I’m using this page to share quotes, excerpts etc from people I admire, or as examples of what I consider to be particularly good writing. I’ll keep adding to it, so come back and visit often…

1. THAT LITTLE DOT…

When the Vorager 1 spacecraft went walkabout beyond the solar system, astronomer the late Carl Sagan suggested that the spacecraft was turned round to take a picture of Earth. What appeared was a tiny blue dot, no more than a pixel… When he saw the picture, Sagan had this to say (those of you who have seen Al Gore’s film ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ may recall his quoting some of this):

“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…

“The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand… 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 with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

2. A WARNING TO NOTE

Chief Seattle, leader of the Squamish Tribe in what is now Washington State US, described in unforgettable detail the relationship between native Americans and the incoming white man – in a celebrated speech to Isaac Ingalls Stevens, governor of the Washington Territory, in the year 1855.

“Every part of this country is sacred to my people. Every hillside, every valley, every plain and grove has been hallowed by some fond memory or some sad experience of my tribe… The very dust under your feet responds more lovingly to our footsteps than to yours, because it is the ashes of our ancestors, and our bare feet are conscious of the sympathetic touch, for the soil is rich with the life of our kindred.

“… when the last Red Man shall have perished from the earth and his memory among white men shall have become a myth, these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe and when your children’s children shall think themselves alone in the field, the store, the shop, upon the highway, or in the silence of the woods, they will not be alone. At night, when the streets of your cities and villages shall be silent and you think them deserted, they will throng with the returning hosts that once filled and still love this beautiful land. The white man will never be alone.”

Chief Seattle lived from 1786 until 1866. He lies buried within sight of the city that bears his name. You can access his full speech here.