Earth Quotes

"The Earth was small, light blue, and so touchingly alone, our home that must be defended like a holy relic. The Earth was absolutely round. I believe I never knew what the word round meant until I saw Earth from space."

- Aleksei Leonov, Russian Cosmonaut

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

- Archibald MacLeish, American Poet

"As we begin to comprehend that the earth itself is a kind of manned spaceship hurtling through the infinity of space—it will seem increasingly absurd that we have not better organized the life of the human family."

- Hubert H. Humphrey, Vice President
of the United States

"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, Apollo Astronaut

"As we got further and further away, it [the Earth] diminished in size. Finally it shrank to the size of a marble, the most beautiful you can imagine. That beautiful, warm, living object looked so fragile, so delicate, that if you touched it with a finger it would crumble and fall apart. Seeing this has to change a man."

- James B. Irwin, Apollo Astronaut

"The view of the Earth from the Moon fascinated me -- a small disk, 240,000 miles away. . . . Raging nationalistic interests, famines, wars, pestilence don't show from that distance."

- Frank Borman, Commander of Apollo 8

"I think the one overwhelming emotion that we had was when we saw the earth rising in the distance over the lunar landscape . . . . It makes us realize that we all do exist on one small globe. For from 230,000 miles away it really is a small planet."

- Frank Borman, Commander of Apollo 8

"The world itself looks cleaner and so much more beautiful. Maybe we can make it that way—the way God intended it to be—by giving everybody that new perspective from out in space."

- Roger B Chaffee, NASA Astronaut

"Oddly enough the overriding sensation I got looking at the earth was, my god that little thing is so fragile out there."

- Mike Collins, Apollo 11 Astronaut

"For the first time in my life I saw the horizon as a curved line. It was accentuated by a thin seam of dark blue light—our atmosphere. Obviously this was not the ocean of air I had been told it was so many times in my life. I was terrified by its fragile appearance."

- Ulf Merbold, ESA Astronaut

"Suddenly, from behind the rim of the Moon, in long, slow-motion moments of immense majesty, there emerges a sparkling blue and white jewel, a light, delicate sky-blue sphere laced with slowly swirling veils of white, rising gradually like a small pearl in a thick sea of black mystery. It takes more than a moment to fully realize this is Earth . . . home."

- Edgar Mitchell, Apollo Astronaut

"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, Apollo Astronaut

"Looking outward to the blackness of space, sprinkled with the glory of a universe of lights, I saw majesty—but no welcome. Below was a welcoming planet. There, contained in the thin, moving, incredibly fragile shell of the biosphere is everything that is dear to you, all the human drama and comedy. That's where life is; that's were all the good stuff is."

- Loren Acton, Physicist and
Space Shuttle Astronaut

"It’s beyond imagination until you actually get up and see it and experience it and feel it."

- Willie McCool, Space Shuttle Astronaut

"To fly in space is to see the reality of Earth, alone. The experience changed my life and my attitude toward life itself. I am one of the lucky ones."

- Roberta Bondar, Neurologist and
Space Shuttle Astronaut

"The scenery was very beautiful. But I did not see the Great Wall."

- Yang Liwei, China's First Astronaut

"We came all this way to explore the moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the earth."

- William Anders, Apollo Astronaut

"The earth is simply too small and fragile a basket for the human race to keep all its eggs in."

- Robert A. Heinlein, Science Fiction Author

"There is perhaps no better a demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world."

- Carl Sagan, Astronomer

"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."

- Carl Sagan, Astronomer