A

"Let us plant dates even though those who plant them will never eat them. We must live by the love of what we will never see. This is the secret discipline. It is a refusal to let the creative act be dissolved away in immediate sense experience, and a stubborn commitment to the future of our grandchildren. Such disciplined love is what has given prophets, revolutionaries, and saints the courage to die for the future they envisaged. They make their own bodies the seed of their highest hope." --Ruben Alves, Tomorrow's Child

"Everyone lives downstream from someone else." --anonymous

"There is enough bad in people to make law necessary, and enough good in people to make it workable." --Anonymous

"It isn't important in which sea or lake you observe a slick of pollution, or in the forests of which country a fire breaks out, or on which continent a hurricane arises. You are standing guard over the whole of our Earth." --Yuri Artyukhin, astronaut

"There are no nations! There is only humanity. And if we don't come to understand that right soon, there will be no nations, because there will be no humanity." --Isaac Asimov, I. Asimov

"It is quite clear that as long as the nations of the world spend most of their energy, money, and emotional strength in quarreling with words and weapons, a true offensive against the common problems that threaten human survival is not very likely. A world government that can channel human efforts in the direction of the great solutions seems desirable, even essential. Naturally, such a world government should be a federal one, with regional and local autonomy safeguarded and with cultural diversity promoted." --Isaac Asimov, "The Dreams of Science Fiction"

"It isn't important whose [the Earth] is, just that it is." --Oleg Atkov, astronaut

B

"We should take care, in inculcating patriotism into our boys and girls, that is a patriotism above the narrow sentiment which usually stops at one's country, and thus inspires jealousy and enmity in dealing with others... Our patriotism should be of the wider, nobler kind which recognises justice and reasonableness in the claims of others and which lead our country into comradeship with...the other nations of the world." --Lord Baden-Powell, founder of Boy Scouting

"As I looked down, I saw a large river meandering slowly along for miles, passing from one country to another without stopping. I also saw huge forests, extending along several borders. And I watched the extent of one ocean touch the shores of separate continents. Two words leaped to mind as I looked down on all this: commonality and interdependence. We are one world." --John-David Bartoe, astronaut

"The first day or so we all pointed to our countries. The third or fourth day we were pointing to our continents. By the fifth day, we were aware of only one Earth." --Sultan bin Salman Al-Saud, astronaut

"When you're finally up on the moon, looking back at the earth, all these differences and nationalistic traits are pretty well going to blend and you're going to get a concept that maybe this is really one world and why the hell can't we learn to live together like decent people?" --Frank Borman, astronaut

"How long will it be 'till we've turned
To the tasks and the skills
That we'll have to have learned
If we're going to find our place in the future
And have something to offer
Where this planet's concerned?" --Jackson Browne, musician, "How Long"

  "People stand themselves next to the righteous
They believe the things they say are true
They speak in terms of what divides us
To justify the violence they do
  "But it is one, it is one
One world spinning 'round the sun
Wherever it is you call home
Whatever country you come from
It is one" --Jackson Browne, musician, "It is One"

"Say it isn't true
That there always has been and always will be war
Say it isn't true
And apart from all the fine things that man has struggled for
Say it isn't true
There always has been and always will be war" --Jackson Browne, musician, "Say It Isn't True"

"Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men's blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever-growing insistency." --Daniel Burnham, architect of first skyscraper (1864-1912)

C

"The love of one's country is a splendid thing. But why should love stop at the border?" --Pablo Casals

"There is no national science just as there is no national multiplication table; what is national is no longer science." --Anton Chekhov

"Unless some effective world supergovernment for the purpose of preventing war can be set up ... the prospects for peace and human progress are dark ....If .... it is found possible to build a world organization of irresistible force and inviolable authority for the purpose of securing peace, there are no limits to the blessings which all men enjoy and share." --Winston Churchill

"Unless we establish some form of world government, it will not be possible for us to avert a World War III in the future." --Winston Churchill

"War is an invention of the human mind. The human mind can invent peace with justice." --Norman Cousins

"There are no boundaries in the real Planet Earth. No United States, no Russia, no China, no Taiwan. Rivers flow unimpeded across the swaths of continents. The persistent tides, the pulse of the sea do not discriminate; they push against all the varied shores on Earth." --Jacques-Yves Cousteau, oceanographer

"[T]hose advocates who work for world peace by urging a system of world government are called impractical dreamers. Those impractical dreamers are entitled to ask their critics what is so practical about war." --Walter Cronkite

"hatred bounces." --e.e. cummings

D

"Contemplating the suffering which is unbearable to us, and is unbearable to others, too, can produce awake mind, which arises from the compassion that wishes to free all living beings from suffering." --The Dalai Lama

"All those who seek to destroy the liberties of a democratic nation ought to know that war is the surest and shortest means to accomplish it." --Alexis de Tocqueville

"I have no country to fight for: my country is the earth, and I am a citizen of the world." --Eugene V. Debs

"No man is an island entire of itself... Any man's death diminishes me because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee." --John Donne

"It is obvious that no difficulty in the way of world government can match the danger of a world without it." --Carl Van Doren

"World federation is an ideal that will not die. More and more people are coming to realize that peace must be more than an interlude if we are to survive; that peace is a produce of law and order; that law is essential if the force of arms is not to rule the world." --William O. Douglas, US Supreme Court Justice

E

"I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones." --Albert Einstein

"Problems cannot be solved at the same level of consciousness that created them." --Albert Einstein

"A world government with powers adequate to guarantee security is not a remote ideal for the distant future. It is an urgent necessity if our civilization is to survive." -- Albert Einstein

"There is no salvation for civilization, or even the human race, other than the creation of a world government." -- Albert Einstein

"With all my heart I believe that the world's present system of sovereign nations can only lead to barbarism, war and inhumanity, and that only world law can assure progress towards a civilized peaceful community." --Albert Einstein

"I like to believe that people in the long run are going to do more to promote peace than our governments. Indeed, I think that people want peace so much that one of these days governments had better get out of the way and let them have it." --Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890 - 1969)

"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. The world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children." --Dwight D. Eisenhower

"The world no longer has a choice between force and law; if civilization is to survive, it must choose the rule of law." --Dwight D. Eisenhower

"... we have been warned by the power of modern weapons, that peace may be the only climate possible for human life itself ... There must be law, steadily invoked and respected by all nations, for without law, the world promises only such meager justice as the pity of the strong upon the weak." -- President Dwight D. Eisenhower

"... the emergency committee of atomic scientists, having explored for two years all means other than world government for making responsible the control of atomic energy, has become convinced that no other method than world government can be expected to prove effective, and that the attainment of world government is therefore the most urgent problem now facing mankind." --Emergency Committee of Atomic Scientists, 1948 Resolution

"If the name of the country has such a nature as to create bonds between those who have a common country, why do not men resolve then that the earth should become the country of all?" --Erasmus, Peace Protests, 16th century

"There is the sky, which is all men's together..." --Euripides (412 B.C.)

F

"From space I saw Earth -- indescribably beautiful and with the scars of national boundaries gone." --Muhammad Ahmad Faris, astronaut

"All wars are civil wars, because all men are brothers... Each one owes infinitely more to the human race than to the particular country in which he was born." --Francois Fenelon, theologian and writer (1651-1715)

"I prefer law to war under all circumstances." --Benjamin Ferencz, Nuremberg prosecutor

"In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart." --Anne Frank

"God grant, that not only the Love of Liberty, but a thorough Knowledge of the Rights of Man, may pervade all the Nations of the Earth, so that a Philosopher may set his foot anywhere on its Surface, and say, "This is my Country."" --Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

"Civilization is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one great unity, the unity of mankind." --Sigmund Freud (1856-1939)

"We are going to have to find ways of organizing ourselves cooperatively, sanely, scientifically, harmonically and in regenerative spontaneity with the rest of humanity around the earth.... We are not going to be able to operate our spaceship earth successfully nor for much longer unless we see it as a whole spaceship and our fate as common." --Buckminster Fuller

G

"I am part and parcel of the whole and cannot find God apart from the rest of humanity." --Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948)

"Unity to be real must stand the severest strain without breaking." --Mohandas Gandhi (1869-1948)

"I have learned through bitter experience the one supreme lesson: to conserve my anger, and, as heat conserved is transmitted into energy, even so our anger controlled can be transmitted into a power which can move the world." --Mohandas Gandhi

"My country is the world; my countrymen are mankind." --William Lloyd Garrison, abolitionist

"Where is the justice of political power if it executes the murderer and jails the plunderer, and then itself marches upon neighboring lands, killing thousands and pillaging the very hills?" --Kahlil Gibran, "The Voice of the Poet"

"I don't want to be an emperor. That's not my business. I don't want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone if possible; Jew, Gentile, black men, white. We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each other's happiness, not by each other's misery. We don't want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone. And the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone... The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these things cries out for the goodness in man; cries out for universal brotherhood; for the unity of us all. Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world, millions of despairing men, women, and little children, victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people. To those who can hear me, I say "Do not despair." The misery that has come upon us is but the passing of greed, the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish... Now let us fight to free the world! To do away with national barriers! To do away with greed, with hate and intolerance! Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to the happiness of us all... [I]n the name of democracy, let us unite!" --The Great Dictator (1940)

"There is an increasing awareness of the need for some form of global government." --Mikhail Gorbachev

H

"We are here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness." --Thich Nhat Hanh

"The bomb that fell on Hiroshima fell on America, too." --Hermann Hagedorn

"When you look up at the sky, you have a feeling of unity, which delights you and makes you giddy." --Ferdinand Hodler

"How can we fret and stew sub specie aeternitatis - under the calm gaze of ancient Tao? The salt of the sea is in our blood; the calcium of the rocks is in our bones; the genes of ten thousand generations of stalwart progenitors are in our cells. The sun shines and we smile. The winds rage and we bend before them. The blossoms open and we rejoice. Earth is our long home." --Stewart W. Holmes, 1973

No army can withstand the strength of an idea whose time has come. -- Victor Hugo, poet, novelist and dramatist (1802-1885)

"A world community can exist only with world communication, which means something more than extensive shortwave facilities scattered about the globe. It means common understanding, a common tradition, common ideas, and common ideals." --Robert M. Hutchins (1899-1977)

"How vast those Orbs must be, and now inconsiderable this Earth, the Theatre upon which all our mighty Designs, all our Navigations, and all our Wars are transacted, is when compared to them.? A very fit consideration, and matter of Reflection, for those Kings and Princes who sacrifice the Lives of so many People, only to flatter their Ambition in being Masters of some pitiful corner of this small Spot." --Christiaan Huygens, New Conjectures Concerning the Planetary Worlds, Their Inhabitants and Productions, c. 1690.

"Any scientist can testify that a dead ocean means a dead planet .... No national law, no national precautions can save the planet. The ocean, more than any other part of our planet, ... is a classic example of the absolute need for international global action." --Thor Hyerdahl

The international community should support a system of laws to regularize international relations and maintain the peace in the same manner that law governs national order." -- Pope John Paul II

K

"Mounting an expedition to actualize a Compassionate Commonwealth of all peoples... is the great spiritual challenge of our time." --Sam Keen

"Our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children's future. And we are all mortal." --John F. Kennedy

"World peace, like community peace, does not require that each man love his neighbor -- it requires only that they live together with mutual tolerance, submitting their disputes to a just and peaceful settlement." --John F. Kennedy

"We must create world-wide law and law enforcement as we outlaw world-wide war and weapons" -- President John F. Kennedy

"Mankind must put an end to war or war will put an end to mankind." --John F. Kennedy

"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny." --Martin Luther King, Jr.

"We have learned to fly the air like birds and swim the sea like fish but we have not learned the simple art of living together as brothers." --Martin Luther King Jr.

"The hope of a secure and livable world lies with disciplined non-conformists, who are dedicated to justice, peace and brotherhood. The trailblazers in human, academic, scientific, and religious freedom have always been non-conformists." --Martin Luther King Jr.

"We must in strength and humility meet hate with love. Maybe in some distant Utopia, you say, that idea will work, but not in the hard cold world in which we live. My friends, we have followed the so called practical way for too long a time now, and it has led inexorably to deeper confusion and chaos. Time is cluttered with the wreckage of communities which surrendered to hatred and violence. For the salvation of our nation and the salvation of mankind, we must follow another way. To our most bitter opponents we say: "We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We shall meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will, and we shall continue to love you. One day we shall win freedom, but not only for ourselves. We shall so appeal to your heart and conscience that we shall win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory." --Martin Luther King Jr.

"I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits. I believe that what self-centered men have torn down, men other-centered can build up. I still believe that one day mankind will bow before the altars of God and be crowned triumphant over war and bloodshed, and nonviolent redemptive goodwill will proclaim the rule of the land." --Martin Luther King Jr. --- Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech, December 10, 1964

"Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism. This call for a world-wide fellowship that lifts neighborly concern beyond one's tribe, race, class, and nation is in reality a call for an all-embracing and unconditional love for all men and women." --Martin Luther King, Jr.

"...we must realize that a vast majority of believers are still searching and will continue to search for the being who is the "source of human good." Those who seek with clear heads and sincere hearts will in some measure find. Of course the true seeker will realize that there is no one way to find God. To be sure, there are many possible ways of finding God." --Martin Luther King, Jr.

"In a real sense, all life is interrelated. All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I ought to be. This is the interrelated structure of reality." --Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Legislation may not change the heart, but it will restrain the heartless." --Martin Luther King, Jr.

"The potential beauty of human life is constantly made ugly by man's ever recurring song of retaliation. The oceans of history are made turbulent by the ever rising tides of revenge. Man has never risen above the injunction of the lex talionis: "Life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot." In spite of the fact that the law of revenge solves no social problems, men continue to follow its disastrous leading. History is cluttered with the wreckage of nations and individuals that pursued this self-defeating path." --Martin Luther King, Jr.

"Every war already carries within it the war which will answer it. Every war is answered by a new war, until everything, everything is smashed." --Kothe Kollwitz

"After an orange cloud -- formed as a result of a dust storm over the Sahara and caught up by air currents -- reached the Philippines and settled there with rain, I understood that we are all sailing in the same boat." --Vladimir Kovalyonok, astronaut

"When you call yourself an Indian or a Muslim or a Christian or a European, or anything else, you are being violent. Do you see why it is violent? Because you are separating yourself from the rest of mankind. When you separate yourself by belief, by nationality, by tradition, it breeds violence. So a man who is seeking to understand violence does not belong to any country, to any religion, to any political party or partial system; he is concerned with the total understanding of mankind." --J. Krishnamurti, Freedom from the Known

"I think we're in a new era where the advancing tide is towards human unity, where people all around the world want to come together. The United States is in a position where it can lead the way towards that and it can do it in practical ways by affirming the power of the United Nations so that the international process makes decisions on international security." --Dennis Kucinich, US congressman

"Our vision of interconnectedness resonates with new networks of world citizens in nongovernmental organizations linking from numberless centers of energy, expressing the emergence of a new organic whole, seeking unity within and across national lines... If governments and their leaders, bound by hierarchy and patriarchy, wedded to military might for legitimacy, fail to grasp the implications of an emerging world consciousness for cooperation, for peace and for sustainability, they may become irrelevant." --Dennis Kucinich, US congressman, "Spirit and Stardust"

"[T]here is a deeper truth expressed in the unity of the United States. [I]mplicate in the union of our country is the union of all people. [A]ll people are essentially one. [T]he world is interconnected not only on the material level of economics, trade, communication, and transportation, but innerconnected through human consciousness, through the human heart, through the heart of the world, through the simply expressed impulse and yearning to be and to breathe free." --Dennis Kucinich, US congressman, "A Prayer for America"

L

"Aristippus said that a wise man's country was the world." -- Diogenes Laertius, 13 xiii, Circa 200 A. D.

"There is no such thing as an inevitable war. If war comes it will be from failure of human wisdom." --Andrew B. Law

"The Earth was small, light blue, and so touchingly alone, our home that must be defended like a holy relic." --Aleksei Leonov, astronaut

"Either men will learn to live like brothers, or they will die like beasts." --Max Lerner.

"War is as outmoded as cannibalism, chattel slavery, blood-feuds, and dueling, an insult to God and humanity...a daily crucifixion of Christ." --Muriel Lester

"If we could read the secret history of our enemies we should find in each person's life sorrow and suffering enough to disarm all hostility." --Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

M

"The abolition of war is no longer an ethical question to be pondered solely by learned philosophers and ecclesiastics, but a hard core one for the decision of the masses whose survival is the issue. Many will tell you with mockery and ridicule that the abolition of war can only be a dream - that it is the vague imagining of a visionary. But we must go on or we will go under ... We must have new thoughts, new ideas, new concepts. We must break out of the straightjacket of the past. We must sufficient imagination and courage to translate the universal wish for peace - which is rapidly becoming a necessity - into actuality." -General Douglas MacArthur, July 5, 1961

"You point out that war is only a symptom of the whole horrid business of human behavior, and cannot be isolated. And that, even if we abolish war, we shall not abolish hate and greed. So might it have been argued about slave emancipation, that slavery was but one aspect of human disgustingness, and that to abolish it would not end the barbarity that causes it. But did the abolitionists therefore waste their breath? And do we waste ours now in protesting against war?" --Rose Macaulay

"So long as you are ready to die for humanity, the life of your country is immortal." --Giuseppe Mazzini

"I know war as few other men now living know it, and nothing to me is more revolting. I have long advocated its complete abolition, as its very destructiveness on both friend and foe has rendered it useless as a method of settling international disputes." --Douglas MacArthur

"To see the earth as it truly is, small and blue in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold -- brothers who know now they are truly brothers." --Archibald McLeish, poet

"We cannot live only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men; and among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects." --Herman Melville, writer

"I dream of giving birth to a child who will ask: "Mother, what was war?"" --Eve Merriam, writer

"The whole idea of compassion is based on a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another, and all involved in one another." --Thomas Merton

"In outer space you develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it. From out there on the moon, international politics look so petty. You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, "Look at that, you son of a bitch." --Edgar Mitchell

"Have I said clearly enough that the Community we created is not an end in itself? It is a process of change, continuing in that same process which in an earlier period produced our national forms of life. The sovereign nations of the past can no longer solve the problems of the present: they cannot ensure their own progress or control their own future. And the Community itself is only a stage on the way of the organized world of tomorrow." --Jean Monnet, conceiver of the European Community, now the European Union

"When we try to pick anything out by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe." --John Muir, naturalist

"If heads of states fail to seize the opportunity of our entry into the third millennium to provide for a better government of planet Earth, history will not forgive them -- if there is a history." --Robert Muller

N

"I have long believed that the only way peace can be achieved is through world government." --Jawaharlal Nehru

P

"The world is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion." --Thomas Paine

"The multitude which is not brought to act as a unity is confusion. That unity which has not its origin in the multitude is tyranny." --Blaise Pascal

"If you are required to kill someone today, on the promise of a political leader that someone else shall live in peace tomorrow, believe me, you are not only a double murderer, you are a suicide, too." --Katherine Anne Porter

R

"The moral development of a civilization is measured by the breadth of its sense of community." --Anatol Rapoport

"Our goals are the same as those of the U.N.'s founders, who sought to replace a world at war with one where the rule of law would prevail, where human rights were honored, where development would blossom, where conflict would give way to freedom from violence." --Ronald Reagan

"We are prophets of a future not our own." --Oscar Romero

"Brotherhood is the very price and condition of man's survival." --Carlos P. Romulo

"My short-term vision is the abolition of nuclear weapons. My long-term vision is the abolition of war." -- Joseph Rotblat, Nobel Peace Laureate, 1995

"People rarely win wars, governments rarely lose them. People get killed. Governments moult and regroup, hydra-headed. They use flags first to shrink-wrap people's minds and smother thought, and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury their willing dead." --Arundhati Roy

"One must care about a world one will never see." --Bertrand Russell, mathematician and philosopher

S

"At a few hundred kilometers altitude, the Earth fills half your sky, and the band of blue that stretches from Mindanao to Bombay, which your eye encompasses in a single glance, can break your heart with its beauty. Home you think. Home. This is my world. This is where I come from. Everyone I know, everyone I ever heard of, grew up down there, under that relentless and exquisite blue." --Carl Sagan, Contact

"In the daylight, though, it's hard to see any sign of human habitation. But at night, except for the polar aurora, everything you see is due to humans, humming and blinking all over the planet. That swath of light is eastern North America, continuous from Boston to Washington, a megalopolis in fact if not in name. Over there is the burnoff of natural gas in Libya. The dazzling lights of the Japanese shrimp fishing fleet have moved toward the South China Sea. On every orbit, the Earth tells you new stories. You can see a volcanic eruption in Kamchatka, a Saharan sandstorm approaching Brazil, unseasonably frigid weather in New Zealand. You get to thinking of the Earth as an organism, a living thing. You get to worry about it, care for it, wish it well. National boundaries are as invisible as meridians of longitude, or the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn. The boundaries are arbitrary. The planet is real. Spaceflight, therefore, is subversive. If they are fortunate enough to find themselves in Earth orbit, most people, after a little meditation, have similar thoughts. The nations that had instituted spaceflight had done so largely for nationalistic reasons; it was a small irony that almost everyone who entered space received a startling glimpse of a transnational perspective, of the Earth as one world." --Carl Sagan, Contact

"Human history can be viewed as a slowly dawning awareness that we are members of a larger group. Initially our loyalties were to ourselves and our immediate family, next, to bands of wandering hunter-gatherers, then to tribes, small settlements, city-states, nations. We have broadened the circle of those we love. We have now organized what are modestly described as super-powers, which include groups of people from divergent ethnic and cultural backgrounds working in some sense together--surely a humanizing and character building experience. If we are to survive, our loyalties must be broadened further, to include the whole human community, the entire planet Earth. Many of those who run the nations will find this idea unpleasant. They will fear the loss of power. We will hear much about treason and disloyalty. Rich nation-states will have to share their wealth with poor ones. But the choice, as H. G. Wells once said in a different context, is clearly the universe or nothing." --Carl Sagan, Cosmos

"Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth. Our obligation to survive is owed not just to ourselves but also to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring." --Carl Sagan, Cosmos

  "Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, 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 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 this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, 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." --Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot

"Teller contended, not implausibly, that hydrogen bombs keep the peace, or at least prevent thermonuclear war, because the consequences of warfare between nuclear powers are now too dangerous. We haven't had a nuclear war yet, have we? But all such arguments assume that the nuclear-armed nations are and always will be, without exception, rational actors, and that bouts of anger and revenge and madness will never overtake their leaders (or military and secret police officers in charge of nuclear weapons). In the century of Hitler and Stalin, this seems ingenuous." --Carl Sagan

"Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us - then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls." --Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World

"Up there in the immensity of the Cosmos, an inescapable perception awaits us. National boundaries are not evident when we view the Earth from space. Fanatical ethnic, 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." --Carl Sagan, Cosmos

"Compassion is not at all weak. It is the strength that arises out of seeing the true nature of suffering in the world. Compassion allows us to bear witness to that suffering, whether it is in ourselves or others, without fear; it allows us to name injustice without hesitation, and to act strongly, with all the skill at our disposal. To develop this mind state of compassion . . . is to learn to live, as the Buddha put it, with sympathy for all living beings, without exception." --Sharon Salzberg

"[I see] half a world to the left, half a world to the right. I can see it all. The Earth is so small." --Vitali Sevastyanov, astronaut

"My mental boundaries expanded when I viewed the Earth against a black and uninviting vacuum, yet my country's rich traditions had conditioned me to look beyond man-made boundaries and prejudices. One does not have to undertake a space flight to come by this feeling." --Rakesh Sharma, astronaut

"The Earth at night looks even more magical than it does during the day. There's always a lightning storm happening somewhere. Flashes of lightning sometimes cover up to a fourth of a continent. At first you see this as a natural disturbance, the eruption of splashes as a majestic spectacle... All of a sudden, against your will, you imagine that the lightning comes not from a natural storm but from the explosions of bombs. No. That must never happen. Let only the northern lights and lightning blaze above our precious Earth." --Vladimir Shatalov, astronaut

"You see things; and you say, "Why?" But I dream things that never were; and I say, "Why not?"" --George Bernard Shaw, 1856-1950

The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man. -- George Bernard Shaw, 1856-1950

"I am neither an Athenian nor a Greek. I am a citizen of the world." --Socrates

"If it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" --Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

"We wanted to love, freely and without barriers. We had to remake the world in order to do it." --Starhawk, The Fifth Sacred Thing

"I believe that if we really want human brotherhood to spread and increase until it makes life safe and sane, we must also be certain that there is no one true faith or path by which it may spread." --Adlai E. Stevenson

"On this shrunken globe, men can no longer live as strangers." --Adlai E. Stevenson

"[Viewing the Earth from space,] you see a singleness and unity to it all that we never perceive in the press of daily life. It seems such a vivid unity that surely it must be rooted some reality, and you wonder why this unity isn't more the reality of everyday human life on earth. You wonder if it could ever be so unified, and you return determined to do whatever you can to make it so -- even a bit." --Kathryn Sullivan, astronaut

T

"It is not your obligation to complete your work, but you are not at liberty to quit." --the Talmud

"World federalists hold before us the vision of a unified mankind living in peace under a just worl order. The heart of their program - a world under law - is realistic and attainable." --U Thant, U.N. Secretary General

"What good is a house, if you haven't got a decent planet to put it on?" --Henry David Thoreau

"If people behaved like governments, you'd call the cops." --Kelvin Throop

"Mankind's problems can no longer be solved by national governments. What is needed is world government." --Jan Tinbergen, Nobel Prize-winning economist

"I know that my unity with all people cannot be destroyed by national boundaries and government orders." --Leo Tolstoy

"It will be just as easy for nations to get along in a republic of the world as it is for you to get along in the republic of the United States. Now when Kansas and Colorado have a quarrel over the water in the Arkansas river they don't call out the national guard in each state and go to war over it. They bring suit in the Supreme Court of the United States and abide by the decision. There isn't a reason in the world why we can't do that internationally." --Harry S. Truman

"My humanity is bound up in yours, for we can only be human together." --Archbishop Desmond Tutu

"Each nation knowing it has the only true religion and the only sane system of government, each despising all the others, each an ass and not suspecting it." --Mark Twain

V

W

"In a sense, each of us is an island. In another sense, however, we are all one. For though islands appear separate, and may even be situated at great distances from one another, they are only extrusions of the same planet, Earth." -- J. Donald Walters

"A Chinese tale tells of some men sent to harm a young girl who, upon seeing her beauty, became her protectors rather than her violators. That's how I felt seeing the Earth for the first time. 'I could not help but love and cherish her.'" --Taylor Wang, astronaut

"Every explicit duality is an implicit unity." --Alan Watts

"Lack of awareness of the basic unity of organism and environment is a serious and dangerous hallucination." -- Alan Watts

"A federation of all humanity, together with a sufficient measure of social justice, to ensure health, education, and a rough equality of opportunity to most of the children born into the world, would mean such a release and increase of human energy as to open a new phase in human history." --H.G. Wells

"Men who think in lifetimes are of little use to statesmanship." --H.G. Wells, The World Set Free

"Our true nationality is mankind." --H.G. Wells

"We look back through countless millions of years and see the great will to live struggling out of the intertidal slime, struggling from shape to shape and from power to power, crawling and then walking confidently upon the land, struggling generation after generation to master the air, creeping down into the darkness of the deep; we see it turn upon itself in rage and hunger and reshape itself, pursuing its relentless inconceivable purpose, until at last it reaches us and its being beats through our brains and arteries... It is possible to believe that all that the human mind has ever accomplished is but the dream before the awakening... Out of our... lineage, minds will spring, that will reach back to us in our littleness to know us better than we know ourselves. A day will come, one day in the unending succession of days, when beings, beings who are now latent in our thoughts and hidden in our loins, shall stand upon this earth as one stands upon a footstool, and shall laugh and reach out their hands amidst the stars." --H.G. Wells

"There must be, not a balance of power, but a community of power; not organized rivalries, but an organized common peace." --Woodrow Wilson

"Now I know why I'm here
Not for a closer look at the moon,
But to look back
At our home
The Earth." --Alfred Worden, astronaut

Y

"Ecological troubles have no limits. In spite of ideological and spiritual differences, we are all citizens of the World Polluted States... Environmental interdependence inevitably leads us to a new concept of global security, which includes not only military but environmental security." --Alexei Yablokov