Hey Chapter 4... I'm almost done!
First quote of the chapter: "Where there is no vision, the people perish." ~ Proverbs 29:18. This means that without a source of meaning larger that of your own ego or beyond survival itself, you're left in a world full of void. How boring that must be!

Next, I found some interesting statistics that I could've used back in high school in junior english when we had to write our persuasive papers. I wrote mine, unsurprisingly, on why the space program was a good investment. Here's what The Dream of Spaceflight had to say about the topic:

"Even in the days of Apollo the public lost interest after the first lunar landing. Having beaten the Russians in the Super Bowl of space, we went back to business and Monday Night Football. After six walks on the moon, the last three were scrapped, saving seven-tenths of 1 percent of Apollo's total cost. Yet the $24 billion Apollo program cost each American only a dollar a month for nine years, and this ignores exponential returns to the economy. The $38 billion spent on space between 1961 and 1972 was barely 1 percent of the national budget, 3 percent of the amount allotted to social programs, and half the figure for detected welfare fraud. Had even this moderate commitment to space persisted, we would have walked on Mars a decade ago."

More quotations: "Wonder, in its larger sense, denotes the mysterium tremendum, the aura of unfathomable majesty, utterly humbling and wholly Other, surrounding the sublime and terrifying unknowns that border our models of reality.... Thus we gaze into the night sky and feel not diminishment but dilation. We sense the vastness and passion of creation and glimpse an equally vast interior - the 'enormous geography of the soul,'..."

"the less one explores, the less comfortable or compelling exploring becomes."

"The sense of wonder - the need to find our place in the whole - is not the only genesis of personal growth but the very mechanism of evolution, driving us to become more than we are. Exploration, evolution, and self-transcendence are but different perspectives on the same process."

"To believe less - or believe more - is to live in the shallows of what it means to be human."

"A young space enthusiast once asked von Braun what it takes to send a man to the moon. His answer is his epitaph: 'The will to do it.'"