The Dream of Spaceflight, vol. 3
Now for the highlights of Chapter 3: 'Seeking the Center at the Edge' By the way, this book is mostly a book who's purpose is to inspire you to say 'yay spaceflight' not really to provoke critical thought on controversial issues; therefore, most of my posts on this book have been and probably will continue to be quotations I think are spiffy.

"We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time."
~T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding

"'Some Part of our being,' said Carl Sagan, 'knows this is from where we came. We long to return.'"

"Perhaps the disenchantment is that of a nation entering middle age. 'The youth,' wrote Thoreau in his journal, 'gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or, perchance, a palace or temple on the earth, and, at length, the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them.'"

"Seeing our own essence in the floating Earth, we are finally more sacred than our works. 'No longer that preposterous figure at the center, no longer that degraded and degrading victim off at the margins of reality,' wrote MacLeish, 'man may at last become himself.'"

"A fragmented, depersonalized, demythologized society spawns cancerlike individuals who lack a sense of anything larger than themselves and who thus destroy the social organism that sustains them. Simultaneously alienated and inflated, the ego becomes obsessed with order and control, barricading itself into a tiny clearing in the dark forest of the soul. Cling to a false self, one loses receptivity to the symbolic unconscious, and with it the ability to experience wonder. "