Earth Four Billion Quotes & Sayings

It's important that we attempt to extend life beyond Earth now. It is the first time in the four billion-year history of Earth that it's been possible, and that window could be open for a long time - hopefully it is - or it could be open for a short time. We should err on the side of caution and do something now. — Elon Musk

Knowledge without justice ought to be called cunning rather than wisdom. — Plato

I don't think ethical people deal with intimidation as a method to achieve success. Undermining someone's self-esteem isn't a method to achieve success. — Dominique Moceanu

I seem to long for community and mistrust it in equal measure, and so I spend most of my days carefully constructing various communities in stories and seeing if they fly. — Lauren Groff

Four billion people on this earth
but my imagination is still the same.
It's bad with large numbers.
It's still taken by particularity.
It flits in the dark like a flashlight,
illuminating only random faces
while all the rest go by,
never coming to mind and never really missed. — Wislawa Szymborska

Out of a human population on earth of four and a half billion, perhaps twenty people can write a book in a year. Some people lift cars, too. Some people enter week-long sled-dog races, go over Niagara Falls in a barrel, fly planes through the Arc de Triomphe. Some people feel no pain in childbirth. Some people eat cars. There is no call to take human extremes as norms. — Annie Dillard

I was born in the U.S. Why should anyone who has an unfavorable view of the American government renounce his or her citizenship? Why don't its supporters relinquish their citizenship first? — Mohammad Marandi

The Moon is a ball of left-over debris from a cosmic collision that took place more than four billion years ago. A Mars-sized asteroid - one of the countless planetesimals that were frantically churning our solar system into existence - hit the infant Earth, bequeathing it a very large natural satellite. — Seth Shostak

I have a vision of a Galaxy overrun by mankind from Core to rim. Of four hundred billion stars each enslaved to the rhythm of Earth's day, Earth's year. I have a vision of a trillion planets pulsing to the beat of a human heart. — Stephen Baxter

Life existed on Earth for nearly four billion years before anything remotely resembling a human being showed up. And even then, when we started to branch off from other apes about 10,000,000 years ago, our ancestors looked pretty different. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

And Spaceship Earth, that glorious and bloody circus, continued its four-billion-year-long spiral orbit about the Sun; the engineering, I must admit, was so exquisite that none of the passengers felt any motion at all. Those on the dark side of the ship mostly slept and voyaged into worlds of freedom and fantasy; those on the light side moved about the tasks appointed for them by their rulers, or idled waiting for the next order from above. — Robert Anton Wilson

I see again my schoolroom in Vyra, the blue roses of the wallpaper, the open window. ... Everything is as it should be, nothing will ever change, nobody will ever die. — Vladimir Nabokov

All qualified physicists, biologists, cosmologists and geologists agree, on the basis of massive, mutually corroborating evidence, that the earth's age is at least four billion years. — Richard Dawkins

There have only been about a half dozen genuinely important events in the four-billion-year saga of life on Earth: single-celled life, multicelled life, differentiation into plants and animals, movement of animals from water to land, and the advent of mammals and consciousness. — Elon Musk

Four billion years ago the planet Earth was molten rock; now it sings opera! — Brian Swimme

Humans are remarkable: the first species in almost four billion years of life on earth that dominates the biosphere. This gives us the power, in principle, to build societies in which everyone flourishes. But it also creates great dangers because it is not clear that we really understand how to use our potentially devastating powers. — David Christian

When I was a child, the Earth was said to be two billion years old. Now scientists say it's four and a half billion. So that makes me two and a half billion. — Paul Erdos

The universe, the whole mass of things that are, is corporeal, that is to say, body, and hath the dimensions of magnitude, length, breadth and depth. Every part of the universe is 'body' and that which is not 'body' is no part of the universe, and because the universe is all, that which is no part of it is nothing, and consequently nowhere. — Thomas Hobbes

Our world is falling apart quietly. Human civilization has reduced the plant, a four-million-year-old life form, into three things: food, medicine, and wood. In our relentless and ever-intensifying obsession with obtaining a higher volume, potency, and variety of these three things, we have devastated plant ecology to an extent that millions of years of natural disaster could not. Roads have grow like a manic fungus and the endless miles of ditches that bracket these roads serve as hasty graves for perhaps millions of plant species extinguished in the name of progress. Planet Earth is nearly a Dr. Seuss book made real: every year since 1990 we have created more than eight billion new stumps. If we continue to fell healthy trees at this rate, less then six hundred years from now, every tree on the planet will have been reduced to a stump. My job is about making sure there will be some evidence that someone cared about the great tragedy that unfolded during our age. — Hope Jahren

They say there's as many as four hundred billion stars in our galaxy" he murmured. "And our galaxy's just one in perhaps five hundred billion others. That's about seventy each of you, me and every other human who walks the earth". — Stephen Lloyd Jones

belief, by its very nature, is exclusive. If The earth is more than four billion years old is true, then the claim, The earth is fewer than ten thousand years old is false. And so my believing the truth of the former entails my also believing the falseness of the latter. — David Werther

A newly elected representative quickly discovers that his job in government-aside from making new laws-is to act as a broker, middleman, special pleader and finagler. — William Greider

On a macro level, four billion people on Earth make less than four dollars a day. — Jacqueline Novogratz

Wise men have regarded the earth as a tragedy, a farce, even an illusionist's trick; but all, if they are truly wise, and not merely intellectual rapists, recognize that it is certainly some kind of stage in which we all play roles, most of us being very poorly coached and totally unrehearsed before the curtain rises. Is it too much if I ask, tentatively, that we agree to look upon it as a circus, a touring carnival wandering about the sun for a record season of four billion years and producing new monsters and miracles, hoaxes and bloody mishaps, wonders and blunders, but never quite entertaining the customers well enough to prevent them from leaving, one by one, and returning to their homes for a long and bored winter's sleep under the dust? — Robert Anton Wilson

The actual recipe for the asteroid belt? Take a mere 2.5 percent of the Moon's mass (itself, just 1/81 the mass of Earth), crush it into thousands of assorted pieces, but make sure that three-quarters of the mass is contained in just four asteroids. Then spread them all across a 100-million-mile-wide belt that tracks along a 1.5-billion-mile path around the Sun. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

She blames me for taking you away from her."
"I was never hers in the first place. And this isn't some game of pass-the-parcel."
That made her grin. "If you're the parcel," she said, giving him a suggestive glance, "I would like to unwrap you. — Lisa Kleypas

Advertising holding companies used to boast about their share of the advertising market. Now they are proud of how much of their business is not in advertising. — Maurice Saatchi

Technologically we now have four [seven!] billion billionaires on board Spaceship Earth who are entirely unaware of their good fortune. — R. Buckminster Fuller

The brown earth, the torn, blasted earth, with a greasy shine under the sun's rays; the earth is the background of this restless, gloomy world of automatons, our gasping is the scratching of a quill, our lips are dry, our heads are debauched with stupor - thus we stagger forward, and into our pierced and shattered souls bores the torturing image of the brown earth with the greasy sun and the convulsed and dead soldiers, who lie there - it can't be helped - who cry and clutch at our legs as we spring away over them. We have lost all feeling for one another. We can hardly control ourselves when our glance lights on the form of some other man. We are insensible, dead men, who through some trick, some dreadful magic, are still able to run and to kill. — Erich Maria Remarque

I don't like feeling sorry for myself. That's not who I am. And most of the time I don't feel that way. Instead, I am grateful for having at least found you. We could have flashed by one another like two pieces of cosmic dust.
God or the universe or whatever one chooses to label the great systems of balance and order does not recognize Earth-time. To the universe, four days is no different than four billion light years. I try to keep that in mind.
But, I am, after all, a man. And all the philosophic rationalizations I can conjure up do not keep me from wanting you, every day, every moment, the merciless wail of time, of time I can never spend with you, deep within my head.
I love you, profoundly and completely. And I always will.
The last cowboy,
Robert — Robert James Waller

If we could magically transport ourselves back to the young Earth, when it was only a billion years old or two billion years old or three billion years old or four billion years old, we wouldn't be able to survive. We would have a hard time surviving if we were transported to the time when dinosaurs were around. — Sylvia Earle

Someone is an ignoramus who would say that, 'Oh, we had three hurricanes this year. This proves that somehow the climate is warming.' The earth is 4.5 billion years old, and you're going to say that we had four hurricanes and so it proves a theory? — Rand Paul

Consider this. It took the earth's population thousand of years-from the early dawn of man all the way to the early 1800s-to reach one billion people. Then astoundingly, it took only about a hundred years to double the population to two billion in the 1920s. After that, it took a mere fifty years for the population to double again to four billion in the 1970s. As you can imagine, we're well on track to reach eight billion very soon. Just today, the human race added another quarter-billion people to planet Earth. A quarter million. And this happens ever day-rain or shine. Currently every year er 're adding the equivalent of the entire country of Germany. — Dan Brown

I'm very, very pro-defense. — James Lankford

Consider: Life arose on Earth close to four billion years ago. Four billion years of slithering, swimming, and soaring life forms. But only in the last 200 thousand years has a species arisen that can fathom the laws of nature and build hardware able to signal its presence. — Seth Shostak

What's the matter with you? Huh? Huh?'
'Why can't you be normal?'
'Why do you wanna be so different? — Jerry Spinelli