"You have to remember we brought back a picture of the Earth as it is 240,000 miles away. And the fact is, it gives you a different perspective of the Earth when you see it as three-dimensional between the sun and the moon, and you begin to realize how small and how significant the body is. … When I put my thumb up to the window I could completely hide it, and then I realized that behind my thumb that I'm hiding this Earth, and there are about 6 billion people that are all striving to live there. You have to really kind of think about our own existence here in the universe, … You realize that people often say, "I hope to go to heaven when I die." In reality, if you think about it, you go to heaven when you're born. You arrive on a planet that has the proper mass, has the gravity to contain water and an atmosphere, which are the very essentials for life … And you arrive on this planet that's orbiting a star just at the right distance — not too far to be too cold, or too close to be too hot — and just at the right distance to absorb that star's energy and then, with that energy, cause life to evolve here in the first place. … In reality, you know, God has really given us a stage, just looking at where we were around the moon, a stage on which we perform. And how that play turns out is up to us, I guess."
January 1, 1970