Originally posted by Dances With Angels
The image of the Pale Blue Dot is the number one thing that inspires me to do good on this Earth. Many people think that in order to do good things one has to be religious. For me, not so. This picture shows us a priceless image of our planet up against the infinite. We are less significant than we think we are.

"It doesn't seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe, this tremendous range of time and space and different kinds of animals, and all the different planets, and all these atoms with all their motions, and so on, all this complicated thing can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil - which is the view that religion has. The stage is too big for the drama".
Richard Feynman


"In some respects, science has far surpassed religion in delivering awe. How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, "This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant. God must be even greater than we dreamed"? Instead they say, "No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way."
Carl Sagan


“The supreme arrogance of religious thinking: that a carbon-based bag of mostly water on a speck of iron-silicate dust around a boring dwarf star in a minor galaxy … would look up at the sky and declare, ‘It was all made just so that I could exist!’”
Physicist Peter Walker


"For most of human history we have searched for our place in the cosmos. Who are we? What are we? We find that we inhabit an insignificant planet of a hum-drum 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


"God did it. He did not call it the universe -- that name is modern. His whole attention was upon this world. He constructed it in five days -- and then? It took him only one day to make twenty million suns and eighty million planets!
What were they for -- according to this idea? To furnish light for this little toy-world. That was his whole purpose; he had no other. One of the twenty million suns (the smallest one) was to light it in the daytime, the rest were to help one of the universe's countless moons modify the darkness of its nights".
Mark Twain

A scientific colleague tells me about a recent trip to the New Guinea highlands where she visited a stone age culture hardly contacted by Western civilization. They were ignorant of wristwatches, soft drinks, and frozen food. But they knew about Apollo 11. They knew that humans had walked on the Moon. They knew the names of Armstrong and Aldrin and Collins. They wanted to know who was visiting the Moon these days.
Carl Sagan

Originally posted by nerbot
Mr Sagan had a wonderful perspective on things didn't he and certainly opened my mind a little with his "Cosmos" series.

Originally posted by Lightworth
I believe the self-congratulatory humility shindig here is a bit MISPLACED.

Originally posted by ALLis0NE
Yes, we are all in God's brain. We are God's imagination at work.