. This, truly, it the greatest mystery of all. V S Ramachandran, The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest For What Makes Us Human
The significance of man is that he is part of the universe that asks the question, What is the significance of Man? He alone can stand apart imaginatively and, regarding himself and the universe in their eternal aspects, pronounce a judgment: The significance of man is that he is insignificant and is aware of it. Carl Becker, Progress and Power, 1936
The starting point of these ideas is to decide how important or unimportant mankind – human beings – are in the scheme of things. And there’s a very remarkable discovery of the last few years which at first sight suggests that human beings are very important. And that’s what we call the Fine Tuning of the universe. Professor Dennis Sciama, Cambridge University
Suns are extinguished or become corrupted, planets perish and scatter across the wastes of the sky; other suns are kindled, new planets formed to make their revolutions or describe new orbits, and man, an infinitely minute part of a globe which itself is only an imperceptible point in the immense whole, believes that the universe is made for himself. Baron d’Holbach
The pursuit of the good and evil are now linked in astronomy as in almost all science … The fate of human civilization will depend on whether the rockets of the future carry the astronomer’s telescope or a hydrogen bomb. Bernard Lovell, British astronomer
Recognize that the very molecules that make up your body, the atoms that construct the molecules, are traceable to the crucibles that were once the centres of high mass stars that exploded their chemically rich guts into the galaxy, enriching pristine gas clouds with the chemistry of life. So that we are all connected to each other biologically, to the earth chemically and to the rest of the universe atomically. That’s kinda cool! That makes me smile and I actually feel quite large at the end of that. It’s not that we are better than the universe, we are part of the universe. We are in the universe and the universe is in us. Neil deGrasse Tyson
We live on a hunk of rock and metal that circles a humdrum star that is one of 400 billion other stars that make up the Milky Way Galaxy which is one of billions of other galaxies which make up a universe which may be one of a very large number, perhaps an infinite number, of other universes. That is a perspective on human life and our culture that is well worth pondering. Carl Sagan
Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another. Carl Sagan, Cosmos
There is perhaps no better a demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. Carl Sagan, Time magazine 9 January 1995, describing Pale Blue Dot image of Earth taken by Voyager 1 spacecraft 6 billion kilometres away, 1990
In all our searching, the only thing we’ve found that makes the emptiness bearable is each other. Carl Sagan
Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people. Carl Sagan
An extraterrestrial visitor examining the differences among human societies would find those differences trivial compared to the similarities.
Our lives, our past and our future are tied to the sun, the moon and the stars ... We humans have seen the atoms which constitute all of nature and the forces that sculpted this work ... and we, who embody the local eyes and ears and thoughts about our origins ... star stuff contemplating the stars, organised collections of ten billion billion billion atoms, contemplating the evolution of nature, tracing that long path by which it arrived at consciousness here on the planet earth ... Our loyalties are to the species and to the planet. Our obligation to survive and flourish is owed not just to ourselves but also to that cosmos ancient and vast from which we spring.
We are one species. We are star stuff harvesting star light. Professor Carl Sagan, 1934-1996
The old appeals to racial, sexual, religious chauvinism, to rabid nationalist fervour, are beginning not to work. A new consciousness is developing which sees the earth as a single organism, and recognises that an organism at war with itself is doomed. We are one planet. Professor Carl Sagan & Ann Druyan, Cosmos: Who Speaks for Earth? PBS 1980