Orbiting Earth in the spaceship, I saw how beautiful our planet is. People, let us preserve and increase this beauty, not destroy it!
In plain words
From space he saw how beautiful Earth is, and asked people to look after it.
Where these words come from
- 55% sureLots of sources credit Yuri Gagarin with this, and they agree with each other. The book or the speech it first came from hasn't turned up yet.
- A handwritten, signed statement by Gagarin after his 1961 flight, but only published in the 1981 Soviet compilation Syny goluboi planety (he died 1968) — posthumous publication caps this at likely per the librarian rule, though the document itself is contemporaneous.
