On a day when the world’s media is consumed with the unintended decapitation, rather than the “civilized” hanging of a former tyrant, perhaps Carl Sagan’s words put a few things in perspective.

Of the “pale blue dot” reproduced at Futility Closet (link below), he said

That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ’superstar,’ every ’supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

Earth seen from 4 billion miles away, photographed by Voyager 1 on June 6, 1990