Brooke

“If we're stuck on one world, we're limited to a single case; we don't know what else is possible. Then—like an art fancier familiar only with Fayoum tomb paintings, a dentist who knows only molars, a philosopher trained merely in NeoPlatonism, a linguist who has studied only Chinese, or a physicist whose knowledge of gravity is restricted to falling bodies on Earth—our perspective is foreshortened, our insights narrow, our predictive abilities circumscribed. By contrast, when we explore other worlds, what once seemed the only way a planet could be turns out to be somewhere in the middle range of a vast spectrum of possibilities. When we look at those other worlds, we begin to understand what happens when we have too much of one thing or too little of another. We learn how a planet can go wrong.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

“Then science came along and taught us that we are not the measure of all things, that there are wonders unimagined, that the Universe is not obliged to conform to what we consider comfortable or plausible. We have learned something about the idiosyncratic nature of our common sense. Science has carried human self-consciousness to a higher level. This is surely a rite of passage, a step towards maturity.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

“Secrets that reside in the mind of one person aren't really secrets. They're unspoken fears.”
― Josh Kilmer-Purcell, I Am Not Myself These Days

“Survival is insufficient.”
― Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven