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-Douglas Adams
The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe
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Interestingly, according to modern astronomers, space is finite. This is a very comforting thought - particularly for people who cannot remember where they left things.
-Woody Allen
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It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.
-Neil Armstrong
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We have no proof, but if we extrapolate, based on the best information we have available to us, we have to come to the conclusion that ... other life probably exists out there and perhaps in many places...
-Neil Armstrong, October 21, 1999
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That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.
-Neil Armstrong, On the first moonwalk, July 20, 1969
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At two-tenths the speed of light, dust and atoms might not do significant damage even in a voyage of 40 years, but the faster you go, the worse it is--space begins to become abrasive. When you begin to approach the speed of light, hydrogen atoms become cosmic-ray particles, and they will fry the crew. ...So 60,000 kilometers per second may be the practical speed limit for space travel.
-Isaac Asimov
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When friendship disappears then there is a space left open to that awful loneliness of the outside world which is like the cold space between the planets. It is an air in which men perish utterly.
-Hilaire Belloc
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It is good to renew one's wonder, said the philosopher.
Space travel has again made children of us all.
-Ray Bradbury
The Martian Chronicles
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Don't tell me that man doesn't belong out there. Man belongs wherever he wants to go -- and he'll do plenty well when he gets there.
-Wernher Von Braun
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In this unbelievable universe in which we live there are no absolutes. Even parallel lines, reaching into infinity, meet somewhere yonder.
-Pearl Buck
A Bridge for Passing. (1962)
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I would like to suggest that the history of science is the history of an enlarging understanding of the universe, its evolution, its history, and its structure. We have engaged the universe at the very limits of our capacity. We have explored the world of the microcosm and the world of the macrocosm. We have found at both extremes incredible complexity.
The universe, beginning from an unimaginably hot and dense singularity, evolved through a series of stages, each producing the condition necessary for the succeeding stage. Our sun, our solar system, our planet, our own beings are all late stages of this evolving universe.
The insights of cosmology and theoretical astronomy have served to tie us ever more tightly into the emerging story of the universe itself.
The history of the universe is our history. We emerged from the same vast processes that created galaxies and suns and stars and planets. We are all of us recycled stardust.
from a collection of quotations at http://www.humanistsofutah.org/quotes.html
-David E. Bumbaugh
Condensed from Toward a Humanist Vocabulary of Reverence published in Religious Humanism, vol.xxxv 2001
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Man is an artifact designed for space travel. He is not designed to remain in his present biologic state any more than a tadpole is designed to remain a tadpole.
-William S. Burroughs
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Venus is now astrologically square with Pluto. That means there isn't a hip planet left.
-Jim Critchfield
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I was sat at the bottom of the garden a week ago, smoking a reflective cheroot, thinking about this and that - mostly that, and I just happened to glance at the night sky and I marvelled at the millions of stars glistening like pieces of quicksilver thrown carelessly onto black velvet. In awe I watched the waxen moon ride across the zenith of the heavens like an amber chariot towards the void of infinite space wherein the tethered bolts of Jupiter and Mars hang forever in their orbital majesty; and as I looked at all this, I thought, 'I must put a roof on this lavatory.'
-Les Dawson
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Until they come to see us from their planet, I wait patiently. I hear them saying: Don't call us, we'll call you.
-Marlene Dietrich
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The question that will decide our destiny is not whether we shall expand into space. It is: shall we be one species or a million? A million species will not exhaust the ecological niches that are awaiting the arrival of intelligence.
-Freeman Dyson
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The stars begin to fade like guttering candles and are snuffed out one by one. Out in the depths of space the great celestial cities, the galaxies cluttered with the memorabilia of ages, are gradually dying. Tens of billions of years pass in the growing darkness ... of a universe condemned to become a galactic graveyard.
-Edward Harrison
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Matter was like a faint precipitate suspended in a world of dense light.
describing the radiation era that began about 1 second after the Big Bang
-Edward Harrison
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To confine our attention to terrestrial matters would be to limit the human spirit.
-Stephen Hawking
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Our passionate preoccupation with the sky, the stars, and a God somewhere in outer space is a homing impulse. We are drawn back to where we came from.
-Eric Hoffer
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Space isn't remote at all. It's only an hour's drive away if your car could go straight upwards.
-Sir Fred Hoyle
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The moon and other celestial bodies should be free for exploration and use by all countries. No country should be permitted to advance a claim of sovereignty.
-Lyndon B. Johnson
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In reality the universe has no geometry.
-Kedar Joshi
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Space is the stature of God.
-Joseph Joubert
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Prometheus is reaching out for the stars with an empty grin on his face.
-Arthur Koestler
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Books about Space
