Top 50 Peter Cawdron Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “People think leadership is about making the right decision. It’s not. It’s about making the best of a bunch of bad decisions. It’s about sailing through a storm and out the other side.”

— Peter Cawdron

2. “Movies have had more influence on us than science.”

— Peter Cawdron

3. “Be willing to learn, not confirm.”

— Peter Cawdron

4. “Science allows us to see beyond the limitation of our senses, teaching us we should not trust our eyes.”

— Peter Cawdron

5. “Reason is an extension rather than a replacement for knowledge. Ignorance is an impediment.”

— Peter Cawdron

6. “It’s simple math, you know. Classic bell curve. Normal distribution. Most people are going to pile up in the middle, not going anywhere, but there’ll be a handful of outliers that go high and low, often for inexplicable reasons. Point is, even survivors don’t really understand why they survive – they just do.”

— Peter Cawdron

7. “Knowledge is more dangerous than any gun, more dangerous than a sword or knife. Even in Eden, knowledge was forbidden.” “But why?” “Knowledge shapes decisions. Limit knowledge and you limit the choices people can make. Knowledge has always been about power, for better or for worse, for good or for evil.”

— Peter Cawdron

8. “Don’t go looking for miracles. You are the miracle. Every day, your body creates roughly three hundred billion new blood cells. That’s more than all the stars in the galaxy. Imagine that.”

— Peter Cawdron

9. “Give me coffee for the things I can change, and tequila for those I can’t.”

— Peter Cawdron

10. “That poem doesn’t say I have to like accepting the things I cannot change, just that I have no other choice. Anxiety is the antithesis, maintaining an illusion that somehow stress can make a difference, when it can’t. I can’t lie to myself.”

— Peter Cawdron

11. “In generations to come, Martian parents are going to hold their kid’s birthday parties on Phobos. It’ll be the inflatable bouncy castle of the 22nd century.”

— Peter Cawdron

12. “Like most astronauts, I made the mistake of asking about safety during training. My instructor tried not to laugh. “The abort system produces eighteen to twenty gees as it catapults you the hell away from any fireball, but it’s a mixed blessing. How safe would it be to pile eighteen to twenty people directly on top of you? You’ll probably survive. Probably. But you won’t be walking away from an abort.”

— Peter Cawdron

13. “There’s a garbled reply, which I hope means they can hear me.”

— Peter Cawdron

14. “Morals rarely keep pace with technology, and collective intelligence can drop away. As life becomes more abstract, more divorced from reality by technology, it’s easy to lose sight of what’s right and wrong.”

— Peter Cawdron

15. “Think about something beautiful. Like a sunset. We look at a planet like Saturn and see beauty. For hundreds of millions of years those magnificent rings have been there, stretching out around a gas giant that’s seven hundred and fifty times larger than Earth, but it’s only now they’re beautiful, only now when we look at them through a telescope or through the eyes of a robotic probe. Don’t you see, without us, they’re meaningless. We make them beautiful.”

— Peter Cawdron

16. “Science is an attempt to remove our emotions and ego from reality.”

— Peter Cawdron

17. “What if beyond the legend there’s a glimmer of truth?”

— Peter Cawdron

18. “Email, Facebook, Twitter – all those false prophets of contrived importance – they can wait. Any urgency they have is artificial. Besides, I’ve had my fill of cat videos this week.”

— Peter Cawdron

19. “For all the talk of vampires, the real issue is life, not blood. Blood is the means, not the end.”

— Peter Cawdron

20. “My problem is, I’m a slow reader. The more I enjoy a book, the slower I read, savoring each moment, so I don’t get through as many books as I’d like.”

— Peter Cawdron

21. “The stars hide the depth of their treasures. As my eyes gaze up at the sky, I’m aware of thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of faint stars on the edge of my vision. There’s so much more to the universe than I can see, so much more to life. The stars tease me with what lies beyond – a vast untamed wilderness. And here I am, slowly dying.”

— Peter Cawdron

22. “Luck is never accommodating, right? Just a big smattering of probabilities that sometimes collide.”

— Peter Cawdron

23. “Dr. Anderson says, “Remember the Challenger space shuttle disaster. Group-think dominated within NASA, and we couldn’t see the forest for all the damn trees – until we lost seven astronauts. A little diversity in decision making is a good thing.”

— Peter Cawdron

24. “Orbits are strange beasts. Rather than escaping the gravity of Mars, we’re surrendering to it, albeit at a speed and distance that allows us to fall around the planet. Like passengers in an elevator with the cable severed, we’re plummeting toward the ground, only we’re going sideways so fast we keep missing the planet.”

— Peter Cawdron

25. “A plane change in space is not unlike trying to hit the offramp of a freeway covered in black ice. Brakes do nothing. Accelerating spins the wheels. Regardless of what we do, the car’s going to continue sliding on down the lane, but with the steering turned hard and a whole lot of gas, we’ll gain a little sideways motion.”

— Peter Cawdron

26. “I think patience is a sign of higher intelligence.”

— Peter Cawdron

27. “For every two steps we’ve taken in advancing our own civilization, we’ve stepped back at least once, embracing our primitive nature, becoming more efficient at killing, more adept at slaughtering each other. Is that the curse of intelligence? Is violence a universal constant?”

— Peter Cawdron

28. “Humans might be difficult to transport between planets but seeds are ideal – small and lightweight. If only humans could be grown in-situ. One day, they will.”

— Peter Cawdron

29. “Micromanagement is leadership by doubt – and it never ends well.”

— Peter Cawdron

30. “History has a way of distilling the complexity of life into oversimplified terms. To them, it will be good versus evil, right versus wrong, freedom struggling against tyranny.” With.”

— Peter Cawdron

31. “Certainty is the crown of a fool.”

— Peter Cawdron

32. “Your world floats on a sea of stars whether you realise it or not.”

— Peter Cawdron

33. “Guesses are for sports commentators, not scientists.”

— Peter Cawdron

34. “Teller adds, “Imagine spending your whole life in that and thinking your bouncy castle represents reality. That’s us here upon Earth.”

— Peter Cawdron

35. “Politics is the art of projecting certainty where none exists.”

— Peter Cawdron

36. “No one wants to die,” Nadir replied. “But everyone will. For the most part, we ignore our finite existence, pretending there are more important concerns – paying the mortgage, saving for a new car, looking for a new job, but really these are distractions. Nothing compares to the privilege of life and the travesty of death. “Once you accept that everyone dies, then it matters not that you die but rather what you do with your life. The joy of life is to bring light into the world.”

— Peter Cawdron

37. “It’s not pride that stops men from asking for help. It’s that they don’t want to shatter the illusion that everything’s the same as it has always been. Blind zeal, that’s what it was, not pride.”

— Peter Cawdron

38. “Don’t you see?” I watch with fascination rather than horror as a chain of explosions breaks the back of the Intrepid. “We’re dead. We’re already dead.” The hull of the Intrepid flexes, buckling beneath us. Explosions race toward us in silence, threatening to consume us. There’s no time to act. There’s barely time to utter one last sentence before we’re caught in the inferno. “We’ve probably been dead for centuries.”

— Peter Cawdron

39. “Beauty is more than makeup, more than styled hair, more than lipstick or pretty earrings. True beauty is a connection between two people that reaches beyond mere looks.”

— Peter Cawdron

40. “The appearance of the anomaly has confirmed our greatest hopes while unmasking some of our deepest fears. Our world will never be the same again.”

— Peter Cawdron

41. “Funny, though, how someone so social in a virtual sense can be so closed off physically.”

— Peter Cawdron

42. “For the folks at home. Hollywood has a way of molding popular opinion. Tell me why we shouldn’t be worried.”

— Peter Cawdron

43. “If something bursts out of my chest, you’re the first one it’s going for. You know that, right?” Nick laughs, jogging down the corridor.”

— Peter Cawdron

44. “No one should care about appearances and yet everyone does. It’s subliminal. Clothing may be a facade, but people read body language for intent. They read posture, temperament and styling as a measure of character. By themselves, these things are meaningless and yet they amplify the message being delivered by the candidates.”

— Peter Cawdron

45. “Ignore the inevitable conspiracies that will arise. Reality is challenging enough.”

— Peter Cawdron

46. “It sounds strange, but dust management will be a big deal for future explorers.”

— Peter Cawdron

47. “Learning is the mind taking a deep breath.”

— Peter Cawdron

48. “Life needs not purpose. Life has its own purpose.”

— Peter Cawdron

49. “There’s something therapeutic about privacy. For me, it’s the sanctity of self, the ability to be alone, to be myself and not on show.”

— Peter Cawdron

50. “Books are the mind of the past,” she says. “And yet they’re stepping stones to the future.”

— Peter Cawdron