“We have abolished space here on the little Earth; we can never abolish the space that yawns between the stars.”

We'll Never Conquer Space (1960)
Context: We have abolished space here on the little Earth; we can never abolish the space that yawns between the stars. Once again, as in the days when Homer sang, we are face-to-face with immensity and must accept its grandeur and terror, its inspiring possibilities and its dreadful restraints.

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Arthur C. Clarke photo
Arthur C. Clarke 207
British science fiction writer, science writer, inventor, u… 1917–2008

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“War is the price we pay for living in a state. Before you can abolish war you will have to abolish all states. But that is unthinkable until the propensity to violence and evil is rooted out of human beings.”

"Father Severyan", in November 1916: The Red Wheel: Knot II (1984; translation 1999).
Context: At no time has the world been without war. Not in seven or ten or twenty thousand years. Neither the wisest of leaders, nor the noblest of kings, nor yet the Church — none of them has been able to stop it. And don't succumb to the facile belief that wars will be stopped by hotheaded socialists. Or that rational and just wars can be sorted out from the rest. There will always be thousands of thousands to whom even such a war will be senseless and unjustified. Quite simply, no state can live without war, that is one of the state's essential functions. … War is the price we pay for living in a state. Before you can abolish war you will have to abolish all states. But that is unthinkable until the propensity to violence and evil is rooted out of human beings. The state was created to protect us from evil. In ordinary life thousands of bad impulses, from a thousand foci of evil, move chaotically, randomly, against the vulnerable. The state is called upon to check these impulses — but it generates others of its own, still more powerful, and this time one-directional. At times it throws them all in a single direction — and that is war.

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“We on Earth have just awakened to the great oceans of space and time from which we have emerged.”

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Context: We on Earth have just awakened to the great oceans of space and time from which we have emerged. We are the legacy of 15 billion years of cosmic evolution. We have a choice: We can enhance life and come to know the universe that made us, or we can squander our 15 billion-year heritage in meaningless self-destruction. What happens in the first second of the next cosmic year depends on what we do, here and now, with our intelligence and our knowledge of the cosmos.

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“This whole earth in which we inhabit is but a point is space.”

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“If we only have love
Then we'll only be men
And we'll drink from the Grail
To be born once again;
Then with nothing at all
But the little we are
We'll have conquered all time
All space, the sun, and the stars!”

Jacques Brel (1929–1978) Belgian singer-songwriter

If Only We Have Love (1957)
Context: If we only have love
We will never bow down
We'll be tall as the pines
Neither heroes nor clowns.
If we only have love
Then we'll only be men
And we'll drink from the Grail
To be born once again;
Then with nothing at all
But the little we are
We'll have conquered all time
All space, the sun, and the stars!

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“If we only have love
Then we'll only be men
And we'll drink from the Grail
To be born once again
Then with nothing at all
But the little we are
We'll have conquered all time
All space, the sun, and the stars.”

Rod McKuen (1933–2015) American poet, songwriter, composer, and singer

As closing scene in the 1968 musical Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris (1975 film version) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wdSXpC8fbNA
Translations and adaptations, If We Only Have Love (1968)
Context: If we only have love
We will never bow down
We'll be tall as the pines
Neither heroes nor clowns.
If we only have love
Then we'll only be men
And we'll drink from the Grail
To be born once again
Then with nothing at all
But the little we are
We'll have conquered all time
All space, the sun, and the stars.

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