Quote of the year

As heard on the GDay world podcast, it being Carl Sagan day. I was very moved by the phrase written by Carl Sagan in his book "Pale Blue Dot".

"We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at
it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever
heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate
of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and
economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every
creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young
couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and
explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar,
every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species,
lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam. The earth is a very small
stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those
generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the
momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited
by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable
inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their
misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their
hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have
some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale
light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our
obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from
elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that
astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my
mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits
than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our
responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to
preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."

The man was a pure genius and its a wonder why this book is not required reading in our schools. The religious right want to go on about "taking God out of our schools" well, if you want God in your schools you should take your kid to a Christian school. Or teach them about God on your own time at home. The arrogance - that some people have -to continue believing that the entire universe was created by God with the earth, that pale blue dot, at its center.
People smoke, but these are the same people who damage our earth. Global Warming is real, and so is war. We are very well on our way to destroying the only home we ever have known.