Mag

“The lessons of rocks, stars,and life are clear. To understand Earth, you must divorce yourself for the inconsequential temporal or spacial scale of human life. We live on a single tiny world in a cosmos of a hundred billion galaxies, each with a hundred billion stars. Similarly, we live day by day in a cosmos aged hundreds of billions of days. If you seek meaning and purpose in the cosmos, you will not find it in any privileged moment or place tied to human existence.”
― Robert m hazen, The Story of Earth: The First 4.5 Billion Years, from Stardust to Living Planet

“Too often, the notion of progress is used as a code word for perfection, the chain of being in a different guise. The term should be employed with caution. Some see an arrow of time in biology, as in physics, but in the opposite direction- a relentless tendency to improve, just as a universe has a built-in trend towards chaos and disorder. That is too optimistic. Some lineages get more complicated, some simpler, and much of life has to struggle to stay in the same place. If everyone is evolving, nobody can afford to stop, and there may be constant change with no overall advance at all. ”
― Steve Jones, Darwin's Ghost: The Origin of Species Updated

“Fancy cutting down all those beautiful trees...to make pulp for those bloody newspapers, and calling it civilisation. - Winston Churchill, remarking to his son during a visit to Canada in 1929”
― John Vaillant, The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed

“The rules are simple: they lie to us, we know they're lying, they know we know they're lying, but they keep lying to us, and we keep pretending to believe them.”
― Elena Gorokhova, A Mountain of Crumbs