Quotes from John Noble Wilford

Mars tugs at the human imagination like no other planet. With a force mightier than gravity, it attracts the eye to the shimmering red presence in the clear night sky...

In our time, when men have looked upon earth from afar, seeing it as a small, glistening sphere spinning in the black sea of space, it requires a long backward flight of the imagination to appreciate earlier perceptions of earth. They were visions of wonder and myth, and often they were marvelously wrong.