Gerard K. O'Neill famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

Here is my advice as we begin the century that will lead to 2081. First, guard the freedom of ideas at all costs. Be alert that dictators have always played on the natural human tendency to blame others and to oversimplify. And don't regard yourself as a guardian of freedom unless you respect and preserve the rights of people you disagree with to free, public, unhampered expression.
-- Gerard K. O'Neill

#Respect #Freedom #Rights
More important than the material issue . . . the opening of a new, high frontier will challenge the best that is in us . . . the new lands waiting to be built in space will give us new freedom to search for better governments, social systems, and ways of life.
-- Gerard K. O'Neill

#Moon #Land #Issues
Is a planetary surface the right place for an expanding technological civilization?
-- Gerard K. O'Neill

#Civilization #Surface #Expanding
We should ask, critically and with appeal to the numbers, whether the best site for a growing advancing industrial society is Earth, the Moon, Mars, some other planet, or somewhere else entirely. Surprisingly, the answer will be inescapable - the best site is "somewhere else entirely.
-- Gerard K. O'Neill

#Moon #Somewhere Else #Numbers
Don't regard yourself as a guardian of freedom unless you respect and preserve the rights of people you disagree with.
-- Gerard K. O'Neill

#Respect #Peace #Freedom
It is the hope of those who work toward the breakout from planet Earth that the establishment of permanent, self-sustaining colonies of humans off-Earth will ... make human life forever unkillable, removing it from the endangered species list, where it now stands on a fragile Earth overarmed with nuclear weapons. Second, the opening of virtually unlimited new land areas in space will reduce territorial pressures and therefore diminish warfare on Earth itself.
-- Gerard K. O'Neill

#Space #Self #Land
The fatalism of the limits-to-growth alternative is reasonable only if one ignores all the resources beyond our atmosphere, resources thousands of times greater than we could ever obtain from our beleaguered Earth. As expressed very beautifully in the language of House Concurrent Resolution 451, 'This tiny Earth is not humanity's prison, is not a closed and dwindling resource, but is in fact only part of a vast system rich in opportunities...'
-- Gerard K. O'Neill

#Opportunity #Space #House
Clearly our first task is to use the material wealth of space to solve the urgent problems we now face on Earth: to bring the poverty-stricken segments of the world up to a decent living standard, without recourse to war or punitive action against those already in material comfort; to provide for a maturing civilization the basic energy vital to its survival.
-- Gerard K. O'Neill

#War #Space #Civilization
Dictators have always played on the natural human tendency to blame others and to oversimplify.
-- Gerard K. O'Neill

#Peace #War #Blame

If once you forfeit the confidence of your fellow-citizens, you can never regain their respect and esteem.
I don't have any understanding of a human being who doesn't respect the beauty of life and that goes for all creatures that have thoughts, feelings and needs.
We show deference to the civil authorities when they respect the divine origin of their power and when they serve the people with objective reference to the law of God.
If there had been no troublemakers, no Dissenters, we should still be living in caves.
Democracy is not something you believe in or a place to hang your hat, but it's something you do. You participate. If you stop doing it, democracy crumbles.
Democracy is constructed like an edifice, freedom by freedom, right by right, until it reaches its snapping point.
Perhaps worse still is what liberal societies might do to themselves in the face of this new and different threat [of terrorism]. They begin, by small but dangerous increments, to cease to be as liberal as they once were. They begin to restrict their own hard-won rights and freedoms as a protection against the crminial minority who attempt (and as we thus see, by forcing liberty to commit suidcide, succed in doing) to terrorise society.
Familiarize yourselves with the chains of bondage and you prepare your own limbs to wear them. Accustomed to trample on the rights of others, you have lost the genius of your own independence and become the fit subjects of the first cunning tyrant who rises among you.
The best way to take control over a people and control them utterly is to take a little of their freedom at a time, to erode rights by a thousand tiny and almost imperceptible reductions. In this way, the people will not see those rights and freedoms being removed until past the point at which these changes cannot be reversed.
We have to put a stop to the idea that it is a part of everybody's civil rights to say whatever he pleases.

Gerard K. O'Neill famous quotes

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