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1.05_-_2010_and_1956_-_Doomsday?
1.06_-_Being_Human_and_the_Copernican_Principle
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Carl Sagan
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sagan "jargon" /say'gn/ (From Carl Sagan's TV series "Cosmos") Billions and billions. A large quantity of anything. "There's a sagan different ways to tweak Emacs." "The US Government spends sagans on bombs and welfare - hard to say which is more destructive." [{Jargon File}] (1999-10-12)
sagan ::: (jargon) /say'gn/ (From Carl Sagan's TV series Cosmos) Billions and billions. A large quantity of anything.There's a sagan different ways to tweak Emacs. The US Government spends sagans on bombs and welfare - hard to say which is more destructive.[Jargon File] (1999-10-12)
KEYS (10k)
39 Carl Sagan
1 there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known
1 there is a tingling in the spine
1 Editors of Discovery Magazine
NEW FULL DB (2.4M)
1456 Carl Sagan
5 Richard Dawkins
3 Michio Kaku
3 Anonymous
2 Nicola Yoon
2 Matt Haig
2 Kurt Andersen
2 Bill Bryson
2 Ann Druyan
1:Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. ~ Carl Sagan, #KEYS
2:For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love. ~ Carl Sagan, #KEYS
3:If it can be destroyed by the Truth, it deserves to be destroyed by the Truth.
~ Carl Sagan,#KEYS
4:As the ancient myth makers knew, we are children equally of the earth and the sky. ~ Carl Sagan, #KEYS
5:If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. ~ Carl Sagan, #KEYS
6:Human history can be viewed as a slowly dawning awareness that we are members of a larger group. ~ Carl Sagan, #KEYS
7:Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works. ~ Carl Sagan , #KEYS
8:According to some estimates, almost half the scientists and high technologists on Earth are employed full- or part-time on military matters. ~ Carl Sagan, #KEYS
9:We humans appear on the cosmic calendar so recently that our recorded history occupies only the last few seconds of the last minute of December 31st. ~ Carl Sagan, #KEYS
10:Every one of us is precious in the cosmic perspective. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another. ~ Carl Sagan, #KEYS
11:But in introducing me simultaneously to skepticism and to wonder, they taught me the two uneasily cohabiting modes of thought that are central to the scientific method. ~ Carl Sagan, #KEYS
12:Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return. And we can. Because the cosmos is also within us. We're made of star-stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself. ~ Carl Sagan, #KEYS
13:The surface of the earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. On this shore we've learned most of what we know. Recently we've waded a little way out, maybe ankle-deep, and the water seems inviting. ~ Carl Sagan, #KEYS
14:For small creatures such as we the vastness [of the universe] is bearable only through love." ~ Carl Sagan, (1934 - 1996) American astronomer, planetary scientist, cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist and author, Wikipedia, #KEYS
15:...The illegality of cannabis is outrageous, an impediment to full utilization of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship so desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world. ~ Carl Sagan, #KEYS
16:I am convinced that there are genuine and valid levels of perception available with cannabis (and probably with other drugs) which are, through the defects of our society and our educational system, unavailable to us without such drugs. ~ Carl Sagan, #KEYS
17:Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works." ~ Carl Sagan, (1934 - 1996) American astronomer, planetary scientist, cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist and author, Wikipedia, #KEYS
18:A religion old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science, might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. Sooner or later, such a religion will emerge. ~ Carl Sagan, #KEYS
19:Exactly the same technology can be used for good and for evil. It is as if there were a God who said to us, I set before you two ways: You can use your technology to destroy yourselves or to carry you to the planets and the stars. It's up to you. ~ Carl Sagan, #KEYS
20:In the fabric of space and in the nature of matter, as in a great work of art, there is, written small, the artist's signature. Standing over humans, gods, and demons, subsuming Caretakers and Tunnel builders, there is an intelligence that antedates the universe. ~ Carl Sagan, #KEYS
21:You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you're not. See, in all our searching, the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable, is each other." ~ Carl Sagan, (1934 - 1996) American astronomer, planetary scientist, cosmologist, astrophysicist & author, Wikipedia, #KEYS
22:Russell commented that the development of such gifted individuals (referring to polymaths) required a childhood period in which there was little or no pressure for conformity, a time in which the child could develop and pursue his or her own interests no matter how unusual or bizarre. ~ Carl Sagan, #KEYS
23:Widespread intellectual and moral docility may be convenient for leaders in the short term, but it is suicidal for nations in the long term. One of the criteria for national leadership should therefore be a talent for understanding, encouraging, and making constructive use of vigorous criticism. ~ Carl Sagan, #KEYS
24:The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us ~ there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation of a distant memory, as if we were falling from a great height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries. ~ Carl Sagan, #KEYS
25:The cosmic calendar compresses the local history of the universe into a single year. If the universe began on January 1st it was not until May that the Milky Way formed. Other planetary systems may have appeared in June, July and August, but our Sun and Earth not until mid-September. Life arose soon after. ~ Carl Sagan, #KEYS
26:600 million years ago, the monopolizing grip of the algae was broken and an enormous proliferation of new lifeforms emerged, an event called the Cambrian explosion. Life had arisen almost immediately after the origin of the Earth, which suggests that life may be an inevitable chemical process on an Earth-like planet. ~ Carl Sagan, #KEYS
27:A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called "leaves") imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person-perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. ~ Carl Sagan, #KEYS
28:We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers.
The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what's true. ~ Carl Sagan,#KEYS
29:When all is said and done, the invention of writing must be reckoned not only as a brilliant innovation but as a surpassing good for humanity. And assuming that we survive long enough to use their inventions wisely, I believe the same will be said of the modern Thoths and Prometheuses who are today devising computers and programs at the edge of machine intelligence. ~ Carl Sagan, #KEYS
30:There is a myth about such highs: the user has an illusion of great insight, but it does not survive scrutiny in the morning. I am convinced that this is an error, and that the devastating insights achieved when high are real insights; the main problem is putting these insights in a form acceptable to the quite different self that we are when we're down the next day. ~ Carl Sagan, #KEYS
31:The sky calls to us. If we do not destroy ourselves, we will one day venture to the stars.
Here we face a critical branch point in history, what we do with our world, right now, will propagate down through the centuries and powerfully affect the destiny of our descendants.
In the vastness of the Cosmos there must be other civilizations far older and more advanced than ours. ~ Carl Sagan,#KEYS
32:All of us cherish our beliefs. They are, to a degree, self-defining. When someone comes along who challenges our belief system as insufficiently well-based - or who, like Socrates, merely asks embarrassing questions that we haven't thought of, or demonstrates that we've swept key underlying assumptions under the rug - it becomes much more than a search for knowledge. It feels like a personal assault. ~ Carl Sagan, #KEYS
33:Look again at that dot 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 Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate... Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. ~ Carl Sagan,#KEYS
34:We on Earth have just awakened to the great oceans of space and time from which we have emerged. We are the legacy of 15 billion years of cosmic evolution. We have a choice: We can enhance life and come to know the universe that made us, or we can squander our 15 billion-year heritage in meaningless self-destruction. What happens in the first second of the next cosmic year depends on what we do, here and now, with our intelligence and our knowledge of the cosmos. ~ Carl Sagan, #KEYS
35:For the first time, we have the power to decide the fate of our planet and ourselves. This is a time of great danger, but our species is young, and curious, and brave. It shows much promise.
We wish to pursue the truth no matter where it leads. But to find the truth, we need imagination and skepticism both. We will not be afraid to speculate, but we will be careful to distinguish speculation from fact. The cosmos is full beyond measure of elegant truths; of exquisite interrelationships; of the awesome machinery of nature. ~ Carl Sagan,#KEYS
36:The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home. In a cosmic perspective, most human concerns seem insignificant, even petty. And yet our species is young and curious and brave and shows much promise. In the last few millennia we have made the most astonishing and unexpected discoveries about the Cosmos and our place within it, explorations that are exhilarating to consider. They remind us that humans have evolved to wonder, that understanding is a joy, that knowledge is prerequisite to survival. I believe our future depends powerfully on how well we understand this Cosmos in which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky. ~ Carl Sagan, #KEYS
37:From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. 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. ~ Carl Sagan, #KEYS
38:Spirit comes from the Latin word to breathe. What we breathe is air, which is certainly matter, however thin. Despite usage to the contrary, there is no necessary implication in the word spiritual that we are talking of anything other than matter (including the matter of which the brain is made), or anything outside the realm of science. On occasion, I will feel free to use the word. Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual. So are our emotions in the presence of great art or music or literature, or of acts of exemplary selfless courage such as those of Mohandas Gandhi or Martin Luther King Jr. The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both. ~ Carl Sagan, #KEYS
39:Those worlds in space are as countless as all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the earth. Each of those worlds is as real as ours and every one of them is a succession of incidents, events, occurrences which influence its future. Countless worlds, numberless moments, an immensity of space and time. And our small planet at this moment, here we face a critical branch point in history, what we do with our world, right now, will propagate down through the centuries and powerfully affect the destiny of our descendants, it is well within our power to destroy our civilization and perhaps our species as well. If we capitulate to superstition or greed or stupidity we could plunge our world into a time of darkness deeper than the time between the collapse of classical civilisation and the Italian Renaissance. But we are also capable of using our compassion and our intelligence, our technology and our wealth to make an abundant and meaningful life for every inhabitant of this planet. ~ Carl Sagan, #KEYS
40:The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity ~ in all this vastness ~ there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known, so far, to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known. ~ Carl Sagan, #KEYS
41:Shouldn't we consider in every nation major changes in the traditional ways of doing things, a fundamental restructuring of economic political social and religious institutions. We've reached a point where there can be no more special interests or special cases, nuclear arms threaten every person on the Earth. Fundamental changes in society are sometimes labelled impractical or contrary to human nature, as if nuclear war were practical or as if there's only one human nature. But fundamental changes can clearly be made, we're surrounded by them. In the last two centuries abject slavery which was with us for thousands of years has almost entirely been eliminated in a stirring worldwide revolution. Women, systematically mistreated for millennia are gradually gaining the political and economic power traditionally denied them and some wars of aggression have recently been stopped or curtailed because of a revulsion felt by the people in the aggressor nations. The old appeals to racial sexual religious chauvinism and to rabid nationalist fervor are beginning not to work. A new consciousness is developing which sees the earth as a single organism and recognizes that an organism at war with itself is doomed. We are one planet. One of the great revelations of the age of space exploration is the image of the earth finite and lonely, somehow vulnerable, bearing the entire human species through the oceans of space and time. ~ Carl Sagan, #KEYS
42:science reading list :::
1. and 2. The Voyage of the Beagle (1845) and The Origin of Species (1859) by Charles Darwin [tie
3. Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) by Isaac Newton (1687)
4. Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems by Galileo Galilei (1632)
5. De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (On the Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres) by Nicolaus Copernicus (1543)
6. Physica (Physics) by Aristotle (circa 330 B.C.)
7. De Humani Corporis Fabrica (On the Fabric of the Human Body) by Andreas Vesalius (1543)
8. Relativity: The Special and General Theory by Albert Einstein (1916)
9. The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins (1976)
10. One Two Three . . . Infinity by George Gamow (1947)
11. The Double Helix by James D. Watson (1968)
12. What Is Life? by Erwin Schrodinger (1944)
13. The Cosmic Connection by Carl Sagan (1973)
14. The Insect Societies by Edward O. Wilson (1971)
15. The First Three Minutes by Steven Weinberg (1977)
16. Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (1962)
17. The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould (1981)
18. The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales by Oliver Sacks (1985)
19. The Journals of Lewis and Clark by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark (1814)
20. The Feynman Lectures on Physics by Richard P Feynman, Robert B. Leighton, and Matthew Sands (1963)
21. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male by Alfred C. Kinsey et al. (1948)
22. Gorillas in the Mist by Dian Fossey (1983)
23. Under a Lucky Star by Roy Chapman Andrews (1943)
24. Micrographia by Robert Hooke (1665)
25. Gaia by James Lovelock (1979)
~ Editors of Discovery Magazine, Website,#KEYS
*** WISDOM TROVE ***
1:But I could be wrong. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 2:We are all star stuff. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 3:War is murder writ large. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 4:All colours are arbitrary. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 5:We are made of star stuff. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 6:Real patriots ask questions. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 7:Not all bits have equal value. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 8:Who will speak for Planet Earth? ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 9:Nobody listens to mathematicians. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 10:The open road still softly calls. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 11:Valid criticism does you a favor. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 12:We are all made up of star stuff. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 13:To read is to voyage through time. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 14:Understanding is a kind of ecstasy ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 15:We can always take but never give. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 16:Every star may be a sun to someone. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 17:What an astonishing thing a book is. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 18:We were wanderers from the beginning. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 19:Cherish your species and your planet." ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 20:We are one species. We are star stuff. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 21:We are star stuff harvesting sunlight. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 22:We can't help it. Life looks for life. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 23:Your god is too small for my universe. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 24:Science is a way to not fool ourselves. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 25:I don't want to believe. I want to know. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 26:We are the custodians of life's meaning. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 27:We are the universe experiencing itself. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 28:An organism at war with itself is doomed. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 29:The illegality of cannabis is outrageous. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 30:Cleverly designed experiments are the key. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 31:Science is only a Latin word for knowledge ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 32:We are a way for the cosmos to know itself. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 33:We are a way of the universe knowing itself. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 34:He didn't want to believe. He wanted to know. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 35:Science has itself become a kind of religion. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 36:Wisdom lies in understanding our limitations. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 37:My wonder button is being pushed all the time. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 38:There is never only ONE of anything in nature. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 39:With insufficient data it is easy to go wrong. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 40:We live on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 41:Extraordinary claim requires extraordinary proof. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 42:Stars are phoenixes, rising from their own ashes. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 43:You are worth about 3 dollars worth in chemicals. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 44:Across the sea of space, the stars are other suns. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 45:Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 46:Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 47:If we ruin the earth, there is no place else to go ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 48:The cosmos is within us. We are made of star stuff ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 49:We began as wanderers, and we are wanderers still. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 50:All inquiries carry with them some element of risk. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 51:The visions we offer our children shape the future. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 52:This oak tree and me, we're made of the same stuff. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 53:Who are we, if not measured by our impact on others? ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 54:Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 55:You have to know the past to understand the present. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 56:We are the children equally of the Sky and the Earth. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 57:Man is the matter of the cosmos, contemplating itself. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 58:The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 59:The passion to explore is at the heart of being human. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 60:All civilizations become either spacefaring or extinct. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 61:Our passion for learning ... is our tool for survival. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 62:Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 63:The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 64:The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 65:Any civilization that doesn't develop space travel dies. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 66:If the press descended, the science would surely suffer. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 67:Observation: I can't see a thing. Conclusion: Dinosaurs. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 68:A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 69:Don't judge everyone else by your own limited experience. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 70:Better the hard truth, I say, than the comforting fantasy. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 71:There is in this Universe much of what seems to be design. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 72:The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 73:The universe forces those who live in it to understand it. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 74:We are, in the most profound sense, children of the Cosmos. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 75:Otherwise we don't run the government the government runs us ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 76:Nothing disturbs me more than the glorification of stupidity. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 77:Sailors on a becalmed sea, we sense the stirring of a breeze. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 78:There are wonders enough out there without our inventing any. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 79:Man is a transitional animal. He is not the climax of creation ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 80:Where we have strong emotions, we're liable to fool ourselves. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 81:The sacred truth of science is that there are no sacred truths. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 82:We are, each of us, a multitude. Within us is a little universe. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 83:It means nothing to be open to a proposition we don't understand. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 84:Science is a way of thinking that helps you not to fool yourself. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 85:We are star stuff which has taken its destiny into its own hands. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 86:The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 87:Books break the shackles of time, proof that humans can work magic. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 88:The price we pay for anticipation of the future is anxiety about it ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 89:Atoms are mainly empty space. Matter is composed chiefly of nothing. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 90:If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 91:It's hard to kill a creature once it lets you see its consciousness. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 92:Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 93:Even through your hardest days, remember we are all made of stardust. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 94:Other things being equal, it is better to be smart than to be stupid. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 95:You're capable of such beautiful dreams and such horrible nightmares. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 96:Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 97:We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 98:We go about our daily lives understanding almost nothing of the world. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 99:Ask courageous questions. Do not be satisfied with superficial answers. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 100:I would suggest that science is, at least in my part, informed worship. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 101:Preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 102:We are the first species to have taken our evolution into our own hands. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 103:To live in the hearts of others is to never die in those we leave behind. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 104:For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 105:Ours is the first generation that has grown up with science-fiction ideas. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 106:The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 107:Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 108:It does no harm to the romance of the sunset to know a little bit about it. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 109:The cosmos is all there is, all there ever was, and all there ever will be. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 110:The open road still softly calls, like a nearly forgotten song of childhood ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 111:How smart does a chimpanzee have to be before killing him constitutes murder? ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 112:And you are made of a hundred trillion cells. We are, each of us, a multitude. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 113:Our concern for the future can be tested by how well we support our libraries. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 114:In exchange for freedom of inquiry, scientists are obliged to explain their work. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 115:As the ancient myth makers knew, we are children equally of the earth and the sky. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 116:Be grateful everyday for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 117:Extraordinary observations require extraordinary evidence to make them believable. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 118:If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 119:Science is far from a perfect instrument of knowledge. It's just the best we have. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 120:Books are key to understanding the world and participating in a democratic society. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 121:But down deep, at the molecular heart of life we're essentially identical to trees. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 122:Curiosity and the urge to solve problems are the emotional hallmarks of our species. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 123:Humans are very good at dreaming, although you'd never know it from your television. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 124:Whatever the reason you're on Mars, I'm glad you're there, and I wish I was with you. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 125:What's the harm of a little mystification? It sure beats boring statistical analyses. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 126:The cure for a fallacious argument is a better argument, not the suppression of ideas. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 127:There are as many atoms in one molecule of DNA as there are stars in a typical galaxy. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 128:Maxwell's Equations have had a greater impact on human history than any ten presidents. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 129:One of the great commandments of science is: & 130:The Earth is a place. It is by no means the only place. It is not even a typical place. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 131:UFOs: The reliable cases are uninteresting and in the interesting cases are unreliable. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 132:If you want to make a [rhubarb] pie from scratch, first you have to create the universe. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 133:Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 134:The universe is a pretty big place. If it's just us, seems like an awful waste of space. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 135:If we continue to accumulate only power and not wisdom, we will surely destroy ourselves. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 136:The brain is like a muscle. When it is in use we feel very good. Understanding is joyous. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 137:First rule in government spending: why build one when you can have two at twice the price? ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 138:Football is a thinly disguised re-enactment of hunting; we played it before we were human. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 139:Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 140:The sky calls to us. If we do not destroy ourselves, we will one day venture to the stars. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 141:The words "question" and "quest" are cognates. Only through inquiry can we discover truth. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 142:we make our world significant by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 143:Any sufficiently crisp question can be answered by a single binary digit-0 or 1, yes or no. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 144:Human beings have a demonstrated talent for self-deception when their emotions are stirred. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 145:Except in pure mathematics, nothing is known for certain (although much is certainly false). ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 146:In the deepest sense the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is a search for ourselves. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 147:If you want to save your child from polio, you can pray or you can inoculate... .Try science. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 148:[Kepler] preferred the hard truth to his dearest illusions, and that is the heart of science. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 149:Not all birds can fly. What separates the flyers from the walkers is the ability to take off. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 150:Not explaining science seems to me perverse. When you're in love, you want to tell the world. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 151:Science is merely an extremely powerful method of winnowing what's true from what feels good. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 152:At the extremes it is difficult to distinguish pseudoscience from rigid, doctrinaire religion. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 153:One’s inability to invalidate your hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 154:We are not smart enough to decide which pieces of knowledge are permissible and which are not. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 155:For a long time the human instinct to understand was thwarted by facile religious explanations. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 156:But nature is always more subtle, more intricate, more elegant than what we are able to imagine. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 157:Human history can be viewed as a slowly dawning awareness that we are members of a larger group. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 158:The simplest thought, like the concept of the number one, has an elaborate logical underpinning. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 159:We on Earth have just awakened to the great oceans of space and time from which we have emerged. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 160:If we do not speak for Earth, who will? If we are not committed to our own survival, who will be? ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 161:In all our searching, the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable is each other. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 162:The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 163:There are more potential combinations of DNA [physical forms] than there are atoms in the universe. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 164:For all our failings, despite our limitations and fallibilities, we humans are capable of greatness. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 165:The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 166:Those who seek power at any price detect a societal weakness, a fear that they can ride into office. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 167:I don't know the answer. Maybe no one knows. Maybe when you grow up, you'll be the first to find out. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 168:It is said that men may not be the dreams of the god, but rather that the gods are the dreams of men. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 169:We are made of star-stuff. Our bodies are made of star-stuff. There are pieces of star within us all. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 170:Books are like seeds. They can lie dormant for centuries and then flower in the most unpromising soil. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 171:I find science so much more fascinating than science fiction. It also has the advantage of being true. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 172:In the vastness of the Cosmos there must be other civilizations far older and more advanced than ours. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 173:If we say that God has always been, why not save a step and conclude that the universe has always been? ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 174:I think the discomfort that some people feel in going to the monkey cages at the zoo is a warning sign. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 175:The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 176:The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 177:Any faith that admires truth, that strives to know God, must be brave enough to accommodate the universe. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 178:Except for fools and madmen, everyone knows that nuclear war would he an unprecedented human catastrophe. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 179:I would be very ashamed of my civilization if we did not try to find out if there is life in outer space. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 180:We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 181:For years I've been stressing with regard to UFOs that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 182:In the vastness of space and the immensity of time, it is my joy to share a planet and an epoch with Annie. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 183:I believe that the extraordinary should be pursued. But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 184:One of the greatest gifts adults can give - to their offspring and to their society - is to read to children. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 185:When we look up at night and view the stars, everything we see is shinning because of distant nuclear fusion. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 186:If all the suns but ours collapsed tonight, how many lifetimes would it take us to realize that we were alone? ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 187:The method of science, as stodgy and grumpy as it may seem, is far more important than the findings of science. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 188:Organic as a dandelion seed, [the ship of our imagination] will carry us to worlds of dreams and worlds of facts ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 189:Advances in medicine and agriculture have saved vastly more lives than have been lost in all the wars in history. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 190:I hold that popularization of science is successful if, at first, it does no more than spark the sense of wonder. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 191:There are no forbidden questions in science, no matters too sensitive or delicate to be probed, no sacred truths. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 192:We have entered, almost without noticing, an age of exploration and discovery unparalleled since the Renaissance. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 193:Science is more than a body of knowledge. It's a way of thinking: a way of skeptically interrogating the universe. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 194:The old appeals to racial, sexual and religious chauvinism to rabid nationalist fervor, are beginning not to work. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 195:Every cell is a triumph of natural selection, and we’re made of trillions of cells. Within us, is a little universe. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 196:If the greenhouse effect is a blanket in which we wrap ourselves to keep warm, nuclear winter kicks the blanket off. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 197:Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 198:The dumbing down of America is evident in the slow decay of substantive content, a kind of celebration of ignorance. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 199:There is perhaps no better a demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 200:A galaxy is composed of gas and dust and stars - billions upon billions of stars. Every star may be a sun to someone. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 201:How lucky we are to live in this time / the first moment in human history / when we are in fact visiting other worlds ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 202:Human beings grew up in forests; we have a natural affinity for them. How lovely a tree is, straining toward the sky. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 203:In science it often happens that scientists say, "You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken... " ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 204:It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 205:It is the tension between creativity and skepticism that has produced the stunning and unexpected findings of science. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 206:A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 207:In the long run, the aggressive civilizations destroy themselves, almost always. It's their nature. They can't help it. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 208:The fact that someone says something doesn't mean it's true. Doesn't mean they're lying, but it doesn't mean it's true. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 209:The total number of stars in the Universe is larger than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the planet Earth. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 210:When you make the finding yourself - even if you're the last person on Earth to see the light - you'll never forget it. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 211:Writing a novel is like trying to solve a very long mathematical equation. Changing anything can change everything else. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 212:Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 213:The cosmos is full beyond measure of elegant truths; of exquisite interrelationships; of the awesome machinery of nature. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 214:Nature does not always conform to our predispositions and preferences, to what we deem comfortable and easy to understand. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 215:Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense." ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 216:The cannabis experience has greatly improved my appreciation for art, a subject which I had never much appreciated before. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 217:In our time, we have sifted the sands of Mars, we have established a presence there, we have fulfilled a century of dreams! ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 218:Our children long for realistic maps of the future that they can be proud of. Where are the cartographers of human purpose? ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 219:If the constellations had been named in the twentieth century, I suppose we would see bicycles and refrigerators in the sky. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 220:If we are to survive, our loyalties must be broadened further, to include the whole human community, the entire planet Earth. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 221:I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 222:The nuclear arms race is like two sworn enemies standing waist deep in gasoline, one with three matches, the other with five. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 223:All inquires carry with them some element of risk. There is no guarantee that the universe will conform to our predispositions. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 224:In the fabric of space and in the nature of matter, as in a great work of art, there is, written small, the artist's signature. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 225:It is all a matter of time scale. An event that would be unthinkable in a hundred years may be inevitable in a hundred million. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 226:If we can't think for ourselves, if we're unwilling to question authority, then we're just putty in the hands of those in power. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 227:Avoidable human misery is more often caused not so much by stupidity as by ignorance, particularly our ignorance about ourselves. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 228:Perhaps the depth of love can be calibrated by the number of different selves that are actively involved in a given relationship. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 229:You can't convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it's based on a deep seated need to believe ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 230:I think if we ever reach the point where we think we thoroughly understand who we are and where we came from, we will have failed. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 231:Our ancestors lived out of doors. They were as familiar with the night sky as most of us are with our favorite television programs. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 232:We live at a moment when our relationships to each other, and to all other beings with whom we share this planet, are up for grabs. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 233:Has there ever been a religion with the prophetic accuracy and reliability of science? . . . No other human institution comes close. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 234:I'm only a four-dimensional creature. Haven't got a clue how to visualise infinity. Even Einstein hadn't. I know because I asked him ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 235:You could just as well say that an agnostic is a deeply religious person with at least a rudimentary knowledge of human fallibility. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 236:I don?t feel rejected by the sky. I?m a part of it- tiny, to be sure, but everything is tiny compared to that overwhelming immensity. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 237:It's sometimes easier to reject strong evidence than to admit that we've been wrong, this is information about ourselves worth having. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 238:A googolplex is precisely as far from infinity as is the number 1... no matter what number you have in mind, infinity is larger still. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 239:One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 240:There are lots of ways to communicate what we know, but few ways to communicate what we feel. Music is one way to communicate emotions. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 241:There is a lurking fear that some things are not ‚Äúmeant" to be known, that some inquiries are too dangerous for human beings to make. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 242:I believe our future depends powerfully on how well we understand this cosmos in which we float, like a mote of dust in the morning sky. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 243:The very act of understanding is a celebration of joining, merging, even if on a very modest scale, with the magnificence of the Cosmos. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 244:We live in an in-between universe where things change all right... but according to patterns, rules, or as we call them, laws of nature. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 245:I believe that in every person is a kind of circuit which resonates to intellectual discovery-and the idea is to make that resonance work ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 246:We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 247:I set before you two ways: You can use your technology to destroy yourselves or to carry you to the planets and the stars. It's up to you. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 248:Some racists still reject the plain testimony written in the DNA that all the races are not only human but nearly indistinguishable. . . . ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 249:An atheist has to know a lot more than I know. An atheist is someone who knows there is no god. By some definitions atheism is very stupid. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 250:A still more glorious dawn awaits / not a sunrise, but a galaxy-rise / a morning filled with 400 billion suns / the rising of the milky way ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 251:Better by far to embrace the hard truth than a reassuring fable. If we crave some cosmic purpose, then let us find ourselves a worthy goal. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 252:Our ancestors worshipped the Sun, and they were not that foolish. It makes sense to revere the Sun and the stars, for we are their children. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 253:I can find in my undergraduate classes, bright students who do not know that the stars rise and set at night, or even that the Sun is a star. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 254:On the day that we do discover that we are not alone, our society may begin to evolve and transform in some incredible and wondrous new ways. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 255:The fact that so little of the findings of modern science is prefigured in Scripture to my mind casts further doubt on it divine inspiration. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 256:We live in a vast and awesome universe in which, daily, suns are made and worlds destroyed, where humanity clings to an obscure clod of rock. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 257:Absolute certainty will always elude us. We will always be mired in error. The most each generation can hope for is to reduce the error. . . . ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 258:Each of us is a tiny being, permitted to ride on the outermost skin of one of the smaller planets for a few dozen trips around the local star. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 259:Except for children (who don't know enough not to ask the important questions), few of us spendtime wondering why nature is the way it is . . . ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 260:In Mozambique, the story goes, monkeys do not talk, because they know if they utter even a single word some man will come and put them to work. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 261:Life is but a momentary glimpse of the wonder of this astonishing universe, and it is sad to see so many dreaming it away on spiritual fantasy. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 262:When permitted to listen to alternative opinions and engage in substantive debate, people have been known to change their minds. It can happen. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 263:Accommodation to change, the thoughtful pursuit of alternative futures are keys to the survival of civilization and perhaps of the human species. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 264:Every thinking person fears nuclear war, and every technological state plans for it. Everyone knows it is madness, and every nation has an excuse ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 265:I am often amazed at how much more capability and enthusiasm for science there is among elementary school youngsters than among college students. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 266:The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 267:Modern science has been a voyage into the unknown, with a lesson in humility waiting at every stop. Many passengers would rather have stayed home. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 268:We are star stuff which has taken its destiny into its own hands. The loom of time and space works the most astonishing transformations of matter. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 269:Our perceptions are fallible. We sometimes see what isn't there. We are prey to optical illusions. Occasionally we hallucinate. We are error-prone. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 270:The prediction I can make with the highest confidence is that the most amazing discoveries will be the ones we are not today wise enough to foresee. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 271:By looking far out into space we are also looking far back into time, back toward the horizon of the universe, back toward the epoch of the Big Bang. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 272:The evidence, so far at least and laws of Nature aside, does not require a Designer. Maybe there is one hiding, maddeningly unwilling to be revealed. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 273:The well-meaning contention that all ideas have equal merit seems to me little different from the disastrous contention that no ideas have any merit. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 274:We humans appear on the cosmic calendar so recently that our recorded history occupies only the last few seconds of the last minute of December 31st. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 275:Humans - who enslave, castrate, experiment on, and fillet other animals - have had an understandable penchant for pretending animals do not feel pain. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 276:The visions we offer our children shape the future. It _matters_ what those visions are. Often they become self-fulfilling prophecies. Dreams are maps. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 277:In more than one respect, the exploring of the Solar System and homesteading other worlds constitutes the beginning, much more than the end, of history. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 278:There is every reason to think that in the coming years Mars and its mysteries will become increasingly familiar to the inhabitants of the Planet Earth. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 279:It would be wryly interesting if in human history the cultivation of marijuana led generally to the invention of agriculture, and thereby to civilization. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 280:We are made of stellar ash. Our origin and evolution have been tied to distant cosmic events. The exploration of the cosmos is a voyage of self-discovery. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 281:Better the hard truth, I say, than the comforting fantasy. And in the final tolling it often turns out that the facts are more comforting than the fantasy. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 282:The Big Bang is our modern scientific creation myth. It comes from the same human need to solve the cosmological riddle [Where did the universe come from?] ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 283:A new consciousness is developing which sees the earth as a single organism and recognizes that an organism at war with itself is doomed. We are one planet. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 284:The usual rejoinder to someone who says & 285:We can judge our progress by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers, our willingness to embrace what is true rather than what feels good. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 286:Our posturings, our imagined self-importance , the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe are challenged by this point of pale light. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 287:She had studied the universe all her life, but had overlooked its clearest message: For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 288:We should be teaching our children the scientific method and the reasons for a Bill of Rights. With it comes a certain decency, humility and community spirit. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 289:Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 290:Books tap the wisdom of our species - the greatest minds, the best teachers - from all over the world and from all our history. And they're patient. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 291:If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits? ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 292:My fundamental premise about the brain is that its workings - what we sometimes call "mind" - are a consequence of its anatomy and physiology, and nothing more. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 293:We have heard the rationales offered by the nuclear superpowers. We know who speaks for the nations. But who speaks for the human species? Who speaks for Earth? ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 294:If we are merely matter intricately assembled, is this really demeaning? If there's nothing here but atoms, does that make us less or does that make matter more? ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 295:Thus the recent rapid evolution of human intelligence is not only the cause of but also the only conceivable solution to the many serious problems that beset us. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 296:Maybe it's a little early. Maybe the time is not quite yet. But those other worlds - promising untold opportunities - beckon. Silently, they orbit the Sun, waiting. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 297:We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology and yet have cleverly arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 298:Where did God come from? If we decide this is an unanswerable question why not save a step and conclude that the origin of the universe is an unanswerable question. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 299:All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 300:Demon mean knowledge in Greek, especially about the material world. Science means knowledge in Latin. A jurisdictional dispute is exposed, even if we look no further ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 301:Frederick Douglas taught that literacy is the path from slavery to freedom. There are many kinds of slavery and many kinds of freedom, but reading is still the path. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 302:These days there seems to be nowhere left to explore, at least on the land area of the Earth. Victims of their very success, the explorers now pretty much stay home. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 303:An atheist is someone who is certain that God does not exist, someone who has compelling evidence against the existence of God. I know of no such compelling evidence. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 304:The method of science is tried and true. It is not perfect, it's just the best we have. And to abandon it, with its skeptical protocols, is the pathway to a dark age. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 305:There are many hypotheses in science which are wrong. That’s perfectly all right: it’s the aperture to finding out what’s right. Science is a self-correcting process. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 306:A multitude of aspects of the natural world that were considered miraculous only a few generations ago are now thoroughly understood in terms of physics and chemistry. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 307:It will not be we who reach Alpha Centauri, and the other nearby stars. It will be a species very like us - but with more of our strengths and fewer of our weaknesses. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 308:Knowing a great deal is not the same as being smart; intelligence is not information alone but also judgement, the manner in which information is coordinated and used. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 309:The desire to be connected with the cosmos reflects a profound reality, but we are connected; not in the trivial ways that astrology promises, but in the deepest ways. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 310:Every kid starts out as a natural-born scientist, and then we beat it out of them. A few trickle through the system with their wonder and enthusiasm for science intact. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 311:The politicians and the religious leaders and the weapons scientists have been at it for a long time and they've made a thorough mess of it. I mean, we're in deep trouble. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 312:Discussing the possibilities of extraterrestrial life: I would love it even if they were short, sullen, grumpy and sexually obsessed. But there just isn't any good evidence. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 313:You can get into a habit of thought in which you enjoy making fun of all those other people who don't see things as clearly as you do. We have to guard carefully against it. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 314:If our long-term survival is at stake, we have a basic responsibility to our species to venture to other worlds. Sailors on a becalmed sea, we sense the stirring of a breeze. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 315:My view is that if there is no evidence for it, then forget about it. An agnostic is somebody who doesn’t believe in something until there is evidence for it, so I’m agnostic. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 316:The way to find out about our place in the universe is by examining the universe and by examining ourselves - without preconceptions, with as unbiased a mind as we can muster. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 317:Some 5 billion years from now, there will be a last perfect day on Earth... then the sun will begin to die, life will be extinguished, the oceans will boil and evaporate away. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 318:The Hindu religion is the only of the World's great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 319:The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 320:A general problem with much of Western theology in my view is that the god portrayed is too small. It is a god of a tiny world and not a god of a galaxy much less of a universe. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 321:Religions are often state-protected nurseries of pseudoscience, although there's no reason why religions have to play that role. In a way, it's an artefact from times long gone. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 322:Those with the courage to explore the weave and structure of the Cosmos, even where it differs profoundly from their wishes and prejudices, will penetrate its deepest mysteries. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 323:Is mankind alone in the universe? Or are there somewhere other intelligent beings looking up into their night sky from very different worlds and asking the same kind of question? ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 324:It goes with a courageous intent to greet the universe as it really is, not to foist our emotional predispositions on it but to courageously accept what our explorations tell us. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 325:Looking at fires when high, by the way, especially through one of those prism kaleidoscopes which image their surroundings, is an extraordinarily moving and beautiful experience. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 326:The immense distances to the stars and the galaxies mean that we see everything ins pace int he past, some as they were before the Earth came to be. Telescopes are time machines. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 327:It took the Church until 1832 to remove Galileo & 328:Virtually every major technological advance in the history of the human species - back to the invention of stone tools and the domestication of fire - has been ethically ambiguous. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 329:What began in deadly competition has helped us to see that global cooperation is the essential precondition for our survival. Travel is broadening. It's time to hit the road again. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 330:In a complex universe, in a society undergoing unprecedented change, how can we find the truth if we are not willing to question everything and to give a fair hearing to everything? ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 331:I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudo-science and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 332:History is full of people who out of fear, or ignorance, or lust for power has destroyed knowledge of immeasurable value which truly belongs to us all. We must not let it happen again. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 333:Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 334:I consider it an extremely dangerous doctrine, because the more likely we are to assume that the solution comes from the outside, the less likely we are to solve our problems ourselves. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 335:But I try not to think with my gut. If I'm serious about understanding the world, thinking with anything besides my brain, as tempting as that might be, is likely to get me into trouble. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 336:Those afraid of the universe as it really is, those who pretend to nonexistent knowledge and envision a Cosmos centered on human beings will prefer the fleeting comforts of superstition. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 337:Science is a collaborative enterprise, spanning the generations. When it permits us to see the far side of some new horizon, we remember those who prepared the way - seeing for them also. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 338:The prediction of nuclear winter is drawn not, of course, from any direct experience with the consequences of global nuclear war, but rather from an investigation of the governing physics. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 339:The secrets of evolution are death and time-the deaths of enormous numbers of lifeforms that were imperfectly adapted to the environment; and time for a long succession of small mutations. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 340:We are at a crossroads in human history. Never before has there been a moment so simultaneously perilous and promising. We are the first species to have taken evolution into our own hands. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 341:Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth. Our obligation to survive is owed not just to ourselves but also to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 342:Both the Freudian and the Platonic metaphors emphasize the considerable independence of and tension among the constituent parts of the psyche, a point that characterizes the human condition. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 343:We are the only species on the planet, so far as we know, to have invented a communal memory stored neither in our genes nor in our brains. The warehouse of this memory is called the library ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 344:A millennium before Europeans were willing to divest themselves of the Biblical idea that the world was a few thousand years old, the Mayans were thinking of millions and the Hindus billions. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 345:And after we returned to the savannahs and abandoned the trees, did we long for those great graceful leaps and ecstatic moments of weightlessness in the shafts of sunlight of the forest roof? ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 346:The understanding of the intent of the artist which I can achieve when high sometimes carries over to when I’m down. This is one of many human frontiers which cannabis has helped me traverse. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 347:Exploration is in our nature. We began as wanderers, and we are wanderers still. We have lingered long enough on the shores of the cosmic ocean. We are ready at last to set sail for the stars. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 348:I also wish that the Pledge of Allegiance were directed at the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, as it is when the President takes his oath of office, rather than to the flag and the nation ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 349:The difference between physics and metaphysics is not that the practitioners of one are smarter than the practitioners of the other. The difference is that the metaphysicist has no laboratory. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 350:.. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the & 351:I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture, and our concern for the future, can all be tested by how well we support our libraries. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 352:It is of interest to note that while some dolphins are reported to have learned English - up to fifty words used in correct context - no human being has been reported to have learned dolphinese. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 353:Science is a way to call the bluff of those who only pretend to knowledge. It is a bulwark against mysticism, against superstition, against religion misapplied to where it has no business being. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 354:Science cuts two ways, of course; its products can be used for both good and evil. But there's no turning back from science. The early warnings about technological dangers also come from science. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 355:Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 356:Science is not perfect. It's often misused; it's only a tool, but it's the best tool we have. Self-correcting , ever changing, applicable to everything: with this tool, we vanquish the impossible. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 357:How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, ‚ÄúThis is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant? ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 358:I promise to question everything my leaders tell me. I promise to use my critical faculties. I promise to develop my independence of thought. I promise to educate myself so I can make my own judgments. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 359:It is clear that the nations of the world now can only rise and fall together. It is not a question of one nation winning at the expense of another. We must all help one another or all perish together. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 360:There are in fact 100 billion galaxies, each of which contain something like a 100 billion stars. Think of how many stars, and planets, and kinds of life there may be in this vast and awesome universe. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 361:Modern Darwinism makes it abundantly clear that many less ruthless traits, some not always admired by robber barons and Fuhrers - altruism, general intelligence, compassion - may be the key to survival. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 362:While our behavior is still significantly controlled by our genetic inheritance, we have, through our brains, a much richer opportunity to blaze new behavioral and cultural pathways on short timescales. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 363:Science ... looks skeptically at all claims to knowledge, old and new. It teaches not blind obedience to those in authority but to vigorous debate, and in many respects that's the secret of its success. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 364:We humans look rather different from a tree. Without a doubt we perceive the world differently than a tree does. But down deep, at the molecular heart of life, the trees and we are essentially identical. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 365:If I finish a book a week, I will read only a few thousand books in my lifetime, about a tenth of a percent of the contents of the greatest libraries of our time. The trick is to know which books to read. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 366:Personally, I would be delighted if there were a life after death, especially if it permitted me to continue to learn about this world and others, if it gave me a chance to discover how history turns out. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 367:One of the great commandments of science is, & 368:One trend that bothers me is the glorification of stupidity, that the media is reassuring people it's alright not to know anything. That to me is far more dangerous than a little pornography on the Internet. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 369:A single message from space will show that it is possible to live through technological adolescence. . . . It is possible that the future of human civilization depends on the receipt of interstellar messages. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 370:The fossil record implies trial and error, an inability to anticipate the future, features inconsistent with an efficient Great Designer (although not with a Designer of a more remote and indirect temperament) ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 371:We are an intelligent species and the use of our intelligence quite properly gives us pleasure. In this respect the brain is like a muscle. When we think well, we feel good. Understanding is a kind of ecstasy. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 372:There are naive questions, tedious questions, ill-phrased questions, questions put after inadequate self-criticism. But every question is a cry to understand the world. There is no such thing as a dumb question. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 373:We can make a similar examination, but with greater uncertainty, of the extraterrestrial hypothesis that holds that a wide range of UFOs viewed on the planet Earth are space vehicles from planets of other stars. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 374:We wish to find the truth, no matter where it lies. But to find the truth we need imagination and skepticism both. We will not be afraid to speculate, but we will be careful to distinguish speculation from fact. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 375:If we're capable of conjuring up terrifying monsters in childhood, why shouldn't some of us, at least on occasion, be able to fantasize something similar, something truly horrifying, a shared delusion, as adults? ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 376:When Kepler found his long-cherished belief did not agree with the most precise observation, he accepted the uncomfortable fact. He preferred the hard truth to his dearest illusions, that is the heart of science. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 377:Who are we, if not measured by our impact on others? That’s who we are! We’re not who we say we are, we’re not who we want to be - we are the sum of the influence and impact that we have, in our lives, on others. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 378:A blade of grass is a commonplace on Earth; it would be a miracle on Mars. Our descendants on Mars will know the value of a patch of green. And if a blade of grass is priceless, what is the value of a human being? ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 379:People are not stupid. They believe things for reasons. The last way for skeptics to get the attention of bright, curious, intelligent people is to belittle or condescend or to show arrogance toward their beliefs. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 380:Much of human history can, I think, be described as a gradual and sometimes painful liberation from provincialism, the emerging awareness that there is more to the world than was generally believed by our ancestors. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 381:They (i. e., the Pythagoreans) did not advocate the free confrontation of conflicting points of view. Instead, like all orthodox religions, they practised a rigidity that prevented them from correcting their errors. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 382:Which aspects of our nature will prevail is uncertain, particularly when our visions and prospects are bound to one small part of the small planet Earth. But up there in the Cosmos an inescapable perspective awaits. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 383:Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of magic. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 384:There is a report that says that kids who watch violent TV programs tend to be more violent when they grow up. But did the TV cause the violence, or do violent children preferentially enjoy watching violent programs? ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 385:We are the product of 4.5 billion years of fortuitous, slow biological evolution. There is no reason to think that the evolutionary process has stopped. Man is a transitional animal. He is not the climax of creation. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 386:For all I know we may be visited by a different extraterrestrial civilization every second Tuesday, but there's no support for this appealing idea. The extraordinary claims are not supported by extraordinary evidence. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 387:There is today-in a time when old beliefs are withering-a kind of philosophical hunger, a need to know who we are and how we got here. It is an on-going search, often unconscious, for a cosmic perspective for humanity ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 388:Even today the most jaded city dweller can be unexpectedly moved upon encountering a clear night sky studded with thousands of twinkling stars. When it happens to me after all these years it still takes my breath away. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 389:Every time you look up at the sky, every one of those points of light is a reminder that fusion power is extractable from hydrogen and other light elements, and it is an everyday reality throughout the Milky Way Galaxy. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 390:If chimpanzees have consciousness, if they are capable of abstractions, do they not have what until now has been described as & 391:Few scientists now dispute that today's soaring levels of carbon dioxide and other gases in the atmosphere will cause global temperature averages to rise by as much as nine degrees Fahrenheit sometime after the year 2000. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 392:I maintain there is much more wonder in science than in pseudoscience. And in addition, to whatever measure this term has any meaning, science has the additional virtue, and it is not an inconsiderable one, of being true. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 393:The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion or in politics, but it is not the path to knowledge; it has no in the endeavor of science. We do not know in advance who will discover fundamental insights. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 394:Probably a dozen times since their death I've heard my mother or father, in an ordinary conversational tone of voice, call my name. They had called my name often during my life with them ... It doesn't seem strange to me. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 395:Cutting off fundamental, curiosity-driven science is like eating the seed corn. We may have a little more to eat next winter but what will we plant so we and our children will have enough to get through the winters to come? ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 396:We are made of star stuff. For the most part, atoms heavier than hydrogen were created in the interiors of stars and then expelled into space to be incorporated into later stars. The Sun is probably a third generation star. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 397:All of the rocky and metallic material we stand on, the iron in our blood, the calcium in our teeth, the carbon in our genes were produced billions of years ago in the interior of a red giant star. We are made of star stuff. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 398:Once we overcome our fear of being tiny, we find ourselves on the threshold of a vast and awesome Universe that utterly dwarfs ‚Äî in time, in space, and in potential ‚Äî the tidy anthropocentric proscenium of our ancestors. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 399:The illegality of cannabis is outrageous, an impediment to full utilization of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship so desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 400:In a lot of scientists, the ratio of wonder to skepticism declines in time. That may be connected with the fact that in some fields-mathematics, physics, some others-the great discoveries are almost entirely made by youngsters. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 401:If we teach only the findings and products of science - no matter how useful and even inspiring they may be - without communicating its critical method, how can the average person possibly distinguish science from pseudoscience? ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 402:I'd like the [Cosmos] series to be so visually stimulating that somebody who isn't even interested in the concepts will just watch for the effects. And I'd like people who are prepared to do some thinking to be really stimulated. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 403:We are prodding, challenging, seeking contradictions or small, persistent residual errors, proposing alternative explanations, encouraging heresy. We give our highest rewards to those who convincingly disprove established beliefs. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 404:For all its material advantages, the sedentary life has left us edgy, unfulfilled, even after 400 generations in villages and cities, we haven't forgotten: The open road still softly calls like a nearly forgotten song of childhood. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 405:When you look more generally at life on Earth, you find that it is all the same kind of life. There are not many different kinds; there's only one kind. It uses about fifty fundamental biological building blocks, organic molecules. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 406:But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 407:Many religions have attempted to make statues of their gods very large, and the idea, I suppose, is to make us feel small. But if that's their purpose, they can keep their paltry icons. We need only look up if we wish to feel small. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 408:What a marvelous cooperative arrangement - plants and animals each inhaling each other's exhalations, a kind of planet-wide mutual mouth-to-stoma resuscitation, the entire elegant cycle powered by a star 150 million kilometers away. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 409:Arguments from authority carry little weight ‚Äì authorities have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 410:The fact is that far more crime and child abuse has been committed by zealots in the name of God, Jesus and Mohammed than has ever been committed in the name of Satan. Many people don’t like that statement, but few can argue with it. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 411:Cosmos is a Greek word for the order of the universe. It is, in a way, the opposite of Chaos. It implies the deep interconnectedness of all things. It conveys awe for the intricate and subtle way in which the universe is put together. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 412:Religions are tough. Either they make no contentions which are subject to disproof or they quickly redesign doctrine after disproof. ... near the core of the religious experience is something remarkably resistant to rational inquiry. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 413:The uniqueness of humans has been claimed on many grounds, but most often because of our tool-making, culture, language, reason and morality. We have them, the other animals don't, and - so the argument goes - that's that. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 414:Our intelligence is imperfect, surely, and newly arisen; the ease with which it can be sweet-talked, overwhelmed, or subverted by other hardwired propensities - sometimes themselves disguised as the cool light of reason - is worrisome. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 415:But amid much elegance and precision, the details of life and the Universe also exhibit haphazard, jury-rigged arrangements and much poor planning. What shall we make of this: an edifice abandoned early in construction by the architect? ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 416:Clutching our crystals and religiously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in steep decline, unable to distinguish between what's true and what feels good, we slide, almost without noticing, into superstition and darkness. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 417:If intelligence is our only edge, we must learn to use it better, to shape it, to understand its limitations and deficiencies - to use it as cats use stealth, as katydids use camouflage - to make it the tool of our survival. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 418:It seems madness to say, & 419:We have begun to contemplate our origins: starstuff pondering the stars; organized assemblages of ten billion billion billion atoms considering the evolution of atoms; tracing the long journey by which, here at least, consciousness arose. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 420:After the earth dies, some 5 billion years from now, after it's burned to a crisp, or even swallowed by the Sun, there will be other worlds and stars and galaxies coming into being - and they will know nothing of a place once called Earth. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 421:The lifetime of a human being is measured by decades, the lifetime of the Sun is a hundred million times longer. Compared to a star, we are like mayflies, fleeting ephemeral creatures who live out their lives in the course of a single day. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 422:The vast distances that separate the stars are providential. Beings and worlds are quarantined from one another. The quarantine is lifted only for those with sufficient self-knowledge and judgment to have safely traveled from star to star. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 423:My parents were not scientists. They knew almost nothing about science. But in introducing me simultaneously to skepticism and to wonder, they taught me the two uneasily cohabiting modes of thought that are central to the scientific method. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 424:Science is based on experiment, on a willingness to challenge old dogma, on an openness to see the universe as it really is. Accordingly, science sometimes requires courage - at the very least the courage to question the conventional wisdom. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 425:Anything else you're interested in is not going to happen if you can't breathe the air and drink the water. Don't sit this one out. Do something. You are by accident of fate alive at an absolutely critical moment in the history of our planet. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 426:If we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then, we are up for grabs for the next charlatan (political or religious) who comes rambling along. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 427:A central lesson of science is that to understand complex issues (or even simple ones), we must try to free our minds of dogma and to guarantee the freedom to publish, to contradict, and to experiment. Arguments from authority are unacceptable. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 428:A religion old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science, might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. Sooner or later such a religion will emerge. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 429:The gears of poverty, ignorance, hopelessness and low self-esteem interact to create a kind of perpetual failure machine that grinds down dreams from generation to generation. We all bear the cost of keeping it running. Illiteracy is its linchpin. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 430:The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. From it we have learned most of what we know. Recently, we have waded a little out to sea, enough to dampen our toes or, at most, wet our ankles. The water seems inviting. The ocean calls. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 431:What counts is not what sounds plausible, not what we would like to believe, not what one or two witnesses claim, but only what is supported by hard evidence rigorously and skeptically examined. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 432:It is the responsibility of scientists never to suppress knowledge, no matter how awkward that knowledge is, no matter how it may bother those in power; we are not smart enough to decide which pieces of knowledge are permissible, and which are not. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 433:My deeply held belief is that if a god of anything like the traditional sort exists, our curiosity and intelligence is provided by such a God. We would be unappreciative of that gift if we suppressed our passion to explore the universe and ourselves. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 434:Philosophers and scientists confidently offer up traits said to be uniquely human, and the monkeys and apes casually knock them down - toppling the pretension that humans constitute some sort of biological aristocracy among the beings on Earth. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 435:So those who wished for some central cosmic purpose for us, or at least our world, or at least our solar system, or at least our galaxy, have been disappointed, progressively disappointed. The universe is not responsive to our ambitious expectations. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 436:The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what's true. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 437:Time spent with children is time well spent. Their little minds are not constrained by & 438:The hole in the ozone layer is a kind of skywriting. At first it seemed to spell out our continuing complacency before a witch's brew of deadly perils. But perhaps it really tells of a newfound talent to work together to protect the global environment. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 439:The wind whips through the canyons of the American Southwest, and there is no one to hear it but us - a reminder of the 40,000 generations of thinking men and women who preceded us, about whom we know almost nothing, upon whom our civilization is based. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 440:If you look at Earth from space you see a dot, that's here. That's home. That's us. It underscores the responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 441:There is much that science doesn't understand, many mysteries still to be resolved. In a Universe tens of billions of light-years across and some ten or fifteen billion years old, this may be the case forever. We are constantly stumbling on new surprises ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 442:A tiny blue dot set in a sunbeam. Here it is. That's where we live. That's home. We humans are one species and this is our world. It is our responsibility to cherish it. Of all the worlds in our solar system, the only one so far as we know, graced by life. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 443:The Bill of Rights decoupled religion from the state, in part because so many religions were steeped in an absolutist frame of mind - each convinced that it alone had a monopoly on the truth and therefore eager for the state to impose this truth on others. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 444:If some good evidence for life after death were announced, I'd be eager to examine it; but it would have to be real scientific data, not mere anecdote. As with the face on Mars and alien abductions, better the hard truth, I say, than the comforting fantasy. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 445:A stars rich in europium; of distant galaxies analyzed through the collective light of a hundred billion constituent stars. Astronomical spectroscopy is an almost magical technique. It amazes me still. Auguste Comte picked a particularly unfortunate example. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 446:We are... capable of using our compassion and our intelligence, our technology and our wealth, to make an abundant and meaningful life for every inhabitant of this planet. To enhance enormously our understanding of the Universe, and to carry us to the stars. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 447:If we offer too much silent assent about mysticism and superstition - even when it seems to be doing a little good - we abet a general climate in which scepticism is considered impolite, science tiresome, and rigorous thinking somehow stuffy and inappropriate. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 448:Since, in the long run, every planetary society will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring ‚Äî not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 449:Because men, compared to male chimps, have such relatively small testicles (large testicles indicate a species where many males mate, one after the other, with the same female), we might guess that promiscuous societies were uncommon in the immediate human past. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 450:Perhaps, in retrospect, there would be little motivation even for malevolent extraterrestrials to attack the Earth; perhaps, after a preliminary survey, they might decide it is more expedient just to be patient for a little while and wait for us to self-destruct. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 451:The Apollo pictures of the whole Earth conveyed to multitudes something well known to astronomers: On the scale of the worlds - to say nothing of stars or galaxies - humans are inconsequential, a thin film of life on an obscure and solitary lump of rock and metal ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 452:Eratosthenes's only tools were sticks, eyes, feet, and brains; plus a zest for experiment. With those tools he correctly deduced the circumference of the Earth, to high precision, with an error of only a few percent. That's pretty good figuring for 2200 years ago. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 453:It's a lazy Saturday afternoon, there's a couple lying naked in bed reading Encyclopediea Brittannica to each other, and arguing about whether the Andromeda Galaxy is more & 454:Scientists make mistakes. Accordingly, it is the job of the scientist to recognize our weakness, to examine the widest range of opinions, to be ruthlessly self-critical. Science is a collective enterprise with the error-correction machinery often running smoothly. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 455:There are huge advertising budgets only when there's no difference between the products. If the products really were different, people would buy the one that's better. Advertising teaches people not to trust their judgment. Advertising teaches people to be stupid. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 456:We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 457:Science is an attempt, largely successful, to understand the world, to get a grip on things, to get hold of ourselves, to steer a safe course. Microbiology and meteorology now explain what only a few centuries ago was considered sufficient cause to burn women to death. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 458:The Universe forces those who live in it to understand it. Those creatures who find everyday experience a muddled jumble of events with no predictability, no regularity, are in grave peril. The Universe belongs to those who, at least to some degree, have figured it out. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 459:The Platonists and their Christian successors held the peculiar notion that the Earth was tainted and somehow nasty, while the heavens were perfect and divine. The fundamental idea that the Earth is a planet, that we are citizens of the Universe, was rejected and forgotten. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 460:Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever the universe has to teach us, or somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved? ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 461:There are many instances in science, where those closest to the intricacies of the subject have a more highly developed sense of its intractability than those at some remove. On the other hand, those at too great a distance may, I am well aware, mistake ignorance for perspective. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 462:You're an interesting species, an interesting mix. You're capable of such beautiful dreams and such horrible nightmares. You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you're not. See, in all our searching, the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable is each other. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 463:Indeed the reasoned criticism of a prevailing belief is a service to the proponents of that belief; if they are incapable of defending it, they are well advised to abandon it. This self-questioning and error-correcting aspect of the scientific method is its most striking property. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 464:The neurochemistry of the brain is astonishingly busy, the circuitry of a machine more wonderful than any devised by humans. But there is no evidence that its functioning is due to anything more than the 10(14) neural connections that build an elegant architecture of consciousness. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 465:After I give lectures-on almost any subject-I am often asked, "Do you believe in UFOs?" I'm always struck by how the question is phrased, the suggestion that this is a matter of belief and not evidence. I'm almost never asked, "How good is the evidence that UFOs are alien spaceships?" ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 466:The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us - there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 467:By exploring other worlds we safeguard this one. By itself, I think this fact more than justifies the money our species has spent in sending ships to other worlds. It is our fate to live during one of the most perilous and, at the same time, one of the most hopeful chapters in human history. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 468:That we can now think of no mechanism for astrology is relevant but unconvincing. No mechanism was known, for example, for continental drift when it was proposed by Wegener. Nevertheless, we see that Wegener was right, and those who objected on the grounds of unavailable mechanism were wrong. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 469:It's perilous and foolhardy for the average citizen to remain ignorant about global warming, say, or ozone depletion, air pollution, toxic and radioactive wastes, acid rain, topsoil erosion, tropical deforestation, exponential population growth. Jobs and wages depend on science and technology. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 470:What does it mean for a civilisation to be a million years old? We have had radio telescopes and spaceships for a few decades; our technical civilisation is a few hundred years old ... an advanced civilisation millions of years old is as much beyond us as we are beyond a bushbaby or a macaque ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 471:We are, in a way, temporary ambulatory repositories for our nucleic acids. This does not deny our humanity; it does not prevent us from pursuing the good, the true and the beautiful. But it would be a great mistake to ignore where we have come from in our attempt to determine where we are going. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 472:Widespread intellectual and moral docility may be convenient for leaders in the short term, but it is suicidal for nations in the long term. One of the criteria for national leadership should therefore be a talent for understanding, encouraging, and making constructive use of vigorous criticism. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 473:Societies will, of course, wish to exercise prudence in deciding which technologies that is, which applications of science are to be pursued and which not. But without funding basic research, without supporting the acquisition of knowledge for its own sake, our options become dangerously limited. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 474:At the heart of science is an essential balance between two seemingly contradictory attitudes-an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive they may be, and the most ruthless skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new. This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 475:Chlorine is a deadly poison gas employed on European battlefields in World War I. Sodium is a corrosive metal which burns upon contact with water. Together they make a placid and unpoisonous material, table salt. Why each of these substances has the properties it does is a subject called chemistry. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 476:In Italy, the Inquisition was condemning people to death until the end of the eighteenth century, and inquisitional torture was not abolished in the Catholic Church until 1816. The last bastion of support for the reality of witchcraft and the necessity of punishment has been the Christian churches. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 477:We all have a thirst for wonder. It's a deeply human quality. Science and religion are both bound up with it. What I'm saying is, you don't have to make stories up, you don't have to exaggerate. There's wonder and awe enough in the real world. Nature's a lot better at inventing wonders than we are. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 478:All over the world there are enormous numbers of smart, even gifted, people who harbor a passion for science. But that passion is unrequited. Surveys suggest that some 95% of Americans are "scientifically illiterate." That's... the same fraction... of slaves who were illiterate before the Civil War. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 479:The impediment to scientific thinking is not, I think, the difficulty of the subject. Complex intellectual feats have been mainstays even of oppressed cultures. Shamans, magicians and theologians are highly skilled in their intricate and arcane arts. No, the impediment is political and hierarchical. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 480:Recent research shows that many children without enough to eat wind up with diminished capacity to understand and learn (‚Äúcognitive impairment‚Äù ). Children don't have to be starving for this to happen. Even mild undernourishment ‚Äî the kind most common among poor people in America ‚Äî can do it. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 481:My long-time view about Christianity is that it represents an amalgam of two seemingly immiscible parts-the religion of Jesus and the religion of Paul. Thomas Jefferson attempted to excise the Pauline parts of the New Testament. There wasn't much left when he was done, but it was an inspiring document. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 482:Nevertheless, (Jefferson) believed that the habit of skepticism is an essential prerequisite for responsible citizenship. He argued that the cost of education is trivial compared to the cost of ignorance, of leaving government to the wolves. He taught that the country is safe only when the people rule. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 483:National boundaries are not evident when we view the Earth from space. Fanatical ethnic or religious or national chauvinisms are a little difficult to maintain when we see our planet as a fragile blue crescent fading to become an inconspicuous point of light against the bastion and citadel of the stars. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 484:That kind of skeptical, questioning, "don't accept what authority tells you" attitude of science - is also nearly identical to the attitude of mind necessary for a functioning democracy. Science and democracy have very consonant values and approaches, and I don't think you can have one without the other. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 485:Religions contradict one another-on small matters, such as whether we should put on a hat or take one off on entering a house of worship, or whether we should eat beef and eschew pork or the other way around, all the way to the most central issues, such as whether there are no gods, one God, or many gods. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 486:Centuries hence, when current social and political problems may seem as remote as the problems of the Thirty Years' War are to us, our age may be remembered chiefly for one fact: It was the time when the inhabitants of the earth first made contact with the vast cosmos in which their small planet is embedded. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 487:Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us - then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 488:Too much openness and you accept every notion, idea, and hypothesis-which is tantamount to knowing nothing. Too much skepticism-especially rejection of new ideas before they are adequately tested-and you're not only unpleasantly grumpy, but also closed to the advance of science. A judicious mix is what we need. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 489:I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue. But as much as I want to believe that, and despite the ancient and worldwide cultural traditions that assert an afterlife, I know of nothing to suggest that it is more than wishful thinking. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 490:For all our conceits about being the center of the universe, we live in a routine planet of a humdrum star stuck away in an obscure corner ... on an unexceptional galaxy which is one of about 100 billion galaxies. ... That is the fundamental fact of the universe we inhabit, and it is very good for us to understand that. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 491:I’m struck again by the irony that spaceflight-conceived in the cauldron of nationalist rivalries and hatreds-brings with it a stunning transnational vision. You spend even a little time contemplating the Earth from orbit and the most deeply engrained nationalisms begin to erode. They seem the squabbles of mites on a plum. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 492:Science arouses a soaring sense of wonder. But so does pseudoscience. Sparse and poor popularizations of science abandon ecological niches that pseudoscience promptly fills. If it were widely understood that claims to knowledge require adequate evidence before they can be accepted, there would be no room for pseudoscience. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 493:We invest far off places with a certain romance... Long summers, mild winters, rich harvests, plentiful game; none of them lasts for ever. Your own life, or your bands, or even your species - might be owed to a restless few, drawn by a craving they can hardly articulate or understand, to undiscovered lands, and new worlds. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 494:Even Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel, and Albert Einstein made serious mistakes. But the scientific enterprise arranges things so that teamwork prevails: What one of us, even the most brilliant among us, misses, another of us, even someone much less celebrated and capable, may detect and rectify. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 495:Imagine we could accelerate continuously at 1 g-what we're comfortable with on good old terra firma-to the midpoint of our voyage, and decelerate continuously at 1 g until we arrive at our destination. It would take a day to get to Mars, a week and a half to Pluto, a year to the Oort Cloud, and a few years to the nearest stars. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 496:In many cultures it is customary to answer that God created the universe out of nothing. But this is mere temporizing. If we wish courageously to pursue the question, we must, of course ask next where God comes from? And if we decide this to be unanswerable, why not save a step and conclude that the universe has always existed? ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 497:There is no other species on Earth that does science. It is, so far, entirely a human invention, evolved by natural selection in the cerebral cortex for one simple reason: it works. It is not perfect. It can be misused. It is only a tool. But it is by far the best tool we have, self-correcting, ongoing, applicable to everything. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 498:The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 499:There is a reward structure in science that is very interesting: Our highest honors go to those who disprove the findings of the most revered among us. So Einstein is revered not just because he made so many fundamental contributions to science, but because he found an imperfection in the fundamental contribution of Isaac Newton. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove 500:Your religion assumes that people are children and need a boogeyman so they'll behave. You want people to believe in God so they'll obey the law. That's the only means that occurs to you: a strict secular police force, and the threat of punishment by an all-seeing God for whatever the police overlook. You sell human beings short. ~ carl-sagan, @wisdomtrove *** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***
1:We make our purpose. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
2:But I could be wrong. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
3:Billions and billions. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
4:We are all star stuff. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
5:God pity a one-dream man. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
6:War is murder writ large. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
7:We are made of starstuff. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
8:All colours are arbitrary. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
9:Ask courageous questions. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
10:We are made of stellar ash. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
11:in the words of Carl Sagan. ~ Bill Bryson, #NFDB
12:Real patriots ask questions. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
13:Not all bits have equal value. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
14:Skepticism does not sell well. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
15:We are made of starstuff. Some ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
16:Who will speak for Planet Earth? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
17:Nobody listens to mathematicians. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
18:The open road still softly calls. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
19:Valid criticism does you a favor. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
20:We are all made up of star stuff. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
21:A still more glorious dawn awaits. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
22:Evrim bir kuram değil bir olgudur. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
23:To read is to voyage through time- ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
24:To read is to voyage through time. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
25:Understanding is a kind of ecstasy ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
26:We can always take but never give. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
27:Every star may be a sun to someone. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
28:What an astonishing thing a book is. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
29:We are one species. We are starstuff. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
30:We were wanderers from the beginning. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
31:We are star stuff harvesting sunlight. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
32:We can't help it. Life looks for life. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
33:Your god is too small for my universe. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
34:Science is a way to not fool ourselves. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
35:Who is really in charge of this planet? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
36:I don't want to believe. I want to know. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
37:We are the custodians of life's meaning. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
38:We are the universe experiencing itself. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
39:An organism at war with itself is doomed. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
40:The illegality of cannabis is outrageous. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
41:Cleverly designed experiments are the key. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
42:Science is only a Latin word for knowledge ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
43:She found what she had been searching for. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
44:We are a way for the cosmos to know itself ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
45:We are a way for the cosmos to know itself. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
46:In a novel of ideas, the ideas have to work. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
47:We are a way of the universe knowing itself. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
48:He didn't want to believe. He wanted to know. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
49:Our God Is Alive and Well. Sorry About Yours. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
50:So beautiful! I had no idea! I had no idea... ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
51:Wisdom lies in understanding our limitations. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
52:Absence Of Evidence Is Not Evidence Of Absence ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
53:La prueba de ausencia no es prueba de ausencia ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
54:My wonder button is being pushed all the time. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
55:There is never only ONE of anything in nature. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
56:With insufficient data it is easy to go wrong. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
57:Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
58:[S]cience has itself become a kind of religion. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
59:What thin partitions sense from thought divide! ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
60:How can you tell when someone is only imagining? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
61:I don't know where I'm going, but I'm on my way. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
62:Isolation, even if incomplete, breeds diversity. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
63:I want Carl Sagan to explain the sky to me. ~ Whoopi Goldberg, #NFDB
64:La ausencia de pruebas no es prueba de ausencia. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
65:...our preferences do not determine what's true. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
66:Some thrive for time, while most quickly vanish. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
67:They will manage to cross the ocean of becoming. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
68:We live on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
69:Civilization is a product of the cerebral cortex. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
70:Extraordinary claim requires extraordinary proof. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
71:Stars are phoenixes, rising from their own ashes. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
72:You are worth about 3 dollars worth in chemicals. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
73:Across the sea of space, the stars are other suns. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
74:Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
75:Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
76:If we ruin the earth, there is no place else to go ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
77:Our passion for learning is our tool for survival. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
78:The cosmos is within us. We are made of star stuff ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
79:Those who avoid decapitation leave more offspring. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
80:We began as wanderers, and we are wanderers still. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
81:All inquiries carry with them some element of risk. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
82:The visions we offer our children shape the future. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
83:This oak tree and me, we're made of the same stuff. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
84:Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
85:Who are we, if not measured by our impact on others? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
86:Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
87:You have to know the past to understand the present. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
88:Cosmos is a Greek word for the order of the universe. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
89:We are the children equally of the Sky and the Earth. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
90:Birds know, better than humans, not to spoil the nest. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
91:Man is the matter of the cosmos, contemplating itself. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
92:Our passion for learning ... is our tool for survival. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
93:Superstition [is] cowardice in the face of the Divine, ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
94:The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
95:The passion to explore is at the heart of being human. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
96:All civilizations become either spacefaring or extinct. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
97:Si uno está muerto, no puede hacer nada para ser feliz. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
98:Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
99:The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
100:The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
101:Anatomy is not destiny, but it is not irrelevant either. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
102:Any civilization that doesn't develop space travel dies. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
103:Carl Sagan, astrophysicist and popularizer of science, ~ James W Sire, #NFDB
104:If the press descended, the science would surely suffer. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
105:Observation: I can't see a thing. Conclusion: Dinosaurs. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
106:The lure of the marvelous blunts our critical faculties. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
107:A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
108:Don't judge everyone else by your own limited experience. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
109:Things had been falling down since the beginning of time. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
110:To live in the hearts we leave behind is to live forever. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
111:Better the hard truth, I say, than the comforting fantasy. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
112:Science gropes and staggers toward improved understanding. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
113:Something very strange is going on in the depths of space. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
114:There is in this Universe much of what seems to be design. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
115:The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
116:The universe forces those who live in it to understand it. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
117:Observation: I can’t see a thing.
Conclusion: Dinosaurs. ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
118:We are, in the most profound sense, children of the Cosmos. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
119:Otherwise we don't run the government the government runs us ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
120:Black holes collect problems faster than they collect matter. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
121:Cosmos is all
That is, Or Ever
Was, Or ever Will
BE. ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
122:My favorite color: "A pale blue dot suspended in a sunbeam... ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
123:Nothing disturbs me more than the glorification of stupidity. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
124:Sailors on a becalmed sea, we sense the stirring of a breeze. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
125:There are wonders enough out there without our inventing any. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
126:Man is a transitional animal. He is not the climax of creation ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
127:Where we have strong emotions, we're liable to fool ourselves. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
128:Better by far to embrace the hard truth than a reassuring fable ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
129:intellectual capacity is no guarantee against being dead wrong. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
130:Man is a transitional animal. He is not the climax of creation. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
131:The sacred truth of science is that there are no sacred truths. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
132:We are, each of us, a multitude. Within us is a little universe. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
133:It means nothing to be open to a proposition we don't understand. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
134:Science is a way of thinking that helps you not to fool yourself. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
135:The obvious is sometimes false; the unexpected is sometimes true. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
136:We are star stuff which has taken its destiny into its own hands. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
137:I would rather be a transformed ape than a degenerate son of Adam. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
138:Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
139:The book of Nature had waited more than a millennium for a reader. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
140:The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
141:[...] afirmações extraordinárias requerem evidência extraordinária. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
142:Books break the shackles of time, proof that humans can work magic. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
143:It pays to keep an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
144:The most brilliant youngsters are a national and a global resource. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
145:The price we pay for anticipation of the future is anxiety about it ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
146:Whether we believe in God depends very much on what we mean by God. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
147:Atoms are mainly empty space. Matter is composed chiefly of nothing. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
148:If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
149:It's hard to kill a creature once it lets you see its consciousness. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
150:One of the central issues in the world population crisis is poverty. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
151:Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
152:Even through your hardest days, remember we are all made of stardust. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
153:Other things being equal, it is better to be smart than to be stupid. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
154:Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
155:We're made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
156:You're capable of such beautiful dreams and such horrible nightmares. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
157:Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
158:We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
159:We go about our daily lives understanding almost nothing of the world. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
160:We grow up in isolation. Only slowly do we teach ourselves the Cosmos. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
161:Ask courageous questions. Do not be satisfied with superficial answers. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
162:I would suggest that science is, at least in my part, informed worship. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
163:Preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
164:The price we pay for the anticipation of our future is anxiety about it. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
165:We are the first species to have taken our evolution into our own hands. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
166:If we go far enough back, any two people on Earth have a common ancestor. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
167:la ciencia es más que un cuerpo de conocimiento, es una manera de pensar. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
168:To live in the hearts of others is to never die in those we leave behind. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
169:For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
170:O primeiro pecado da humanidade foi a fé; a primeira virtude foi a dúvida. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
171:Ours is the first generation that has grown up with science-fiction ideas. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
172:The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
173:Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
174:It does no harm to the romance of the sunset to know a little bit about it. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
175:The cosmos is all there is, all there ever was, and all there ever will be. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
176:The open road still softly calls, like a nearly forgotten song of childhood ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
177:We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever. What ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
178:el deterioro de sus cuerpos de que habla la segunda ley de la termodinámica, ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
179:If there is life, then I believe we should do nothing to disturb that life. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
180:In a cosmic perspective, most human concerns seem insignificant, even petty. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
181:Carl Sagan put it best: Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. ~ Chris Impey, #NFDB
182:How smart does a chimpanzee have to be before killing him constitutes murder? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
183:Para criaturas pequenas como nós, a vastidão só é suportável através do amor. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
184:And you are made of a hundred trillion cells. We are, each of us, a multitude. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
185:If it can be destroyed by the truth, it deserves to be destroyed by the truth. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
186:Our concern for the future can be tested by how well we support our libraries. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
187:Ubi dubium ibi libertas: Where there is doubt, there is freedom. LATIN PROVERB ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
188:You humans have a certain talent for adaptability--at least in the short term. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
189:Each time it happens we’re tempted to infer the direct intervention of a Maker. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
190:And because what we are doing is so horrifying, we tend not to think of it much. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
191:As Carl Sagan said, “Observation: I can’t see a thing. Conclusion: Dinosaurs. ~ Nathalia Holt, #NFDB
192:One of the great commandments of science is, “Mistrust arguments from authority. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
193:The universe belongs to those who, at least to some degree, have figured it out. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
194:What is there in the precepts of science that keeps a scientist from doing evil? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
195:… where ignorance is bliss,
’Tis folly to be wise wrote the poet Thomas Gray. ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
196:If it can be destroyed by the Truth, it deserves to be destroyed by the Truth.
~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
197:In exchange for freedom of inquiry, scientists are obliged to explain their work. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
198:One of the great commandments of science is: 'Mistrust arguments from authority.' ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
199:As the ancient myth makers knew, we are children equally of the earth and the sky. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
200:Be grateful everyday for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
201:Extraordinary observations require extraordinary evidence to make them believable. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
202:If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
203:Of course we all would like to foretell the future and make contact with the gods. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
204:Para pequenas criaturas como nós, a imensidão é suportável apenas através do amor. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
205:Science is far from a perfect instrument of knowledge. It's just the best we have. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
206:Books are key to understanding the world and participating in a democratic society. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
207:But down deep, at the molecular heart of life we're essentially identical to trees. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
208:El universo no fue hecho a medida del hombre; tampoco le es hostil: es indiferente. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
209:It’s hard to imagine an American sports team named the Diarrheas (“Gimme a ‘D’ …”). ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
210:This will be deducted from your share in Paradise." ========== Contact (Carl Sagan) ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
211:Curiosity and the urge to solve problems are the emotional hallmarks of our species. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
212:Humans are very good at dreaming, although you'd never know it from your television. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
213:Their position seems to be that their God is so great he doesn't even have to exist. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
214:Those at too great a distance may, I am well are, mistake ignorance for perspective. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
215:I've always thought an agnostic is an atheist without the courage of his convictions. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
216:La búsqueda de inteligencia extraterrestre —que todos abreviaban con las siglas SETI, ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
217:Those are some of the things that molecules do, given four billion years of evolution ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
218:Whatever the reason you're on Mars, I'm glad you're there, and I wish I was with you. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
219:What's the harm of a little mystification? It sure beats boring statistical analyses. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
220:Curiosity and the urge to solve problems are the
emotional hallmarks of our species ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
221:For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love. – Carl Sagan ~ Matt Haig, #NFDB
222:The cure for a fallacious argument is a better argument, not the suppression of ideas. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
223:There are as many atoms in one molecule of DNA as there are stars in a typical galaxy. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
224:The visions we offer our children shape the future. It matters what those visions are. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
225:Liberation from superstition is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for science. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
226:Maxwell's Equations have had a greater impact on human history than any ten presidents. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
227:Pseudoscience speaks to powerful emotional needs that science often leaves unfulfilled. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
228:The Earth is a place. It is by no means the only place. It is not even a typical place. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
229:UFOs: The reliable cases are uninteresting and in the interesting cases are unreliable. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
230:But if we do not destroy ourselves, I believe that we will one day venture to the stars. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
231:Given a hundred clones of Carl Sagan, we might have some hope for the next century. ~ Richard Dawkins, #NFDB
232:If you want to make a [rhubarb] pie from scratch, first you have to create the universe. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
233:Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
234:Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were, but without it we go nowhere. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
235:The universe is a pretty big place. If it's just us, seems like an awful waste of space. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
236:and it is here that we are, in some pain and with no guarantees, working out our destiny. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
237:If we continue to accumulate only power and not wisdom, we will surely destroy ourselves. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
238:Science exacts a substantial entry fee in effort and tedium in exchange for its insights. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
239:The brain is like a muscle. When it is in use we feel very good. Understanding is joyous. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
240:The many sorrows of our recent history suggest that we humans have a learning disability. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
241:There are many kinds of slavery and many kinds of freedom. But reading is still the path. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
242:Thomas Jefferson taught that a democracy was impractical unless the people were educated. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
243:First rule in government spending: why build one when you can have two at twice the price? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
244:Football is a thinly disguised re-enactment of hunting; we played it before we were human. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
245:It is a characteristic conceit of our species to put human face on random cosmic violence. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
246:Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
247:The sky calls to us. If we do not destroy ourselves, we will one day venture to the stars. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
248:The words "question" and "quest" are cognates. Only through inquiry can we discover truth. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
249:we make our world significant by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
250:Any sufficiently crisp question can be answered by a single binary digit-0 or 1, yes or no. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
251:Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
252:But deep down, the the molecular heart of life, the trees and we are essentially identical. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
253:Human beings have a demonstrated talent for self-deception when their emotions are stirred. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
254:If ever there was an avian candidate for psychotherapy, the male blue heron is our nominee. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
255:We must understand the Cosmos as it is and not confuse how it is with how we wish it to be. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
256:And just when she felt more capable of love than she had ever been, she found herself alone. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
257:Except in pure mathematics, nothing is known for certain (although much is certainly false). ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
258:If you want to save your child from polio, you can pray or you can inoculate....Try science. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
259:In the deepest sense the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is a search for ourselves. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
260:This new project of hers was in experimental theology. But so is all of science she thought. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
261:Thus, 99 percent of the Earth’s atmosphere is of biological origin. The sky is made by life. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
262:Cosmos is a Greek word for the order of the universe. It is, in a way, the opposite of Chaos. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
263:Dear Friend, Just a line to show that I am alive & kicking and going grand. It’s a treat. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
264:[Kepler] preferred the hard truth to his dearest illusions, and that is the heart of science. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
265:Not all birds can fly. What separates the flyers from the walkers is the ability to take off. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
266:Not explaining science seems to me perverse. When you're in love, you want to tell the world. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
267:Science is merely an extremely powerful method of winnowing what's true from what feels good. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
268:At the extremes it is difficult to distinguish pseudoscience from rigid, doctrinaire religion. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
269:We are not smart enough to decide which pieces of knowledge are permissible and which are not. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
270:We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
271:Broca was quoted as saying, “I would rather be a transformed ape than a degenerate son of Adam. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
272:For a long time the human instinct to understand was thwarted by facile religious explanations. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
273:Otto Warburg had, half a century before, proposed that oxidation was the cause of many cancers. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
274:The progress and perfection of mathematics are linked closely with the prosperity of the state. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
275:Advertising teaches people not to trust their judgment. Advertising teaches people to be stupid. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
276:But nature is always more subtle, more intricate, more elegant than what we are able to imagine. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
277:Human history can be viewed as a slowly dawning awareness that we are members of a larger group. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
278:[One's] inability to invalidate your hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
279:Predictions of surprising events always prove more accurate if not set down on paper beforehand. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
280:The simplest thought, like the concept of the number one, has an elaborate logical underpinning. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
281:We on Earth have just awakened to the great oceans of space and time from which we have emerged. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
282:Could my fondness for materials have something to do with the fact the I am made chiefly of them? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
283:En basit yapılı tek hücreli organizma bile en mükemmel cep saatinden daha karmaşık bir makinedir. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
284:If stones could philosophize, I imagine Lithic Principles would be at the intellectual frontiers. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
285:If we do not speak for Earth, who will? If we are not committed to our own survival, who will be? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
286:If you want to save your child from polio, you can pray or you can inoculate. ... Choose science. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
287:In all our searching, the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable is each other. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
288:Minha alegria de ensinar foi repetidamente frustrada por diretores com características militares. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
289:The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
290:the increase of known truths stimulates the investigation, establishment, and growth of the arts. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
291:The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
292:The values of science and the values of democracy are concordant, in many cases indistinguishable. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
293:When too much cynicism threatens to engulf us, it is buoying to remember how pervasive goodness is ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
294:Hallucinations may be a neglected low door in the wall to a scientific understanding of the sacred. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
295:Modern science has been a voyage into the unknown, with a lesson in humility waiting at every stop. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
296:There are more potential combinations of DNA [physical forms] than there are atoms in the universe. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
297:There are some hundred billion (1011) galaxies, each with, on the average, a hundred billion stars. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
298:what is wanted is not the will to believe, but the desire to find out, which is the exact opposite. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
299:Are we willing to tolerate ignorance and complacency in matters that affect the entire human family? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
300:For all our failings, despite our limitations and fallibilities, we humans are capable of greatness. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
301:Observation: there was absolutely nothing to see on Venus. Conclusion: it must be covered with life. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
302:Pseudoscience is embraced, it might be argued, in exact proportion as real science is misunderstood. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
303:The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
304:Those who seek power at any price detect a societal weakness, a fear that they can ride into office. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
305:Tsiolkovsky wrote: “The Earth is the cradle of mankind. But one does not live in the cradle forever. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
306:Even if the aliens are short, dour, and sexually obsessed—if they’re here, I want to know about them. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
307:I don't know the answer. Maybe no one knows. Maybe when you grow up, you'll be the first to find out. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
308:In any case, we do not advance the human cause by refusing to consider ideas that make us frightened. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
309:It is said that men may not be the dreams of the god, but rather that the gods are the dreams of men. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
310:These are some of the things that hydrogen atoms do, given fifteen billion years of cosmic evolution. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
311:We are made of star-stuff. Our bodies are made of star-stuff. There are pieces of star within us all. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
312:Books are like seeds. They can lie dormant for centuries and then flower in the most unpromising soil. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
313:If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
314:I find science so much more fascinating than science fiction. It also has the advantage of being true. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
315:In the vastness of the Cosmos there must be other civilizations far older and more advanced than ours. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
316:Knowledge is preferable to ignorance. Better by far to embrace the hard truth than a reassuring fable. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
317:Wisdom lies in understanding our limitations. ‘For Man is a giddy thing,’ teaches William Shakespeare. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
318:An oak tree and I are made of the same stuff. If you go far enough back, we have a common ancestor. The ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
319:If we say that God has always been, why not save a step and conclude that the universe has always been? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
320:I think the discomfort that some people feel in going to the monkey cages at the zoo is a warning sign. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
321:CARL SAGAN SAID that if you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. ~ Nicola Yoon, #NFDB
322:The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
323:The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
324:We tend not to be especially critical when presented with evidence that seems to confirm our prejudices. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
325:All her life, dreams had been her friends. Her dreams were unusually detailed, well-structured, colorful. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
326:almost every species that has ever existed is extinct; extinction is the rule, survival is the exception. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
327:Any faith that admires truth, that strives to know God, must be brave enough to accommodate the universe. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
328:Except for fools and madmen, everyone knows that nuclear war would he an unprecedented human catastrophe. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
329:I would be very ashamed of my civilization if we did not try to find out if there is life in outer space. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
330:The roots of tyranny and freedom trace back to long before recorded history, and are etched in our genes. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
331:We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
332:Leave nothing to chance. Overlook nothing. Combine contradictory observations. Allow yourself enough time. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
333:Our very existence in that distant time requires that we will have changed our institutions and ourselves. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
334:Pseudoscience is embraced, it might be argued, in exact proportion as real science is misunderstood—except ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
335:For years I've been stressing with regard to UFOs that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
336:In the vastness of space and the immensity of time, it is my joy to share a planet and an epoch with Annie. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
337:No Green Revolution, no hydroponics, no making the deserts bloom can beat an exponential population growth. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
338:I believe that the extraordinary should be pursued. But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
339:If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another. Human ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
340:...is it really true that we can't afford one attack helicopter's worth of seed corn to listen to the stars? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
341:We are all flawed and creatures of our times. Is it fair to judge us by the unknown standards of the future? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
342:In good speaking, should not the mind of the speaker know the truth of the matter about which he is to speak? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
343:One of the greatest gifts adults can give - to their offspring and to their society - is to read to children. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
344:Voltaire argued that if God did not exist Man would be obliged to invent him, and was reviled for the remark. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
345:When we look up at night and view the stars, everything we see is shinning because of distant nuclear fusion. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
346:Would not a rational society spend more on understanding and preventing, than on preparing for, the next war? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
347:If all the suns but ours collapsed tonight, how many lifetimes would it take us to realize that we were alone? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
348:But if they called everything divine which they do not understand, why, there would be no end of divine beings. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
349:Even victims of atrocious brutality and intractable pain may retain a longing, sometimes even a zest, for life. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
350:La ciencia no es solamente compatible con la espiritualidad, sino que es una profunda fuente de espiritualidad. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
351:Life is profligate, blind at this level unconcerned with notions of justice. It can afford to waste multitudes. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
352:The method of science, as stodgy and grumpy as it may seem, is far more important than the findings of science. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
353:When asked how he accomplished his astonishing discoveries, Newton replied unhelpfully, “By thinking upon them. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
354:When we look up at night and view the stars, everything we see is shining because of distant nuclear fusion. In ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
355:But you reassure yourself that at least here they are safe from baleen whales and oil slicks and cocktail sauce. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
356:For ages men had used sticks to club and spear each other—Anaximander of Miletus used the stick to measure time. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
357:Organic as a dandelion seed, [the ship of our imagination] will carry us to worlds of dreams and worlds of facts ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
358:Advances in medicine and agriculture have saved vastly more lives than have been lost in all the wars in history. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
359:I hold that popularization of science is successful if, at first, it does no more than spark the sense of wonder. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
360:There are no forbidden questions in science, no matters too sensitive or delicate to be probed, no sacred truths. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
361:The same few dozen organic molecules are used over and over again in biology for the widest variety of functions. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
362:We have entered, almost without noticing, an age of exploration and discovery unparalleled since the Renaissance. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
363:Everything not forbidden by the laws of nature, he assured her - quoting a colleague down the hall - is mandatory. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
364:Science is more than a body of knowledge. It's a way of thinking: a way of skeptically interrogating the universe. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
365:The old appeals to racial, sexual and religious chauvinism to rabid nationalist fervor, are beginning not to work. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
366:[...] science carries us towards an understanding of how the world is, rather than how we would wish it to be [...] ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
367:The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent to the concerns of such puny creatures as we are. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
368:Every cell is a triumph of natural selection, and we’re made of trillions of cells. Within us, is a little universe. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
369:If the greenhouse effect is a blanket in which we wrap ourselves to keep warm, nuclear winter kicks the blanket off. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
370:Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
371:The Cosmos is rich beyond measure—in elegant facts, in exquisite interrelationships, in the subtle machinery of awe. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
372:The dumbing down of America is evident in the slow decay of substantive content, a kind of celebration of ignorance. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
373:There is perhaps no better a demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
374:We must surrender our skepticism only in the face of rock-solid evidence. Science demands a tolerance for ambiguity. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
375:Across the sea of space. The stars are other suns. We have traveled this way before. And there is much to be learned. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
376:A galaxy is composed of gas and dust and stars - billions upon billions of stars. Every star may be a sun to someone. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
377:How lucky we are to live in this time / the first moment in human history / when we are in fact visiting other worlds ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
378:Human beings grew up in forests; we have a natural affinity for them. How lovely a tree is, straining toward the sky. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
379:In science it often happens that scientists say, "You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken..." ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
380:Sagan is an astronomer with one eye on the stars, another on history, and a third—his mind’s—on the human condition.… ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
381:I believe that the extraordinary should certainly be pursued. But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
382:In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
383:It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
384:It is the tension between creativity and skepticism that has produced the stunning and unexpected findings of science. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
385:what’s the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
386:A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
387:In the long run, the aggressive civilizations destroy themselves, almost always. It's their nature. They can't help it. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
388:Intuitive: The word conveys, I think, a diffuse annoyance at our inability to understand how we come by such knowledge. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
389:The fact that someone says something doesn't mean it's true. Doesn't mean they're lying, but it doesn't mean it's true. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
390:These are the folks who brought us the hydrogen bomb. Forgive me, Lord, for not being more grateful to these kind souls ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
391:The total number of stars in the Universe is larger than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the planet Earth. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
392:When you make the finding yourself - even if you're the last person on Earth to see the light - you'll never forget it. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
393:I do not imagine that many people in the fifteenth century ever wondered if they were living in the Italian Renaissance. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
394:Writing a novel is like trying to solve a very long mathematical equation. Changing anything can change everything else. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
395:You know the opinion of Cervantes? He said that reading a translation is like examining the back of a piece of tapestry. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
396:Keeping an open mind is a virtue—but, as the space engineer James Oberg once said, not so open that your brains fall out. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
397:Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
398:The cosmos is full beyond measure of elegant truths; of exquisite interrelationships; of the awesome machinery of nature. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
399:...the hopeless sense of a civilization destroyed for nothing; the knowledge that we could have prevented it and did not. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
400:When we are self-indulgent and uncritical, when we confuse hopes and facts, we slide into pseudoscience and superstition. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
401:cuando hierve el fanatismo a nuestro alrededor, los hábitos de pensamiento familiares de épocas antiguas toman el control. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
402:Hiçbir uygarlık, topluluktaki doğumların sayısını sınırlandırmadan yıldızlar arası yolculuk çabalarının üstesinden gelemez ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
403:Nature does not always conform to our predispositions and preferences, to what we deem comfortable and easy to understand. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
404:The cannabis experience has greatly improved my appreciation for art, a subject which I had never much appreciated before. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
405:A single lifetime, even though entirely devoted to the sky, would not be enough for the investigation of so vast a subject ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
406:In our time, we have sifted the sands of Mars, we have established a presence there, we have fulfilled a century of dreams! ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
407:Our children long for realistic maps of the future that they can be proud of. Where are the cartographers of human purpose? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
408:The nature of life on Earth and the search for life elsewhere are two sides of the same question—the search for who we are. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
409:We also know how cruel the truth often is, and we wonder whether delusion is not more consoling. HENRI POINCARÉ (1854–1912) ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
410:If the constellations had been named in the twentieth century, I suppose we would see bicycles and refrigerators in the sky. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
411:Science cuts two ways, of course; its products can be used for both good and evil. But there's no turning back from science. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
412:Science is based on experiment, on a willingness to challenge old dogma, on an openness to see the universe as it really is. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
413:If our long-term survival is at stake, we have a basic responsibility to our species to venture to other worlds. —CARL SAGAN ~ Michio Kaku, #NFDB
414:If we are to survive, our loyalties must be broadened further, to include the whole human community, the entire planet Earth. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
415:I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
416:The nuclear arms race is like two sworn enemies standing waist deep in gasoline, one with three matches, the other with five. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
417:The secrets of evolution, are time and death.
There's an unbroken thread that stretches from those first cells to us. ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
418:For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
419:In every culture we imagined something like our own political system running the Universe Few found the similarity suspicious. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
420:Microbiology and meteorology now explain what only a few centuries ago was considered sufficient cause to burn women to death. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
421:the future belongs to those societies that treat new ideas as delicate, fragile and immensely valuable pathways to the future. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
422:All inquires carry with them some element of risk. There is no guarantee that the universe will conform to our predispositions. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
423:Anger at queries about our beliefs is the body’s warning signal: here lies unexamined and probably dangerous doctrinal baggage. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
424:In the fabric of space and in the nature of matter, as in a great work of art, there is, written small, the artist's signature. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
425:It is all a matter of time scale. An event that would be unthinkable in a hundred years may be inevitable in a hundred million. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
426:With an ambassador, you're supposed to put your best foot forward, and we've been sending mainly crap to space for forty years. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
427:If we can't think for ourselves, if we're unwilling to question authority, then we're just putty in the hands of those in power. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
428:Avoidable human misery is more often caused not so much by stupidity as by ignorance, particularly our ignorance about ourselves. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
429:Could we possible manage the next phase of human history without first dealing with this penchant for dehumanizing the adversary? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
430:If it takes a little myth and ritual to get us through a night that seems endless, who among us cannot sympathize and understand? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
431:Our psychological predispositions pros or cons must not misleads us. All that matters is the evidence, and the evident is not in. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
432:Perhaps the depth of love can be calibrated by the number of different selves that are actively involved in a given relationship. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
433:You can't convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it's based on a deep seated need to believe ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
434:I think if we ever reach the point where we think we thoroughly understand who we are and where we came from, we will have failed. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
435:Writing is perhaps the greatest human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
436:as astronomer Carl Sagan once aptly put it, you do not want to keep your mind so open that your brain is likely to fall out. ~ Massimo Pigliucci, #NFDB
437:Our ancestors lived out of doors. They were as familiar with the night sky as most of us are with our favorite television programs. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
438:Scientists often say "My position is mistaken." I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
439:We live at a moment when our relationships to each other, and to all other beings with whom we share this planet, are up for grabs. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
440:Contemplated as one grand whole, astronomy is the most beautiful monument of the human mind; the noblest record of its intelligence. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
441:El Universo no parece ni benigno ni hostil, simplemente indiferente a las preocupaciones de seres tan insignificantes como nosotros. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
442:Has there ever been a religion with the prophetic accuracy and reliability of science? . . . No other human institution comes close. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
443:I'm only a four-dimensional creature. Haven't got a clue how to visualise infinity. Even Einstein hadn't. I know because I asked him ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
444:We are privileged to live in, and if we are lucky to influence, one of the most critical epochs in the history of the human species. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
445:When enough fiction is written and enough scientific hypotheses are proposed, sooner or later there will be accidental concordances. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
446:When you're in love, you want to tell the world. This book is a personal statement, reflecting my lifelong love affair with science. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
447:You could just as well say that an agnostic is a deeply religious person with at least a rudimentary knowledge of human fallibility. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
448:All of us long for a competent, uncorrupt, charismtatic leader. We will leap at the opportunity to support, to believe, to feel good. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
449:I don?t feel rejected by the sky. I?m a part of it- tiny, to be sure, but everything is tiny compared to that overwhelming immensity. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
450:There is a lurking fear that some things are not “meant" to be known, that some inquiries are too dangerous for human beings to make. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
451:A googolplex is precisely as far from infinity as is the number 1... no matter what number you have in mind, infinity is larger still. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
452:If people knew how many people, especially the very rich and powerful ones, went to psychics, their jaws would drop through the floor, ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
453:It's sometimes easier to reject strong evidence than to admit that we've been wrong, this is information about ourselves worth having. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
454:Perhaps the depth of love can be calibrated by the number of different selves that are actively involved in a given relationship. With ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
455:One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
456:There are lots of ways to communicate what we know, but few ways to communicate what we feel. Music is one way to communicate emotions. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
457:We live in an in-between universe where things change all right...but according to patterns, rules, or as we call them, laws of nature. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
458:I believe our future depends powerfully on how well we understand this cosmos in which we float, like a mote of dust in the morning sky. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
459:People’s feelings are as strong as they always were, and skepticism is probably as unfashionable today as in any other age. Accordingly, ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
460:the lack is not in intelligence, which is in plentiful supply; rather, the scarce commodity is systematic training in critical thinking. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
461:The very act of understanding is a celebration of joining, merging, even if on a very modest scale, with the magnificence of the Cosmos. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
462:Güneş'in yapısında önce helyum bulunduğu saptanmıştır.(Yunanlıların güneş tanrısına Helios adını vermeleri nedeniyle helyum denilmiştir.) ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
463:I agree, along with Carl Sagan, that we should eventually become a two planet species. Life is too precious to place on a single planet. ~ Michio Kaku, #NFDB
464:I believe that in every person is a kind of circuit which resonates to intellectual discovery-and the idea is to make that resonance work ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
465:Kozmos ''düzen içinde bir evren'' anlamında kullanılan Yunanca bir sözcüktür ve bir bakıma ''karmaşa'' anlamına gelen Kaos'un karşıtıdır. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
466:The fossil record implies trial and error, an inability to anticipate the future, features inconsistent with an efficient Great Designer. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
467:We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
468:I set before you two ways: You can use your technology to destroy yourselves or to carry you to the planets and the stars. It's up to you. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
469:Science is an ongoing process. It never ends. There is no single ultimate truth to be achieved, after which all the scientists can retire. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
470:Some racists still reject the plain testimony written in the DNA that all the races are not only human but nearly indistinguishable. . . . ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
471:The fifth regular solid must then, they thought, correspond to some fifth element that could only be the substance of the heavenly bodies. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
472:An atheist has to know a lot more than I know. An atheist is someone who knows there is no god. By some definitions atheism is very stupid. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
473:A still more glorious dawn awaits / not a sunrise, but a galaxy-rise / a morning filled with 400 billion suns / the rising of the milky way ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
474:Better by far to embrace the hard truth than a reassuring fable. If we crave some cosmic purpose, then let us find ourselves a worthy goal. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
475:Humans everywhere share the same goals when the context is large enough. And the study of the Cosmos provides the largest possible context. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
476:In a slick manifesto called Cosmos, Carl Sagan artfully packaged his own creed: “The Cosmos is all there is, or was, or ever will be. ~ Charles W Colson, #NFDB
477:Literacy is the path from slavery to freedom. But there are many kinds of slavery and many kinds of freedom. But reading is still the path. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
478:According to some estimates, almost half the scientists and high technologists on Earth are employed full- or part-time on military matters. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
479:A universe that is unknowable is no fit place for a thinking being. The ideal universe for us is one very much like the universe we inhabit. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
480:El intelecto humano lo debe esencialmente todo a los millones de años que nuestros antecesores pasaron en solitario colgados de los árboles. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
481:Maturity entails a readiness, painful and wrenching though it may be, to look squarely into the long dark places, into the fearsome shadows. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
482:Our ancestors worshipped the Sun, and they were not that foolish. It makes sense to revere the Sun and the stars, for we are their children. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
483:Venus, it turns out, is broiling hot. There are no swamps, no oil fields, no seltzer oceans. With insufficient data, it is easy to go wrong. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
484:we are privileged to live among brilliant and passionately inquisitive people, and in time when the search for knowledge is generally prized ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
485:Widespread intellectual and moral docility may be convenient for leaders in the short term, but it is suicidal for nations in the long term. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
486:According to some estimates, almost half the scientists and high technologists on Earth are employed full- or part-time on military matters. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
487:I can find in my undergraduate classes, bright students who do not know that the stars rise and set at night, or even that the Sun is a star. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
488:I wonder how many potential Einsteins have been permanently discouraged through competitive examinations and the forced feeding of curricula. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
489:Once upon a time, we soared into the Solar System. For a few years. Then we hurried back. Why? What happened? What was 'Apollo' really about? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
490:On the day that we do discover that we are not alone, our society may begin to evolve and transform in some incredible and wondrous new ways. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
491:Spurious accounts that snare the gullible are readily available. Skeptical treatments are much harder to find. Skepticism does not sell well. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
492:The fact that so little of the findings of modern science is prefigured in Scripture to my mind casts further doubt on it divine inspiration. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
493:We live in a vast and awesome universe in which, daily, suns are made and worlds destroyed, where humanity clings to an obscure clod of rock. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
494:You mustn't think of the Universe as a wilderness. It hasn't been that for billions of years," he said. "Think of it more as... ..cultivated. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
495:Absolute certainty will always elude us. We will always be mired in error. The most each generation can hope for is to reduce the error. . . . ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
496:A still more glorious dawn awaits
Not a sunrise, but a galaxy rise
A morning filled with 400 billion suns
The rising of the milky way ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
497:Each of us is a tiny being, permitted to ride on the outermost skin of one of the smaller planets for a few dozen trips around the local star. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
498:If it’s sometimes easier to reject strong evidence than to admit that we’ve been wrong, this is also information about ourselves worth having. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
499:Life is but a momentary glimpse of the wonder of this astounding universe, and it is sad to see so many dreaming it away on spiritual fantasy. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
500:The Sphinx is missing a nose. Someone shot it off in a moment of idle desecration—some say it was Mameluke Turks, others, Napoleonic soldiers. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
501:Except for children (who don't know enough not to ask the important questions), few of us spendtime wondering why nature is the way it is . . . ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
502:In Mozambique, the story goes, monkeys do not talk, because they know if they utter even a single word some man will come and put them to work. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
503:Life is but a momentary glimpse of the wonder of this astonishing universe, and it is sad to see so many dreaming it away on spiritual fantasy. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
504:When permitted to listen to alternative opinions and engage in substantive debate, people have been known to change their minds. It can happen. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
505:All our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike—and yet it is the most precious thing we have. ALBERT EINSTEIN (1879–1955) ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
506:If a marker were to be erected today, it might read, in homage to his scientific courage: “He preferred the hard truth to his dearest illusions. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
507:Like it or not, we humans are bound up with our fellows, and with the other plants and animals all over the world.
Our lives are intertwined. ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
508:The usual rejoinder to someone who says 'They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Galileo' is to say 'But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown'. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
509:Accommodation to change, the thoughtful pursuit of alternative futures are keys to the survival of civilization and perhaps of the human species. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
510:Every thinking person fears nuclear war, and every technological state plans for it. Everyone knows it is madness, and every nation has an excuse ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
511:I am often amazed at how much more capability and enthusiasm for science there is among elementary school youngsters than among college students. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
512:Los dioses no vienen a componer las cosas que nos salieron mal. Fíjese en la historia del hombre, y se dará cuenta de que siempre estuvimos solos ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
513:The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
514:We will know which stars to visit. Our descendants will then skim the light years, the children of Thales and Aristarchus, Leonardo and Einstein. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
515:Modern science has been a voyage into the unknown, with a lesson in humility waiting at every stop. Many passengers would rather have stayed home. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
516:We are star stuff which has taken its destiny into its own hands. The loom of time and space works the most astonishing transformations of matter. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
517:All our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike—and yet it is the most precious thing we have. ALBERT EINSTEIN
(1879–1955) ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
518:Our perceptions are fallible. We sometimes see what isn't there. We are prey to optical illusions. Occasionally we hallucinate. We are error-prone. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
519:Toda nuestra ciencia, comparada con la realidad, es primitiva e infantil… y sin embargo es lo más preciado que tenemos. ALBERT EINSTEIN (1879-1955) ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
520:We have examined the universe in space and seen that we live on a mote of dust circling a humdrum star in the remotest corner of an obscure galaxy. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
521:Apart from the social insects, no other species has been clever enough to invent war It is an institution optimally configured to benefit the alphas ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
522:Every thinking person fears nuclear war, and every technological state plans for it.
Everyone knows it is madness, and every nation has an excuse ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
523:The only planet we are sure is inhabited is a tiny speck of rock and metal, shining feebly by reflected sunlight, and at this distance utterly lost. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
524:The prediction I can make with the highest confidence is that the most amazing discoveries will be the ones we are not today wise enough to foresee. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
525:By looking far out into space we are also looking far back into time, back toward the horizon of the universe, back toward the epoch of the Big Bang. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
526:Even after 400 generations in villages and cities, we haven't forgotten. The open road still softly calls, like a nearly forgotten song of childhood. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
527:For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring. CARL SAGAN ~ Jennifer Foehner Wells, #NFDB
528:Nearly everyone in ancient Egypt exhorted the gods to let the Pharaoh live 'forever. These collective prayers failed. Their failure constitutes data. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
529:Significant change might require those who are now high in the hierarchy to move downward many steps. This seems to them undesirable and is resisted. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
530:The biblical God is a sloppy manufacturer. He's not good at design, he's not good at execution. He'd be out of business if there was any competition. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
531:The evidence, so far at least and laws of Nature aside, does not require a Designer. Maybe there is one hiding, maddeningly unwilling to be revealed. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
532:The well-meaning contention that all ideas have equal merit seems to me little different from the disastrous contention that no ideas have any merit. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
533:We humans appear on the cosmic calendar so recently that our recorded history occupies only the last few seconds of the last minute of December 31st. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
534:Books tap the wisdom of our species -- the greatest minds, the best teachers -- from all over the world and from all our history. And they're patient. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
535:Do dogs feel for humans something akin to religious ecstasy? What other strong or subtle emotions are felt by animals that do not communicate with us? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
536:Especially where the implications of what we think we are seeing seem to be profound, we may not exercise adequate self-discipline and self-criticism. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
537:Humans - who enslave, castrate, experiment on, and fillet other animals - have had an understandable penchant for pretending animals do not feel pain. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
538:If it were widely understood that claims to knowledge require adequate evidence before they can be accepted, there would be no room for pseudoscience. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
539:Biology is more like history than it is like physics. You have to know the past to understand the present. And you have to know it in exquisite detail. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
540:I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas …” To the ancient Greeks and Romans, the known world comprised ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
541:The visions we offer our children shape the future. It matters what those visions are. Often they become self-fulfilling prophecies. Dreams are maps. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
542:The visions we offer our children shape the future. It _matters_ what those visions are. Often they become self-fulfilling prophecies. Dreams are maps. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
543:We have examined the universe in space and seen that we live on a mote of dust circling a humdrum star in the remotest corner of an obscure galaxy. And ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
544:In more than one respect, the exploring of the Solar System and homesteading other worlds constitutes the beginning, much more than the end, of history. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
545:Natural selection has served as a kind of intellectual sieve, producing brains and intelligences increasingly competent to deal with the laws of nature. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
546:There is every reason to think that in the coming years Mars and its mysteries will become increasingly familiar to the inhabitants of the Planet Earth. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
547:...todo gobierno se degenera cuando se deja solos a los gobernantes, porque éstos -por el mero hecho de gobernar- hacen mal uso de la confianza pública. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
548:And if the world does not in all respects correspond to our wishes, is this the fault of science, or of those who would impose their wishes on the world? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
549:In addition, science is a delight;
evolution has arranged that we take pleasure in understanding - those who understand
are more likely to survive. ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
550:It would be wryly interesting if in human history the cultivation of marijuana led generally to the invention of agriculture, and thereby to civilization. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
551:Pseudoscience speaks to powerful emotional needs that science often leaves unfulfilled. It caters to fantasies about personal powers we lack and long for. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
552:We are made of stellar ash. Our origin and evolution have been tied to distant cosmic events. The exploration of the cosmos is a voyage of self-discovery. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
553:What does seventy million years mean to beings who live only one-millionth as long? We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
554:Better the hard truth, I say, than the comforting fantasy. And in the final tolling it often turns out that the facts are more comforting than the fantasy. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
555:If we know only our own side of the argument, we hardly know even that; it becomes stale, soon learned only by rote, untested, a pallid and lifeless truth. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
556:The Big Bang is our modern scientific creation myth. It comes from the same human need to solve the cosmological riddle [Where did the universe come from?] ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
557:A new consciousness is developing which sees the earth as a single organism and recognizes that an organism at war with itself is doomed. We are one planet. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
558:…better the hard truth, I say, than the comforting fantasy. And in the final tolling it often turns out that the facts are more comforting than the fantasy. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
559:CARL SAGAN SAID that if you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. When he says “from scratch,” he means from nothing. ~ Nicola Yoon, #NFDB
560:My kind of Supreme Being would rather that people worship no gods than false gods and would prefer eternal discourse with Carl Sagan than with Jerry Falwell. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
561:There is no single ultimate truth to be achieved, after which all the scientists can retire. And because this is so, the world is far more interesting, both ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
562:We can judge our progress by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers, our willingness to embrace what is true rather than what feels good. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
563:On the scale of worlds—to say nothing of stars or galaxies—humans are inconsequential, a thin film of life on an obscure and solitary lump of rock and metal. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
564:Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
565:Our posturings, our imagined self-importance , the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe are challenged by this point of pale light. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
566:True memories seemed like phantoms, while false memories were so convincing that they replaced reality. GABRIEL GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ,
Strange Pilgrims
(1992) ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
567:If we can accomplish the integration of the search without obliterating cultural differences or destroying ourselves, we will have accomplished a great thing. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
568:She had studied the universe all her life, but had overlooked its clearest message: For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
569:We should be teaching our children the scientific method and the reasons for a Bill of Rights. With it comes a certain decency, humility and community spirit. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
570:Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
571:I reject the notion that science is by its nature secretive. Its culture and ethos are, and for very good reason, collective, collaborative, and communicative. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
572:The idea of science as a method rather than as a body of knowledge is not widely appreciated outside of science, or indeed in some corridors inside of science. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
573:The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion and politics, but it is not the path to knowledge; it has no place in the endeavor of science. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
574:Evolution is adventitious and not foresighted. Only through the deaths of an immense number of slightly maladapted organisms are we, brains and all, here today. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
575:Geometry existed before the Creation. It is co-eternal with the mind of God … Geometry provided God with a model for the Creation … Geometry is God Himself.” In ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
576:If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
577:My fundamental premise about the brain is that its workings - what we sometimes call "mind" - are a consequence of its anatomy and physiology, and nothing more. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
578:On the scale of worlds—to say nothing of stars or galaxies—humans are inconsequential, a thin film of life on an obscure and solitary lump of rock and metal. It ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
579:We have heard the rationales offered by the nuclear superpowers. We know who speaks for the nations. But who speaks for the human species? Who speaks for Earth? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
580:If we are merely matter intricately assembled, is this really demeaning? If there's nothing here but atoms, does that make us less or does that make matter more? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
581:Thus the recent rapid evolution of human intelligence is not only the cause of but also the only conceivable solution to the many serious problems that beset us. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
582:You've tapped yourself in some sort of fifthcentury religious mania. Since then the Renaissance has happened, the Enlightenment has happened. Where've you been? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
583:I know that I am born for a day. But when I follow at my pleasure the serried multitude of the stars in their circular course, my feet no longer touch the Earth … ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
584:It's no surprise that appeals to a state of mind called faith can relieve symptoms caused, at least in part, by another, perhaps not very different state of mind. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
585:Once intelligent beings achieve technology and the capacity for self-destruction of their species, the selective advantage of intelligence becomes more uncertain. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
586:Our purportedly advanced civilization may be changing the delicate ecological balance that has tortuously evolved over the 4-billion-year period of life on Earth. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
587:we still talk about the Sun “rising” and the Sun “setting.” It is 2,200 years since Aristarchus, and our language still pretends that the Earth does not turn. The ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
588:in the forty-five years centered on 1910, the nature of the atom was first understood—partly by shooting pieces of atoms at atoms and watching how they bounce off. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
589:In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries you could travel from Holland to China in a year or two, the time it has taken Voyager to travel from Earth to Jupiter. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
590:Maybe it's a little early. Maybe the time is not quite yet. But those other worlds - promising untold opportunities - beckon. Silently, they orbit the Sun, waiting. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
591:We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology and yet have cleverly arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
592:Where did God come from? If we decide this is an unanswerable question why not save a step and conclude that the origin of the universe is an unanswerable question. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
593:All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
594:An atheist is someone who is certain that God doesn't exist, someone who has compelling evidence against the existence of God. I know of no such compelling evidence. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
595:Demon mean knowledge in Greek, especially about the material world. Science means knowledge in Latin. A jurisdictional dispute is exposed, even if we look no further ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
596:Frederick Douglas taught that literacy is the path from slavery to freedom. There are many kinds of slavery and many kinds of freedom, but reading is still the path. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
597:If anything like this is true, then we would be denied even our self-congratulatory distinction of being the only animal that makes self-congratulatory distinctions. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
598:It is on this world that we developed our passion for exploring the Cosmos, and it is here that we are, in some pain and with no guarantees, working out our destiny. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
599:Meanwhile the Cosmos is rich beyond measure: the total number of stars in the universe is greater than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the planet Earth. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
600:No, there's one thing the Bible makes clear: The biblical God is a sloppy manufacturer. He's not good at design, he's not good at execution. He'd be out of business. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
601:These days there seems to be nowhere left to explore, at least on the land area of the Earth. Victims of their very success, the explorers now pretty much stay home. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
602:The suppression of uncomfortable ideas
may be common in religion and politics, but it is not the path to knowledge; it has no place
in the endeavor of science. ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
603:Una de las lecciones más tristes de la historia es ésta: si se está sometido a un engaño demasiado tiempo, se tiende a rechazar cualquier prueba de que es un engaño. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
604:An atheist is someone who is certain that God does not exist, someone who has compelling evidence against the existence of God. I know of no such compelling evidence. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
605:And reading itself is an amazing activity: You glance at a thin, flat object made from a tree...and the voice of the author begins to speak inside your head. (Hello!) ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
606:Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value the may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
607:Frederick Douglass taught that literacy is the path from slavery to freedom. There are many kinds of slavery and many kinds of freedom. But reading is still the path. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
608:In the vastness of space and the immensity of time, it is my joy to share a planet and an epoch with Annie.
[Dedication to Sagan's wife, Ann Druyan, in Cosmos] ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
609:She had spent her career attempting to make contact with the most remote and alien of strangers, while in her own life she had made contact with hardly anyone at all. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
610:The method of science is tried and true. It is not perfect, it's just the best we have. And to abandon it, with its skeptical protocols, is the pathway to a dark age. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
611:There are many hypotheses in science which are wrong. That’s perfectly all right: it’s the aperture to finding out what’s right. Science is a self-correcting process. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
612:We are alive and we resonate with idea of life elsewhere, but only careful accumulation and assessment of the evidence can tell us whether a given world is inhabited. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
613:You spend even a little time contemplating the Earth from orbit and the most deeply engrained nationalisms begin to erode. They seem the squabbles of mites on a plum. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
614:A multitude of aspects of the natural world that were considered miraculous only a few generations ago are now thoroughly understood in terms of physics and chemistry. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
615:It will not be we who reach Alpha Centauri, and the other nearby stars. It will be a species very like us - but with more of our strengths and fewer of our weaknesses. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
616:Knowing a great deal is not the same as being smart; intelligence is not information alone but also judgement, the manner in which information is coordinated and used. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
617:Our difficulties in understanding or effectuating
communication with other animals may arise from our reluctance to grasp unfamiliar ways of dealing with the world. ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
618:Perhaps for the first time in any medium, the person teaching you science—Carl Sagan—cared about the tangled mental roadways that can rob a person of rational thought. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
619:The desire to be connected with the cosmos reflects a profound reality, but we are connected; not in the trivial ways that astrology promises, but in the deepest ways. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
620:We are set irrevocably, I believe, on a path what will take us to the stars - unless in some monstrous capitulation to stupidity and greed, we destroy ourselves first. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
621:Whatever their neurological and molecular antecedents, hallucinations feel real. They are sought out in many cultures and considered a sign of spiritual enlightenment. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
622:But in introducing me simultaneously to skepticism and to wonder, they taught me the two uneasily cohabiting modes of thought that are central to the scientific method. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
623:Every kid starts out as a natural-born scientist, and then we beat it out of them. A few trickle through the system with their wonder and enthusiasm for science intact. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
624:It is precisely our plasticity, our long childhood, that prevents a slavish adherence to genetically programmed behavior in human beings more than in any other species. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
625:No question; language can free us of feeling, or almost. Maybe that's one of its functions - so we can understand the world without becoming entirely overwhelmed by it. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
626:Nuestro planeta y nuestro sistema solar se hallan rodeados por un nuevo mundo oceánico, las profundidades del espacio. Y no es más infranqueable que el de otras épocas. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
627:But in introducing me simultaneously to skepticism and to wonder, they taught me the two uneasily cohabiting modes of thought that are central to the scientific method. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
628:My fundamental premise about the brain is that its workings—what we sometimes call “mind”—are a consequence of its anatomy and physiology, and nothing more. —CARL SAGAN ~ Michio Kaku, #NFDB
629:The whole idea of a democratic application of skepticism is that everyone should have the essential tools to effectively and constructively evaluate claims to knowledge. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
630:The world is so exquisite, with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there's little good
evidence. ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
631:We live in a complex age where many of the problems we face can, whatever their origins, only have solutions that involve a deep understanding of science and technology. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
632:All science asks is to employ the same levels of skepticism we use in buying a used car or in judging the quality of analgesics or beer from their television commercials. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
633:Would you say, “Billy, be home by the time the Earth has rotated enough so as to occult the Sun below the local horizon”? Billy would be long gone before you’re finished. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
634:Göz önünde tutmak'' anlamındaki İngilizce ''consider'' sözcüğünün köken anlamı şudur: ''Gezegene bakarak konuşmak.'' Gezegenlere bakarak konuşmaksa oldukça ciddi bir işti. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
635:Many pseudoscientific and New Age belief systems emerge out of dissatisfaction with conventional values and perspectives—and are therefore themselves a kind of skepticism. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
636:The politicians and the religious leaders and the weapons scientists have been at it for a long time and they've made a thorough mess of it. I mean, we're in deep trouble. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
637:El reduccionismo no parece conceder un respeto suficiente a la complejidad del universo. A algunos se les antoja como un híbrido curioso de arrogancia y pereza intelectual. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
638:Home, you think. Home. This is my world. This is where I come from. Everyone I know, everyone I ever heard of, grew up down there, under that relentless and exquisite blue. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
639:Discussing the possibilities of extraterrestrial life: I would love it even if they were short, sullen, grumpy and sexually obsessed. But there just isn't any good evidence. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
640:In human history there a precious few whose memory we revere because they knowingly sacrificed themselves for others. For each of them, there are multitudes who did nothing. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
641:It took the Church until 1832 to remove Galileo 's work from its list of books which Catholics were forbidden to read at the risk of dire punishment of their immortal souls. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
642:You can get into a habit of thought in which you enjoy making fun of all those other people who don't see things as clearly as you do. We have to guard carefully against it. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
643:If our long-term survival is at stake, we have a basic responsibility to our species to venture to other worlds. Sailors on a becalmed sea, we sense the stirring of a breeze. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
644:If you look up at the Milky Way through the eyes of Carl Sagan, you get a feeling in your chest of something greater than yourself. And it is. But it's not supernatural. ~ Richard Dawkins, #NFDB
645:While the style of the critique may vary with the character of the critic, overly polite criticism benefits neither the proponents of new ideas nor the scientific enterprise. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
646:70 milyon yıl, bunun ancak milyonda birine eşit bir süre yaşayabilen insan için ne ifade eder? Yalnızca bir güncük uçan ve günü sonsuzmuş gibi algılayan kelebeklere benziyoruz ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
647:My view is that if there is no evidence for it, then forget about it. An agnostic is somebody who doesn’t believe in something until there is evidence for it, so I’m agnostic. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
648:Some 5 billion years from now, there will be a last perfect day on Earth... then the sun will begin to die, life will be extinguished, the oceans will boil and evaporate away. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
649:The way to find out about our place in the universe is by examining the universe and by examining ourselves - without preconceptions, with as unbiased a mind as we can muster. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
650:.. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the 'Momentary' masters of a 'Fraction' of a 'Dot' ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
651:Geometry existed before the Creation. It is co-eternal with the mind of God... Geometry provided God with a model for the creatin... Geometry is God Himself.
Johannes Kepler ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
652:If we long for our planet to be important, there is something we can do about it. We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
653:The Hindu religion is the only of the World's great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
654:The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
655:A general problem with much of Western theology in my view is that the god portrayed is too small. It is a god of a tiny world and not a god of a galaxy much less of a universe. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
656:Religions are often state-protected nurseries of pseudoscience, although there's no reason why religions have to play that role. In a way, it's an artefact from times long gone. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
657:Those with the courage to explore the weave and structure of the Cosmos, even where it differs profoundly from their wishes and prejudices, will penetrate its deepest mysteries. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
658:When you realize that no one really knows what they are doing and that everyone is doing the best they can according to their own level of consciousness, life gets a lot easier. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
659:...explorations that are exhilarating to consider. They remind us that humans have
evolved to wonder, that understanding is a joy, that knowledge is prerequisite to survival. ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
660:Is mankind alone in the universe? Or are there somewhere other intelligent beings looking up into their night sky from very different worlds and asking the same kind of question? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
661:It goes with a courageous intent to greet the universe as it really is, not to foist our emotional predispositions on it but to courageously accept what our explorations tell us. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
662:It never happens that a new constellation suddenly rises out of the east. There is an order, a predictability, a permanence about the stars. In a way, they are almost comforting. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
663:Looking at fires when high, by the way, especially through one of those prism kaleidoscopes which image their surroundings, is an extraordinarily moving and beautiful experience. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
664:The immense distances to the stars and the galaxies mean that we see everything in space in the past, some as they were before the Earth came to be. Telescopes are time machines. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
665:The immense distances to the stars and the galaxies mean that we see everything ins pace int he past, some as they were before the Earth came to be. Telescopes are time machines. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
666:If we long for our planet to be important, there is something we can do about it. We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers. We ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
667:The technological perils that science serves up, its implicit challenge to received wisdom, and its perceived difficulty, are all reasons for some people to mistrust and avoid it. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
668:Virtually every major technological advance in the history of the human species - back to the invention of stone tools and the domestication of fire - has been ethically ambiguous. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
669:What began in deadly competition has helped us to see that global cooperation is the essential precondition for our survival. Travel is broadening. It's time to hit the road again. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
670:Apart from a thin film of life at the very surface of the Earth, an occasional intrepid spacecraft, and some radio static, our impact on the Universe is nil. It knows nothing of us. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
671:In a complex universe, in a society undergoing unprecedented change, how can we find the truth if we are not willing to question everything and to give a fair hearing to everything? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
672:It is striking that the observational search for extraterrestrial life began in the same generation as the invention of the telescope, and with the greatest theoretician of the age. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
673:What if, despite all our pretense and disguise, it was necessary to appear in public with the person we loved most of all? Imagine this a prerequisite for social discourse on Earth. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
674:[an encounter in space] "Some celestial event. No--no words--no words to describe it. Poetry! They should have sent a poet. So beautiful. So beautiful...I had no idea. I had no idea. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
675:In that case, on behalf of Earthlife, I urge that, with full knowledge of our limitations, we vastly increase our knowledge of the Solar System and then begin to settle other worlds. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
676:Çok bilmek, çok zeki olmakla eş değer değildir. Akıl yalnızca bilgi demek değildir, aynı zamanda yargıdır da. Başka bir deyişle, bilgiler arasında bağlantı kurup bunları kullanmaktır. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
677:For thousands of years humans were oppressed—as some of us still are—by the notion that the universe is a marionette whose strings are pulled by a god or gods, unseen and inscrutable. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
678:It would seem that our intelligence is the source of our unhappiness in an almost literal way; but it would also imply that our unhappiness is the source of our strength as a species. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
679:I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudo-science and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
680:Lashley also reported no apparent change in the general behavior of a rat when significant fractions—say 10 percent—of its brain were removed. But no one asked the rat of its opinion. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
681:Prejudice means literally pre-judgment, the rejection of a contention out of hand, before examining the evidence. Prejudice is the result of powerful emotions, not of sound reasoning. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
682:The cognitive abilities of chimpanzees force us, I think, to raise searching questions about the boundaries of the community of beings to which special ethical considerations are due. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
683:the more people killed in a war, the less likely it was to occur, and the longer before you could witness it, just as violent storms occur less frequently than cloudbursts. Richardson ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
684:Then, if we really want our celestial neighbors to know how far we have progressed intelectually, we should have included pictures of Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
685:History is full of people who out of fear, or ignorance, or lust for power has destroyed knowledge of immeasurable value which truly belongs to us all. We must not let it happen again. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
686:If we like them, they're freedom fighters, she thought. If we don't like them, they're terrorists. In the unlikely case we can't make up our minds, they're temporarily only guerrillas. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
687:Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
688:The great radio telescopes of the world are constructed in remote locations for the same reason Paul Gauguin sailed to Tahiti: For them to work well they must be far from civilization. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
689:Uma marca infalível do amor à verdade”, escreveu John Locke em 1690, “é não considerar nenhuma proposição com uma convicção maior do que a autorizada pelas provas em que se fundamenta. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
690:And if our naïve self-confidence is a little undermined in the process, is that altogether such a loss? Is there not cause to welcome it as a maturing and character-building experience? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
691:I consider it an extremely dangerous doctrine, because the more likely we are to assume that the solution comes from the outside, the less likely we are to solve our problems ourselves. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
692:It is therefore impossible that reason not previously instructed should imagine anything other than that the Earth is a kind of vast house with the vault of the sky placed on top of it; ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
693:Neuroanatomy, political history, and introspection all offer evidence that human beings are quite capable of resisting the urge to surrender to every impulse of reptilian core of brain. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
694:The great radio telescopes of the world are constructed in remote locations for the same reason Paul Gauguin sailed to Tahiti: For them to work well, they must be far from civilization. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
695:The total amount of energy from outside the solar system ever received by all the radio telescopes on the planet Earth is less than the energy of a single snowflake striking the ground. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
696:But I try not to think with my gut. If I'm serious about understanding the world, thinking with anything besides my brain, as tempting as that might be, is likely to get me into trouble. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
697:Mašta će nas često odvoditi do svjetova kojih nikada nije bilo. Ali bez nje nikamo ne bismo stigli. Sumnja nam omogućuje da razlučimo maštu od činjenica, da provjerimo naša razmišljanja. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
698:On Titan the molecules that have been raining down like manna from heaven for the last 4 billion years might still be there largely unaltered deep-frozen awaiting the chemists from Earth ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
699:The ancient Ionians were the first we know of to argue systematically that laws and forces of Nature, rather than gods, are responsible for the order and even the existence of the world. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
700:Those afraid of the universe as it really is, those who pretend to nonexistent knowledge and envision a Cosmos centered on human beings will prefer the fleeting comforts of superstition. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
701:For thousands of years humans were oppressed - as some of us still are - by the notion that the universe is a marionette whose strings are pulled by a god or gods, unseen and inscrutable. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
702:In the year 540 B.C. or thereabouts, on the island of Samos, there came to power a tyrant named Polycrates. He seems to have started as a caterer and then gone on to international piracy. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
703:It is not hard to imagine serious public dangers emerging out of instances in which political, military, scientific or religious leaders are unable to distinguish fact from vivid fiction. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
704:Our species has discovered a way to communicate through the dark, to transcend immense distances. No means of communication is faster or cheaper or reaches out farther. It’s called radio. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
705:Science is a collaborative enterprise, spanning the generations. When it permits us to see the far side of some new horizon, we remember those who prepared the way - seeing for them also. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
706:I believe in Spinoza’s God, who revealed himself in the harmony of all being, not in the God who concerns himself with the fate and actions of men”—a more subtle religious view embraced by ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
707:If the Earth were as old as a person, a typical organism would be born, live and die in a sliver of a second. We are fleeting, transitional creatures, snowflakes fallen on the hearth fire. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
708:The chief danger of adopting a credible pose of irrationality is that to succeed in the pretense you have to be very good. After a while, you get used to it. It becomes pretense no longer. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
709:The prediction of nuclear winter is drawn not, of course, from any direct experience with the consequences of global nuclear war, but rather from an investigation of the governing physics. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
710:There seem to be many people who simply wish to be told an answer, any answer, and thereby avoid the burden of keeping two mutually exclusive possibilities in their heads at the same time. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
711:The secrets of evolution are death and time-the deaths of enormous numbers of lifeforms that were imperfectly adapted to the environment; and time for a long succession of small mutations. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
712:The secrets of evolution are death and time—the deaths of enormous numbers of lifeforms that were imperfectly adapted to the environment; and time for a long succession of small mutations. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
713:We are at a crossroads in human history. Never before has there been a moment so simultaneously perilous and promising. We are the first species to have taken evolution into our own hands. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
714:We are too small and our statecraft is too feeble to be seen by a spacecraft between the Earth and the Moon. From this vantage point, our obsession with nationalism is nowhere in evidence. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
715:History is full of people who out of fear or ignorance or the lust for power have destroyed treasures of immeasurable value which truly belong to all of us. We must not let it happen again. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
716:I … had ambition not only to go farther than anyone had done before,” wrote Captain James Cook, the eighteenth-century explorer of the Pacific, “but as far as it was possible for man to go. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
717:Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth. Our obligation to survive is owed not just to ourselves but also to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
718:The evidence, so far at least and laws of Nature aside, does not require a Designer. Maybe there is one hiding, maddeningly unwilling to be revealed. Sometimes it seems a very slender hope. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
719:Tides of people will continue to ebb and flow across the planet. But the lands we run to now have already been settled. Other people, often unsympathetic to our plight, are there before us. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
720:As in all such technological nightmares, the principal task is to foresee what is possible; to educate use and misuse; and to prevent its organizational, bureaucratic and governmental abuse. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
721:Both the Freudian and the Platonic metaphors emphasize the considerable independence of and tension among the constituent parts of the psyche, a point that characterizes the human condition. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
722:The tar is an extremely rich collection of complex organic molecules, including the constituent parts of proteins and nucleic acids. The stuff of life, it turns out, can be very easily made. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
723:We are the only species on the planet, so far as we know, to have invented a communal memory stored neither in our genes nor in our brains. The warehouse of this memory is called the library ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
724:A millennium before Europeans were willing to divest themselves of the Biblical idea that the world was a few thousand years old, the Mayans were thinking of millions and the Hindus billions. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
725:And after we returned to the savannahs and abandoned the trees, did we long for those great graceful leaps and ecstatic moments of weightlessness in the shafts of sunlight of the forest roof? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
726:Kepler’s second law: A planet sweeps out equal areas in equal times. It takes as long to travel from B to A as from F to E as from D to C; and the shaded areas BSA, FSE and DSC are all equal. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
727:The Earth was in darkness except for a patchwork and sprinkle of light, the plucky attempt of humans to compensate for the opacity of the Earth when their hemisphere was averted from the Sun. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
728:The understanding of the intent of the artist which I can achieve when high sometimes carries over to when I’m down. This is one of many human frontiers which cannabis has helped me traverse. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
729:Exploration is in our nature. We began as wanderers, and we are wanderers still. We have lingered long enough on the shores of the cosmic ocean. We are ready at last to set sail for the stars. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
730:I also wish that the Pledge of Allegiance were directed at the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, as it is when the President takes his oath of office, rather than to the flag and the nation ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
731:The difference between physics and metaphysics is not that the practitioners of one are smarter than the practitioners of the other. The difference is that the metaphysicist has no laboratory. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
732:We achieve some measure of adulthood when we recognize our parents as they really were, without sentimentalizing or mythologyzing, but also without blaming them unfairly for our imperfections. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
733:And were the vision of Democritus to have been adopted by Western civilization, instead of being cast aside for the pale views of Plato and Aristotle, we would be vastly further ahead today, in ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
734:Modern Roman Catholicism has no quarrel with the Big Bang, with a Universe 15 billion or so years old, with the first living things arising from prebiological molecules, or with humans evolving ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
735:The fossil record implies trial and error, the inability to anticipate the future, features inconsistent with a Great Designer (though not a Designer of a more remote and indirect temperament.) ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
736:We are the only species on the planet, so far as we know, to have invented a communal memory stored neither in our genes nor in our brains. The warehouse of that memory is called the library. A ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
737:I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture, and our concern for the future, can all be tested by how well we support our libraries. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
738:It is of interest to note that while some dolphins are reported to have learned English - up to fifty words used in correct context - no human being has been reported to have learned dolphinese. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
739:Science is a way to call the bluff of those who only pretend to knowledge. It is a bulwark against mysticism, against superstition, against religion misapplied to where it has no business being. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
740:When I say I’m an agnostic, I only mean that the evidence isn’t in. There isn’t compelling evidence that God exists—at least your kind of god—and there isn’t compelling evidence that he doesn’t. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
741:Science cuts two ways, of course; its products can be used for both good and evil. But there's no turning back from science. The early warnings about technological dangers also come from science. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
742:Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
743:Science is not perfect. It's often misused; it's only a tool, but it's the best tool we have. Self-correcting , ever changing, applicable to everything: with this tool, we vanquish the impossible. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
744:There is nothing inhuman about an intelligent machine; it is indeed an expression of those superb intellectual capabilities that only human beings, of all the creatures on our planet, now possess. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
745:A new generation gladly abandons its critical and skeptical faculties. Old slogans and hatreds are dusted off. What was only recently muttered guiltily is now offered as political axiom and agenda. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
746:Ever been in love?' The question was direct, matter-of-fact.
'Halfway, half a dozen times. But'—she glanced at the nearest telescope—"there was always so much noise, the signal was hard to find. ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
747:Might it be possible at some future time, when neurophysiology has advanced substantially, to reconstruct the memories or insight of someone long dead?...It would be the ultimate breach of privacy. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
748:Science is an ongoing process. It never ends. There is no single ultimate truth to be achieved, after which all the scientists can retire. And because this is so, the world is far more interesting, ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
749:Cosmos is closed and light cannot escape from it, then it may be perfectly correct to describe the universe as a black hole. If you wish to know what it is like inside a black hole, look around you. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
750:How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, “This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
751:If the one-year-old, the five-year-old, the twelve-year-old, and the twenty-year-old all find compatible personalities in the beloved, there is a real chance to keep all of these sub-personas happy. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
752:The major religions on the Earth contradict each other left and right. You can't all be correct. And what if all of you are wrong? It's a possibility, you know. You must care about the truth, right? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
753:A cover-up to keep knowledge of extraterrestrial life or alien abductions almost wholly secret for 45 years, with hundreds if not thousands of government employees privy to it, is a remarkable notion. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
754:A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
755:But the male lexicographers had somehow neglected to coin a word for the dislike of men. They were almost entirely men themselves, she thought, and had been unable to imagine a market for such a word. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
756:Hippocrates wrote: “Men think epilepsy divine, merely because they do not understand it. But if they called everything divine which they do not understand, why, there would be no end of divine things. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
757:Huygens was, of course, a citizen of his time. Who of us is not? He claimed science as his religion and then argued that the planets must be inhabited because otherwise God had made worlds for nothing. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
758:I promise to question everything my leaders tell me. I promise to use my critical faculties. I promise to develop my independence of thought. I promise to educate myself so I can make my own judgments. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
759:It is clear that the nations of the world now can only rise and fall together. It is not a question of one nation winning at the expense of another. We must all help one another or all perish together. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
760:One of the great commandments of science is, 'Mistrust arguments from authority'. (Scientists, being primates, and thus given to dominance hierarchies, of course do not always follow this commandment.) ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
761:Our particular causality scheme has brought us to a modest and rudimentary, although in many respects heroic, series of explorations. But it is far inferior to what might have been, and may one day be. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
762:There are in fact 100 billion galaxies, each of which contain something like a 100 billion stars. Think of how many stars, and planets, and kinds of life there may be in this vast and awesome universe. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
763:Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time, proof that humans can work magic. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
764:I promise to question everything my leaders tell me. I promise to use my critical faculties. I promise to develop my independence of thought. I promise to educate myself so I can make my own judgements. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
765:It is very difficult to evolve by altering the deep fabric of life; any change there is likely to be lethal. But fundamental change can be accomplished by the addition of new systems on top of old ones. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
766:Modern Darwinism makes it abundantly clear that many less ruthless traits, some not always admired by robber barons and Fuhrers - altruism, general intelligence, compassion - may be the key to survival. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
767:Science ... looks skeptically at all claims to knowledge, old and new. It teaches not blind obedience to those in authority but to vigorous debate, and in many respects that's the secret of its success. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
768:While our behavior is still significantly controlled by our genetic inheritance, we have, through our brains, a much richer opportunity to blaze new behavioral and cultural pathways on short timescales. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
769:Most of us are for freedom of expression when there’s a danger that our own views will be suppressed. We’re not all that upset, though, when views we despise encounter a little censorship here and there. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
770:Voyages to the outer solar system are controlled from a single place on the planet Earth, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in Pasadena, California. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
771:We humans look rather different from a tree. Without a doubt we perceive the world differently than a tree does. But down deep, at the molecular heart of life, the trees and we are essentially identical. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
772:Hay preguntas ingenuas, preguntas tediosas, preguntas malformuladas, preguntas planteadas con una inadecuada autocrítica. Pero toda pregunta es un clamor por entender el mundo. No hay preguntas estúpidas. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
773:If I finish a book a week, I will read only a few thousand books in my lifetime, about a tenth of a percent of the contents of the greatest libraries of our time. The trick is to know which books to read. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
774:Personally, I would be delighted if there were a life after death, especially if it permitted me to continue to learn about this world and others, if it gave me a chance to discover how history turns out. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
775:If there is as a continuum from self-reproducing molecules, such as DNA, to microbes, and an evolutionary sequence continuum from microbes to humans, why should we imagine that continuum to stop at humans? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
776:Plato, Socrates’ most celebrated student, assigned a high role to demons: “No human nature invested with supreme power is able to order human affairs,” he said, “and not overflow with insolence and wrong … ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
777:We are, each of us, largely responsible for what gets put into our brains, for what, as adults, we wind up caring for and knowing about. No longer at the mercy of the reptile brain, we can change ourselves. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
778:One trend that bothers me is the glorification of stupidity, that the media is reassuring people it's alright not to know anything. That to me is far more dangerous than a little pornography on the Internet. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
779:A single message from space will show that it is possible to live through technological adolescence. . . . It is possible that the future of human civilization depends on the receipt of interstellar messages. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
780:By my reckoning, I'm about 100 kilometers from Pathfinder. Technically it's called “Carl Sagan Memorial Station.” But with all due respect to Carl, I can call it whatever the hell I want. I'm the King of Mars. ~ Andy Weir, #NFDB
781:Do Buddhists believe in God, or not?” Ellie asked on their way to have dinner with the Abbot. “Their position seems to be,” Vaygay replied dryly, “that their God is so great he doesn’t even have to exist.” As ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
782:A radio telescope works more like a light meter than a camera. You point it toward some fairly broad region of the sky, and it records how much energy, in a particular radio frequency, is coming down to Earth. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
783:En cierto modo, la ciencia puede ser definida como el pensamiento paranoide aplicado a la naturaleza. En efecto, andamos a la búsqueda de conspiraciones naturales, de nexos entre hechos aparentemente dispares. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
784:The fossil record implies trial and error, an inability to anticipate the future, features inconsistent with an efficient Great Designer (although not with a Designer of a more remote and indirect temperament) ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
785:We are an intelligent species and the use of our intelligence quite properly gives us pleasure. In this respect the brain is like a muscle. When we think well, we feel good. Understanding is a kind of ecstasy. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
786:Anything you don't understand, you attribute to God. God for you is where you sweep away all the mysteries of the world, all the challenges to our intelligence. You simply turn your mind off and say God did it. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
787:Let's see if I got this right," she would say to herself. "I've taken an inert gas that's in the air, made it into a liquid, put some impurities in a ruby, attached a magnet, and detected the fires of creation. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
788:It almost never feels like prejudice. Instead, it feels fitting and just - the idea that, because of an accident of birth, ‘our’ group (whichever one it is) should have a central position in the social universe. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
789:Once we lose our fear of being tiny, we find ourselves on the threshold of a vast and awesome Universe which dwarfs -- in time, in space, and in potential -- the tidy anthropocentric proscenium of our ancestors. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
790:There are naive questions, tedious questions, ill-phrased questions, questions put after inadequate self-criticism. But every question is a cry to understand the world. There is no such thing as a dumb question. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
791:We are fortunate: we are alive; we are powerful; the welfare of our civilization and our species is in our hands. If we do not speak for Earth, who will? If we are not committed to our own survival, who will be? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
792:We can make a similar examination, but with greater uncertainty, of the extraterrestrial hypothesis that holds that a wide range of UFOs viewed on the planet Earth are space vehicles from planets of other stars. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
793:We wish to find the truth, no matter where it lies. But to find the truth we need imagination and skepticism both. We will not be afraid to speculate, but we will be careful to distinguish speculation from fact. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
794:I believe in Spinoza’s God, who revealed himself in the harmony of all being, not in the God who concerns himself with the fate and actions of men”—a more subtle religious view embraced by many theologians today. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
795:If we're capable of conjuring up terrifying monsters in childhood, why shouldn't some of us, at least on occasion, be able to fantasize something similar, something truly horrifying, a shared delusion, as adults? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
796:It may be that there are kernels of truth in a few of these doctrines, but their widespread acceptance
betokens a lack of intellectual rigor, an absence of skepticism, a need to replace experiments by desires. ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
797:Perhaps the locale of the subjunctive mood will
one day be found. Will Latins turn out to be extravagantly endowed and English-speaking peoples significantly short-changed in this minor piece of brain anatomy? ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
798:When Kepler found his long-cherished belief did not agree with the most precise observation, he accepted the uncomfortable fact. He preferred the hard truth to his dearest illusions, that is the heart of science. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
799:Who are we, if not measured by our impact on others? That’s who we are! We’re not who we say we are, we’re not who we want to be - we are the sum of the influence and impact that we have, in our lives, on others. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
800:A blade of grass is a commonplace on Earth; it would be a miracle on Mars. Our descendants on Mars will know the value of a patch of green. And if a blade of grass is priceless, what is the value of a human being? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
801:People are not stupid. They believe things for reasons. The last way for skeptics to get the attention of bright, curious, intelligent people is to belittle or condescend or to show arrogance toward their beliefs. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
802:If chimpanzees have consciousness, if they are capable of abstractions, do they not have what until now has been described as 'human rights'? How smart does a chimp have to be before killing him constitutes murder? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
803:In science we may start with experimental results, data, observations, measurements, ‘facts’. We invent, if we can, a rich array of possible explanations and systematically confront each explanation with the facts. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
804:MUCH OF HUMAN HISTORY can, I think, be described as a gradual and sometimes painful liberation from provincialism, the emerging awareness that there is more to the world than was generally believed by our ancestors. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
805:Much of human history can, I think, be described as a gradual and sometimes painful liberation from provincialism, the emerging awareness that there is more to the world than was generally believed by our ancestors. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
806:The theologian Meric Casaubon argued—in his 1668 book, Of Credulity and Incredulity—that witches must exist because, after all, everyone believes in them. Anything that a large number of people believe must be true. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
807:They (i. e., the Pythagoreans) did not advocate the free confrontation of conflicting points of view. Instead, like all orthodox religions, they practised a rigidity that prevented them from correcting their errors. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
808:through lowered educational standards, declining intellectual competence, diminished zest for substantive debate, and social sanctions against skepticism, our liberties can be slowly eroded and our rights subverted. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
809:Which aspects of our nature will prevail is uncertain, particularly when our visions and prospects are bound to one small part of the small planet Earth. But up there in the Cosmos an inescapable perspective awaits. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
810:Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of magic. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
811:Aquello me hizo preguntarme si Hawking también habría participado en la gran mentira de la ADT. ¿Y Neil deGrasse Tyson? Si Carl Sagan estaba metido en el ajo, era probable que otros científicos importantes también. ~ Ernest Cline, #NFDB
812:It was difficult to hold Broca's brain without wondering whether in some sense Broca was still in there—his wit, his skeptical mien, his abrupt gesticulations when he talked, his quiet and sentimental moments. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
813:Like charges, charges of the same sign, strongly repel one another. We can think of it as a dedicated mutual aversion to their own kind, a little as if the world were densely populated by anchorites and misanthropes. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
814:The Greek religion explained that diffuse band of light in the night sky as the milk of Hera, squirted from her breast across the heavens, a legend that is the origin of the phrase Westerners still use—the Milky Way. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
815:There are a vast number of stars within our galaxy. The number is not so large as the number of cometary nuclei around the Sun but is nevertheless hardly modest. It's about 400 billion stars, of which the Sun is one. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
816:There is a report that says that kids who watch violent TV programs tend to be more violent when they grow up. But did the TV cause the violence, or do violent children preferentially enjoy watching violent programs? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
817:There were human cultures that taught an afterlife of the blessed on mountaintops or in clouds in caverns or oases but she could not recall any in which if you were very very good when you died you went to the beach. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
818:To what purpose should I trouble myself in searching out the secrets of the stars, having death or slavery continually before my eyes? —A question put to Pythagoras by Anaximenes (c. 600 B.C.), according to Montaigne ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
819:We are the product of 4.5 billion years of fortuitous, slow biological evolution. There is no reason to think that the evolutionary process has stopped. Man is a transitional animal. He is not the climax of creation. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
820:For all I know we may be visited by a different extraterrestrial civilization every second Tuesday, but there's no support for this appealing idea. The extraordinary claims are not supported by extraordinary evidence. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
821:The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land. —T. H. Huxley, ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
822:There is today-in a time when old beliefs are withering-a kind of philosophical hunger, a need to know who we are and how we got here. It is an on-going search, often unconscious, for a cosmic perspective for humanity ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
823:Even today the most jaded city dweller can be unexpectedly moved upon encountering a clear night sky studded with thousands of twinkling stars. When it happens to me after all these years it still takes my breath away. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
824:I’m frequently asked, “Do you believe there’s extraterrestrial intelligence?” I give the standard arguments—there are a lot of places out there, the molecules of life are everywhere, I use the word billions, and so on. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
825:It is not the function of our government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error. U.S. SUPREME COURT JUSTICE ROBERT H. JACKSON, 1950 ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
826:And when I concentrate on the stars, the planets, and their motions, I have an irresistible sense of machinery, clockwork, elegant precision working on a scale that, however lofty our aspirations, dwarfs and humbles us. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
827:Christiaan Huygens became simultaneously adept in languages, drawing, law, science, engineering, mathematics and music. His interests and allegiances were broad. “The world is my country,” he said, “science my religion. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
828:Every time you look up at the sky, every one of those points of light is a reminder that fusion power is extractable from hydrogen and other light elements, and it is an everyday reality throughout the Milky Way Galaxy. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
829:Human spoken language seems to be
adventitious. The exploitation of organ systems with other functions for communication in humans is also indicative of the comparatively recent evolution of our linguistic abilities. ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
830:Once we overcome our fear of being tiny, we find ourselves on the threshold of a vast and awesome Universe that utterly dwarfs — in time, in space, and in potential — the tidy anthropocentric proscenium of our ancestors. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
831:Cuando la gravedad es lo bastante elevada no deja escapar nada, ni siquiera la luz. Un lugar así recibe el nombre de agujero negro. Es una especie de gato cósmico de Chesire, enigmáticamente indiferente a lo que le rodea. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
832:Few scientists now dispute that today's soaring levels of carbon dioxide and other gases in the atmosphere will cause global temperature averages to rise by as much as nine degrees Fahrenheit sometime after the year 2000. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
833:Had Jupiter been several dozen times more massive, the matter in its interior would have undergone thermonuclear reactions, and Jupiter would have begun to shine by its own light. The largest planet is a star that failed. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
834:If we scrutinize 100,000 pictures, it’s not surprising that occasionally we’ll come upon something like a face. With our brains programmed for this from infancy, it would be amazing if we couldn’t find one here and there. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
835:I maintain there is much more wonder in science than in pseudoscience. And in addition, to whatever measure this term has any meaning, science has the additional virtue, and it is not an inconsiderable one, of being true. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
836:Probably a dozen times since their death I've heard my mother or father, in an ordinary conversational tone of voice, call my name. They had called my name often during my life with them ... It doesn't seem strange to me. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
837:The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion or in politics, but it is not the path to knowledge; it has no in the endeavor of science. We do not know in advance who will discover fundamental insights. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
838:Why are there no nonhuman primates with an existing complex gestural language? One possible answer, it seems to me, is that humans have systematically exterminated those other primates who displayed signs of intelligence. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
839:Part of the success of the tobacco industry in purveying this brew of addictive poisons can be attributed to widespread unfamiliarity with baloney detection, critical thinking, and the scientific method. Gullibility kills. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
840:Cutting off fundamental, curiosity-driven science is like eating the seed corn. We may have a little more to eat next winter but what will we plant so we and our children will have enough to get through the winters to come? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
841:We are made of star stuff. For the most part, atoms heavier than hydrogen were created in the interiors of stars and then expelled into space to be incorporated into later stars. The Sun is probably a third generation star. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
842:Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
843:All of the rocky and metallic material we stand on, the iron in our blood, the calcium in our teeth, the carbon in our genes were produced billions of years ago in the interior of a red giant star. We are made of star stuff. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
844:Do you believe in UFOs?’ I’m always struck by how the question is phrased, the suggestion that this is a matter of belief and not of evidence. I’m almost never asked, ‘How good is the evidence that UFOs are alien spaceships? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
845:It is called Giordano Bruno after the sixteenth-century Roman Catholic scholar who held that there are an infinity of worlds and that many are inhabited. For this and other crimes he was burned at the stake in the year 1600. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
846:Longevity is perhaps the best single measure of the physical quality of life. (If you’re dead, there’s little you can do to be happy.) This is a precious offering from science to humanity -nothing less than the gift of life. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
847:The uniqueness of humans has been claimed on many grounds, but most often because of our tool-making, culture, language, reason and morality. We have them, the other animals don't, and -- so the argument goes -- that's that. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
848:We have designed our civilization based on science and technology and at the same time arranged things so that almost no one understands anything at all about science and technology. This is a clear prescription for disaster ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
849:La escritura es quizás la mayor invención humana. Une a gente que nunca se conoció. Ciudadanos de épocas distantes. Los libros rompen las cadenas del tiempo. Un libro es la prueba de que los humanos son capaces de hacer magia ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
850:The astonishing fact is that similar mathematics applies so well to planets and to clocks. It needn’t have been this way. We didn’t impose it on the Universe. That’s the way the Universe is. If this is reductionism, so be it. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
851:There is nothing which can better deserve our patronage than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness. GEORGE WASHINGTON, address to Congress, January 8, 1790 ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
852:If intelligence is our only edge, we must learn to use it better, to shape it, to understand its limitations and deficiencies -- to use it as cats use stealth, as katydids use camouflage -- to make it the tool of our survival. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
853:In fact, said Carl Sagan, “As an inadvertent side effect, the pattern-recognition machinery in our brains is so efficient in extracting a face from a clutter of other detail that we sometimes see faces where there are none. ~ Garr Reynolds, #NFDB
854:The illegality of cannabis is outrageous, an impediment to full utilization of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship so desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
855:The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land. —T. H. Huxley, 1887 The ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
856:T. H. Huxley’s formulation was The foundation of morality is to … give up pretending to believe that for which there is no evidence, and repeating unintelligible propositions about things beyond the possibilities of knowledge. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
857:We must not believe the many, who say that only free people ought to be educated, but we should rather believe the philosophers who say that only the educated are free. EPICTETUS, Roman philosopher and former slave, Discourses ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
858:Adolf Hitler! Ken, it makes me furious. Forty million people die to defeat that megalomaniac, and he's the star of the first broadcast to another civilization? He's representing us. And them. It's that madman's dream come true. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
859:Do you believe in UFOs?” I’m always struck by how the question is phrased, the suggestion that this is a matter of belief and not of evidence. I’m almost never asked, “How good is the evidence that UFOs are alien spaceships?” I ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
860:In a lot of scientists, the ratio of wonder to skepticism declines in time. That may be connected with the fact that in some fields-mathematics, physics, some others-the great discoveries are almost entirely made by youngsters. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
861:It seems madness to say, 'We're worried that they're going to become addicted to marijuana' -- there's no evidence whatever that it's an addictive drug, but even if it were, these people are dying, what are we saving them from? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
862:If we teach only the findings and products of science - no matter how useful and even inspiring they may be - without communicating its critical method, how can the average person possibly distinguish science from pseudoscience? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
863:The early Sumerian pictograph for god was an asterisk, the symbol of the stars. The early Aztec word for god was Teotl, and its glyph was a representation of the Sun. The heavens were called Teoatl, the godsea, the cosmic ocean. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
864:I'd like the [Cosmos] series to be so visually stimulating that somebody who isn't even interested in the concepts will just watch for the effects. And I'd like people who are prepared to do some thinking to be really stimulated. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
865:We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
866:This planet is run by crazy people. Remember what they have to do to get where they are. Their perspective is so narrow, so... brief. A few years. In the best of them a few decades. They care only about the time they are in power. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
867:We are prodding, challenging, seeking contradictions or small, persistent residual errors, proposing alternative explanations, encouraging heresy. We give our highest rewards to those who convincingly disprove established beliefs. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
868:Arguments from authority carry little weight – authorities have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
869:For all its material advantages, the sedentary life has left us edgy, unfulfilled, even after 400 generations in villages and cities, we haven't forgotten: The open road still softly calls like a nearly forgotten song of childhood. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
870:Practitioners of pop science were once called Paradoxers, a quaint nineteenth-century word used to describe those who invent elaborate and undemonstrated explanations for what science has understood rather well in simpler terms. We ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
871:Since much of the ocean floor remains unexplored (except perhaps for still-classified data acquired by the U.S. and Soviet navies), we may know more about the surface topography of Venus than about any other planet, Earth included. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
872:The American and Russian capabilities in space science and technology mesh; they interdigitate. Each is strong where the other is weak. This is a marriage made in heaven - but one that has been surprisingly difficult to consummate. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
873:When you look more generally at life on Earth, you find that it is all the same kind of life. There are not many different kinds; there's only one kind. It uses about fifty fundamental biological building blocks, organic molecules. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
874:But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
875:But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
876:Many religions have attempted to make statues of their gods very large, and the idea, I suppose, is to make us feel small. But if that's their purpose, they can keep their paltry icons. We need only look up if we wish to feel small. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
877:Many religions have attempted to make statues of their gods very large, and the idea, I suppose, is to make us feel small. But if that’s their purpose, they can keep their paltry icons. We need only look up if we wish to feel small. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
878:Mars has become a kind of mythic arena onto which we have projected our earthly hopes and fears. But our psychological predispositions pro or con must not mislead us. All that matters is the evidence, and the evidence is not yet in. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
879:What a marvelous cooperative arrangement - plants and animals each inhaling each other's exhalations, a kind of planet-wide mutual mouth-to-stoma resuscitation, the entire elegant cycle powered by a star 150 million kilometers away. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
880:But if intelligence is our only edge, we must learn to use it better, to sharpen it, to understand its limitations and deficiencies—to use it as cats use stealth, as walking sticks use camouflage, to make it the tool of our survival. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
881:Fanatical ethnic or religious or national chauvinisms are a little difficult to maintain when we see our planet as a fragile blue crescent fading to become an inconspicuous point of light against the bastion and citadel of the stars. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
882:Religions are tough. Either they make no contentions which are subject to disproof or they quickly redesign doctrine after disproof. ... near the core of the religious experience is something remarkably resistant to rational inquiry. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
883:The fact is that far more crime and child abuse has been committed by zealots in the name of God, Jesus and Mohammed than has ever been committed in the name of Satan. Many people don’t like that statement, but few can argue with it. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
884:Cosmos is a Greek word for the order of the universe. It is, in a way, the opposite of Chaos. It implies the deep interconnectedness of all things. It conveys awe for the intricate and subtle way in which the universe is put together. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
885:Do whales know each other's names? Can they recognise each other as individuals by sounds alone? We have cut the whales off from themselves. Creatures that communicated for tens of millions of years have now effectively been silenced. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
886:Other things being equal, it is better to be smart than to be stupid. Intelligent beings can solve problems better, live longer, and leave more offspring. Until the invention of nuclear weapons, intelligence powerfully aided survival. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
887:[Censoring] knowledge, telling people what they must think and what ideas are impermissible, which lines of evidence may not be pursued, is the aperture to thought police, foolish and incompetent decision-making, and long-term decline. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
888:Our intelligence is imperfect, surely, and newly arisen; the ease with which it can be sweet-talked, overwhelmed, or subverted by other hardwired propensities - sometimes themselves disguised as the cool light of reason - is worrisome. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
889:There was a time before television, before motion pictures, before radio, before books. The greatest part of human existence was spent in such a time. Over the dying embers of the campfire, on a
moonless night, we watched the stars. ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
890:But amid much elegance and precision, the details of life and the Universe also exhibit haphazard, jury-rigged arrangements and much poor planning. What shall we make of this: an edifice abandoned early in construction by the architect? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
891:Clutching our crystals and religiously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in steep decline, unable to distinguish between what's true and what feels good, we slide, almost without noticing, into superstition and darkness. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
892:How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and said, 'This is better than we thought! The universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant. God must be even greater than we dreamed'? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
893:Often, superstition and injustice are imposed by the same ecclesiastical and secular authorities, working hand in glove. It is no surprise that political revolutions, scepticism about religion, and the rise of science might go together, ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
894:The rabbit was not domesticated until early medieval times (it was bred by French monks in the belief that newborn bunnies were fish and therefore exempt from the prohibitions against eating meat on certain days in the Church calendar); ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
895:Religious sects, established and marginal, and some newly invented for the purpose, were dissecting the theological implications of the Message. Some thought it was from God, and some from the Devil. Astonishingly, some were even unsure. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
896:every time we exercise self-criticism, every time we test our ideas against the outside world, we are doing science. When we are self-indulgent and uncritical, when we confuse hopes and facts, we slide into pseudoscience and superstition. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
897:We have begun to contemplate our origins: starstuff pondering the stars; organized assemblages of ten billion billion billion atoms considering the evolution of atoms; tracing the long journey by which, here at least, consciousness arose. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
898:After the earth dies, some 5 billion years from now, after it's burned to a crisp, or even swallowed by the Sun, there will be other worlds and stars and galaxies coming into being - and they will know nothing of a place once called Earth. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
899:In the diagnosis of disease, Hippocrates introduced elements of the scientific method. He urged careful and meticulous observation: “Leave nothing to chance. Overlook nothing. Combine contradictory observations. Allow yourself enough time. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
900:The lifetime of a human being is measured by decades, the lifetime of the Sun is a hundred million times longer. Compared to a star, we are like mayflies, fleeting ephemeral creatures who live out their lives in the course of a single day. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
901:The vast distances that separate the stars are providential. Beings and worlds are quarantined from one another. The quarantine is lifted only for those with sufficient self-knowledge and judgment to have safely traveled from star to star. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
902:And after the Earth dies, some 5 billion years from now, after it is burned t a crisp or even swallowed by the Sun, there will be other worlds and stars and galaxies coming into being- and they will know nothing of a place once called Earth ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
903:Each Voyager is itself a message. In their exploratory intent, in the lofty ambition of their objectives, in their utter lack of intent to do harm, and in the brilliance of their design and performance, these robots speak eloquently for us. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
904:My parents were not scientists. They knew almost nothing about science. But in introducing me simultaneously to skepticism and to wonder, they taught me the two uneasily cohabiting modes of thought that are central to the scientific method. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
905:Thus, an inhibition center developed below what in humans is the temporal lobe, to turn off much of the functioning of the reptilian brain; and an activation center evolved in the pons to turn on the R-complex, but harmlessly, during sleep. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
906:...every time we exercise self-criticism, every time we test our ideas against the outside world, we are doing science. When we are self-indulgent and uncritical, when we confuse hopes and facts, we slide into pseudoscience and superstition. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
907:It is certainly true that all beliefs and all myths are worthy of a respectful hearing. It is not true that all folk beliefs are equally valid - if we’re talking not about an internal mindset, but about understanding of the external reality. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
908:Science is based on experiment, on a willingness to challenge old dogma, on an openness to see the universe as it really is. Accordingly, science sometimes requires courage - at the very least the courage to question the conventional wisdom. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
909:Anything else you're interested in is not going to happen if you can't breathe the air and drink the water. Don't sit this one out. Do something. You are by accident of fate alive at an absolutely critical moment in the history of our planet. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
910:If we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then, we are up for grabs for the next charlatan (political or religious) who comes rambling along. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
911:In addition, human beings have, in the most recent few tenths of a percent of our existence, invented not only extra-genetic but also extrasomatic knowledge: information stored outside our bodies, of which writing is the most notable example. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
912:They remind us that humans have evolved to wonder, that understanding is a joy, that knowledge is prerequisite to survival. I believe our future depends on how well we know this Cosmos in which we float like a mote of dust in the morning sky. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
913:Those mothers with hereditary large pelvises were able to bear large-brained babies who because of their superior intelligence were able to compete successfully in adulthood with the smaller-brained offspring of mothers with smaller pelvises. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
914:Si uno crece en una casa donde hay libros, donde alguien le lee, donde padres, hermanos, tías, tíos y primos leen por placer, es natural que aprenda a leer. Si no hay nadie cerca que disfrute leyendo, ¿dónde está la prueba de que vale la pena? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
915:A central lesson of science is that to understand complex issues (or even simple ones), we must try to free our minds of dogma and to guarantee the freedom to publish, to contradict, and to experiment. Arguments from authority are unacceptable. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
916:I try not to think with my gut. If I'm serious about understanding the world, thinking with anything besides my brain, as tempting as that might be, is likely to get me in trouble. Really, it's okay to reserve judgment until the evidence is in. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
917:Public libraries depend on voluntary contributions. I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
918:The gears of poverty, ignorance, hopelessness, and low self-esteem mesh to create a kind of perpetual failure machine that grinds down dreams from generation to generation. We all bear the cost of keeping it running. Illiteracy is its linchpin. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
919:When I wake up I go through an abbreviated process of mourning all over again. Plainly, there’s something within me that’s ready to believe in life after death. And it’s not the least bit interested in whether there’s any sober evidence for it. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
920:A religion old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science, might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. Sooner or later such a religion will emerge. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
921:Bishop John Wilkins commented in 1638 on these Athenians: “Those zealous idolators [counted] it a great blasphemy to make their God a stone, whereas notwithstanding they were so senseless in their adoration of idols as to make a stone their God. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
922:[...] every time we excercise self-criticism, every time we test our ideas against the outside world, we are doing science. When we are self-indulgent and uncritical, when we confuse hopes and facts, we slide into pseudoscience and superstition. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
923:Philosophers and scientists confidently offer up traits said to be uniquely human, and the monkeys and apes casually knock them down -- toppling the pretension that humans constitute some sort of biological aristocracy among the beings on Earth. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
924:Time spent with children is time well spent. Their little minds are not constrained by 'reality' or focused upon goals. Anything and everything is possible. Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
925:All the explanations proposed seem to be
only partly satisfactory. They range from massive climatic change to mammalian predation to the extinction of a plant with apparent laxative properties, in which case the dinosaurs died of constipation. ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
926:Exactly the same technology can be used for good and for evil. It is as if there were a God who said to us, “I set before you two ways: You can use your technology to destroy yourselves or to carry you to the planets and the stars. It's up to you ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
927:- Taken together, the dramatic societal shifts – often in ten generations or less – provide a compelling refutation of the claim that we are condemned, without hope of reprieve, to live out our lives in a barely disguised chimpanzee social order. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
928:The total number of such worlds are, as I said, something of the order of a trillion, or 10^12, a one followed by twelve zeros, of which Earth represents just one, all in the family of the Sun. And our star, of course, is one of a vast multitude. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
929:We have examined the universe in space and seen that we live on a mote of dust circling a humdrum star in the remotest corner of an obscure galaxy. And if we are a speck in the immensity of space, we also occupy an instant in the expanse of ages. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
930:The gears of poverty, ignorance, hopelessness and low self-esteem interact to create a kind of perpetual failure machine that grinds down dreams from generation to generation. We all bear the cost of keeping it running. Illiteracy is its linchpin. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
931:The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. From it we have learned most of what we know. Recently, we have waded a little out to sea, enough to dampen our toes or, at most, wet our ankles. The water seems inviting. The ocean calls. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
932:What counts is not what sounds plausible, not what we would like to believe, not what one or two witnesses claim, but only what is supported by hard evidence rigorously and skeptically examined. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
933:It is the responsibility of scientists never to suppress knowledge, no matter how awkward that knowledge is, no matter how it may bother those in power; we are not smart enough to decide which pieces of knowledge are permissible, and which are not. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
934:Those who make uncritical observations or fraudulent claims lead us into error and deflect us from the major human goal of understanding how the world works. It is for this reason that playing fast and loose with the truth is a very serious matter. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
935:Brought before HCUA, Miller was chastised for the suggestion that Congressional investigations might have something in common with witch trials; he replied, “The comparison is inevitable, sir.” Thomas was shortly afterwards thrown in jail for fraud. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
936:The Yale anthropologist Weston La Barre goes far as to argue that `a surprisingly good case could be made that much of culture is hallucination` and that `the whole intent and function of ritual appears to be... a group wish to hallucinate reality`. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
937:It is the responsibility of scientists never to suppress knowledge, no matter how awkward that knowledge is, no matter how it may bother those in power; we are not smart enough to decide which pieces of knowledge are permissible, and which are not. … ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
938:La búsqueda de configuraciones sin análisis crítico y la ostentación de un rígido escepticismo sin la búsqueda de configuraciones son las antípodas de una ciencia incompleta. La búsqueda efectiva del saber requiere la concurrencia de ambas funciones. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
939:My deeply held belief is that if a god of anything like the traditional sort exists, our curiosity and intelligence is provided by such a God. We would be unappreciative of that gift if we suppressed our passion to explore the universe and ourselves. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
940:So those who wished for some central cosmic purpose for us, or at least our world, or at least our solar system, or at least our galaxy, have been disappointed, progressively disappointed. The universe is not responsive to our ambitious expectations. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
941:Anything else you’re interested in is not going to happen if you
can’t breathe the air and drink the water. Don’t sit this one out.
Do something. You are by accident of fate alive at an absolutely
critical moment in the history of our planet. ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
942:Every generation worries that educational standards are decaying. One of the oldest short essays in human history, dating from Sumer some 4,000 years ago, laments that the young are disastrously more ignorant than the generation immediately preceding. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
943:The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what's true. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
944:Nietzsche mourns the loss of “man’s belief in his dignity, his uniqueness, his irreplace-ability in the scheme of existence.” For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
945:The hole in the ozone layer is a kind of skywriting. At first it seemed to spell out our continuing complacency before a witch's brew of deadly perils. But perhaps it really tells of a newfound talent to work together to protect the global environment. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
946:If we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then we are up for grabs for the next charlatan—political or religious—who comes ambling along.” —Carl Sagan ~ Brian Grazer, #NFDB
947:[...] I try not to think with my gut. If I'm serious about understanding the world, thinking with anything besides my brain, as tempting as that might be, is likely to get me into trouble. Really, it's okay to reserve judgement until the evidence is in. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
948:The wind whips through the canyons of the American Southwest, and there is no one to hear it but us - a reminder of the 40,000 generations of thinking men and women who preceded us, about whom we know almost nothing, upon whom our civilization is based. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
949:if we have several hundred or several thousand cultures, each with its own cosmology, we should not be astounded if, every now and then, purely by chance, one of them proposes an idea that is not only correct but also impossible for them to have deduced. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
950:If you look at Earth from space you see a dot, that's here. That's home. That's us. It underscores the responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
951:There is much that science doesn't understand, many mysteries still to be resolved. In a Universe tens of billions of light-years across and some ten or fifteen billion years old, this may be the case forever. We are constantly stumbling on new surprises ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
952:The sleeping style of each organism is exquisitely
adapted to the ecology of the animal. It is conceivable that animals who are too stupid to be quiet on their own initiative are, during periods of high risk, immobilized by the implacable arm of sleep. ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
953:The unprecedented powers that science now makes available must be accompanied by unprecedented levels of ethical focus and concern by the scientific community—as well as the most broadly based public education into the importance of science and democracy. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
954:We might have thought that the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust were enough to innoculate us against the toxins there revealed and unleashed. But our resistance quickly fades. A new generation gladly abandons its critical and skeptical faculties. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
955:A tiny blue dot set in a sunbeam. Here it is. That's where we live. That's home. We humans are one species and this is our world. It is our responsibility to cherish it. Of all the worlds in our solar system, the only one so far as we know, graced by life. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
956:The Bill of Rights decoupled religion from the state, in part because so many religions were steeped in an absolutist frame of mind - each convinced that it alone had a monopoly on the truth and therefore eager for the state to impose this truth on others. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
957:There are many hypotheses in science that are wrong. That's perfectly alright; it's the aperture to finding out what's right. Science is a self-correcting process. To be accepted, new ideas must survive the most rigorous standards of evidence and scrutiny. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
958:If some good evidence for life after death were announced, I'd be eager to examine it; but it would have to be real scientific data, not mere anecdote. As with the face on Mars and alien abductions, better the hard truth, I say, than the comforting fantasy. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
959:This is one of the reasons that the organized religions do not inspire me with confidence. Which leaders of the major faiths acknowledge that their beliefs might be incomplete or erroneous and establish institutes to uncover possible doctrinal deficiencies? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
960:We are...capable of using our compassion and our intelligence, our technology and our wealth, to make an abundant and meaningful life for every inhabitant of this planet. To enhance enormously our understanding of the Universe, and to carry us to the stars. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
961:A stars rich in europium; of distant galaxies analyzed through the collective light of a hundred billion constituent stars. Astronomical spectroscopy is an almost magical technique. It amazes me still. Auguste Comte picked a particularly unfortunate example. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
962:Edmund Way Teale in his 1950 book Circle of the Seasons understood the dilemma better: It is morally as bad not to care whether a thing is true or not, so long as it makes you feel good, as it is not to care how you got your money as long as you have got it. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
963:It's a lazy Saturday afternoon, there's a couple lying naked in bed reading Encyclopediea Brittannica to each other, and arguing about whether the Andromeda Galaxy is more 'numinous' than the Ressurection. Do they know how to have a good time, or don't they? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
964:Maturity entails a readiness, painful and wrenching though it may be, to look squarely into the long dark places, into the fearsome shadows.
In this act of ancestral remembrance and acceptance may be found a light by which to see our children safely home. ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
965:all the atoms that make each of us up—the iron in our blood, the calcium in our bones, the carbon in our brains—were manufactured in red giant stars thousands of light-years away in space and billions of years ago in time. We are, as I like to say, starstuff. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
966:Since, in the long run, every planetary society will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring — not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
967:The Man in the Moon is in fact a record of ancient catastrophes--most of which took place before humans, before mammals, and probably even before life arose on Earth. It is a characteristic conceit of our species to put a human face on random cosmic violence. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
968:If artificial selection can make such major changes in so short a period of time, what must natural selection, working over billions of years, be capable of? The answer is all the beauty and diversity of the biological world. Evolution is a fact, not a theory. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
969:If we offer too much silent assent about mysticism and superstition - even when it seems to be doing a little good - we abet a general climate in which scepticism is considered impolite, science tiresome, and rigorous thinking somehow stuffy and inappropriate. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
970:[In] everyday life, it is very rare that we are confronted with new facts about events of long ago. Our memories are almost never challenged. They can, instead, be frozen in place, no matter how flawed they are, or become a work in continual artistic revision. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
971:The brain must function during the renovation […] The old parts are in charge of too many fundamental functions for them to be replaced altogether. So they wheeze along, out of-date and sometimes counterproductive, but a necessary consequence of our evolution. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
972:If we are to send people, it must be for a very good reason - and with a realistic understanding that almost certainly we will lose lives. Astronauts and Cosmonauts have always understood this. Nevertheless, there has been and will be no shortage of volunteers. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
973:I know personally, both from having science explained to me and from my attempts to explain it to others, how gratifying it is when we get it, when obscure terms suddenly take on meaning, when we grasp what all the fuss is about, when deep wonders are revealed. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
974:Knowing a great deal is not the same as being smart; intelligence is not information alone but also judgement, the manner in which information is co-ordinated and used. Still, the amount of information to which we have accessed is one index of our intelligence. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
975:Atheism is more than just the knowledge that gods do not exist, and that religion is either a mistake or a fraud. Atheism is an attitude, a frame of mind that looks at the world objectively, fearlessly, always trying to understand all things as a part of nature. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
976:Because men, compared to male chimps, have such relatively small testicles (large testicles indicate a species where many males mate, one after the other, with the same female), we might guess that promiscuous societies were uncommon in the immediate human past. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
977:It is interesting that it is not the getting of any sort of knowledge that God has forbidden, but, specifically, the knowledge of the difference between good and evil-that is, abstract and moral judgments, which, if they reside anywhere, reside in the neocortex. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
978:Paid product endorsements, especially by real or purported experts, constitute a steady rainfall of deception. They betray contempt for the intelligence of their customers. They introduce an insidious corruption of popular attitudes about scientific objectivity. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
979:Na Arean sat alone in space as a cloud that floats in nothingness. He slept not, for there was no sleep; he hungered not, for as yet there was no hunger. So he remained for a great while, until a thought came to his mind. He said to himself, "I will make a thing. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
980:Our politics, economics, advertising, and religions (New Age and Old) are awash in credulity. Those who have something to sell, those who wish to influence public opinion, those in power, a skeptic might suggest, have a vested interest in discouraging skepticism, ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
981:Perhaps, in retrospect, there would be little motivation even for malevolent extraterrestrials to attack the Earth; perhaps, after a preliminary survey, they might decide it is more expedient just to be patient for a little while and wait for us to self-destruct. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
982:The Apollo pictures of the whole Earth conveyed to multitudes something well known to astronomers: On the scale of the worlds - to say nothing of stars or galaxies - humans are inconsequential, a thin film of life on an obscure and solitary lump of rock and metal ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
983:We invented phonetic writing so we could put
our sounds down on paper and, by glancing at a page, hear someone speaking in our head—an invention that became so widespread in the last few thousand years that we hardly ever stop to consider how astonishing it is ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
984:Eratosthenes's only tools were sticks, eyes, feet, and brains; plus a zest for experiment. With those tools he correctly deduced the circumference of the Earth, to high precision, with an error of only a few percent. That's pretty good figuring for 2200 years ago. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
985:Scientists make mistakes. Accordingly, it is the job of the scientist to recognize our weakness, to examine the widest range of opinions, to be ruthlessly self-critical. Science is a collective enterprise with the error-correction machinery often running smoothly. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
986:There are huge advertising budgets only when there's no difference between the products. If the products really were different, people would buy the one that's better. Advertising teaches people not to trust their judgment. Advertising teaches people to be stupid. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
987:We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
988:For the price of a modest meal you can ponder the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, the origin of species, the interpretation of dreams, the nature of things. Books are like seeds. They can lie dormant for centuries and then flower in the most unpromising soil. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
989:at least some paleontologists believe that the demise
of the dinosaurs was accelerated by nocturnal predation on reptilian eggs by the early mammals. Two chicken eggs for breakfast may be all-at least on the surface-that is left of this ancient mammalian cuisine. ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
990:If God is omnipotent and omniscient, why didn’t he start the universe out in the first place so it would come out the way he wants? Why’s he constantly repairing and complaining? No, there’s one thing the Bible makes clear: The biblical God is a sloppy manufacturer. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
991:If the laws of nature are unpredictably reassorted at the cusps (the transition from contraction to expansion of the universe), then it is only by the most extraordinary coincidence that the cosmic slot machine has this time come up with a universe consistent with us. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
992:Pero la vida no sabe a donde se dirige. No tiene un plan a largo plazo. No tiene una finalidad en mente. No tiene una finalidad en mente. No hay mente que abrigue una finalidad. (...) La vida es derrochadora, ciega, indiferente en este nivel a las nociones de justicia. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
993:Science is an attempt, largely successful, to understand the world, to get a grip on things, to get hold of ourselves, to steer a safe course. Microbiology and meteorology now explain what only a few centuries ago was considered sufficient cause to burn women to death. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
994:...there is no deeper religious feeling than the feeling for the natural world. I wouldn't separate the world of nature from the religious instinct...I would not even object to saying that the sense of awe before the grandeur of nature is itself a religious experience. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
995:Likewise, if we offer too much silent assent about mysticism and superstition - even when it seems to be doing a little good - we abet a general climate in which scepticism is considered impolite, science tiresome, and rigorous thinking somehow stuffy and inappropriate. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
996:Of all the planets, moons, asteroids, and comets in our Solar System, there is fire only on Earth—because there are large amounts of oxygen gas, O2, only on Earth. Fire was, much later, to have profound consequences for life and intelligence. One thing leads to another. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
997:The Universe forces those who live in it to understand it. Those creatures who find everyday experience a muddled jumble of events with no predictability, no regularity, are in grave peril. The Universe belongs to those who, at least to some degree, have figured it out. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
998:Would the Gardners and the workers at the Yerkes Primate Center be remembered dimly as legendary folk heroes or gods of another species? Would there be myths, like those of Prometheus, Thoth, or Cannes, about divine beings who had given the gift of language to the apes? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
999:Our Sun is a second- or third-generation star. All of the rocky and metallic material we stand on, the iron in our blood, the calcium in our teeth, the carbon in our genes were produced billions of years ago in the interior of a red giant star. We are made of star-stuff. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1000:Some evidence suggests the left-handers are more likely to have problems with such left-hemisphere functions as reading, writing, speaking and arithmetic; and to be more adept at such right -hemisphere functions as imagination, pattern recognition and general creativity. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1001:And despite the insignificance of the instant we have so far occupied in cosmic time, it is clear that what happens on and near Earth at the beginning of the second cosmic year will depend very much on the scientific wisdom and the distinctly human sensitivity of mankind. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1002:Black holes may be apertures to elsewhen. Were we to plunge down a black hole, we would re-emerge, it is conjectured, in a different part of the universe and in another epoch in time . . . Black holes may be entrances to Wonderlands. But are there Alices or white rabbits? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1003:Like it or not, we are stuck with science. We had better make the best of it. When we finally come to terms with it and fully recognize its beauty and its power, we will find, in spiritual as well as in practical matters, that we have made a bargain strongly in our favor. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1004:That's what this book is about: other worlds, what awaits us on them, what they tell us about ourselves, and - given the urgent problems our species now faces - whether it makes sense to go.
Should we solve those problems first?
Or are they a reason to go? ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
1005:Dartmouth College employs computer learning techniques in a very broad array of courses. For example, a student can gain a deep insight into the statistics of Mendelian genetics in an hour with the computer rather than spend a year crossing fruit flies
in the laboratory. ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
1006:The Platonists and their Christian successors held the peculiar notion that the Earth was tainted and somehow nasty, while the heavens were perfect and divine. The fundamental idea that the Earth is a planet, that we are citizens of the Universe, was rejected and forgotten. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1007:And despite the insignificance of the instant we have so far occupied in cosmic time, it is clear that what happens on and near Earth at the beginning of the
second cosmic year will depend very much on the scientific wisdom and the distinctly human sensitivity of mankind. ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
1008:It is the responsibility of scientists never to suppress knowledge, no matter how awkward that knowledge is, no matter how it may bother those in power. We are not smart enough to decide which pieces of knowledge are permissible and which are not. —CARL SAGAN (1934–1996) ~ Eben Alexander, #NFDB
1009:Si la calidad de la educación que uno tiene a su alcance es inadecuada, si a uno le enseñan a memorizar al pie de la letra y no a pensar, si el contenido de lo que se nos da para leer viene de una cultura casi ajena, la alfabetización puede ser un camino lleno de obstáculos. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1010:We live in a vast and awesome universe in which, daily, suns are made and worlds destroyed, where humanity clings to an obscure clod of rock. The significance of our lives and our fragile realm derives from our own wisdom and courage. We are the custodians of life’s meaning. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1011:Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever the universe has to teach us, or somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1012:Kepler and Newton represent a critical transition in human history, the discovery that fairly simple mathematical laws pervade all of Nature; that the same rules apply on Earth as in the skies; and that there is a resonance between the way we think and the way the world works. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1013:The first two letters of the name Pluto are the initials of Percival Lowell. Its symbol is , a planetary monogram. But Lowell’s lifelong love was the planet Mars. He was electrified by the announcement in 1877 by an Italian astronomer, Giovanni Schiaparelli, of canali on Mars. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1014:the most important step we can take toward Mars is to make significant progress on Earth. Even modest improvements in the social, economic, and political problems that our global civilization now faces could release enormous resources, both material and human, for other goals. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1015:Our probable ancestors, Homo erectus and Homo habilis -now extinct- are classified as of the same genus (Homo) but of different species, although no one (at least lately) has attempted the appropriate experiments to see if crosses of them with us would produce fertile offspring. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1016:Except for hydrogen, all the atoms that make each of us up—the iron in our blood, the calcium in our bones, the carbon in our brains—were manufactured in red giant stars thousands of light-years away in space and billions of years ago in time. We are, as I like to say, starstuff. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1017:If you grow up in a household where there are books, where you are read to, where parents, siblings, aunts, uncles, and cousins read for their own pleasure, naturally you learn to read. If no one close to you takes joy in reading, where is the evidence that it's worth the effort? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1018:There are many instances in science, where those closest to the intricacies of the subject have a more highly developed sense of its intractability than those at some remove. On the other hand, those at too great a distance may, I am well aware, mistake ignorance for perspective. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1019:There will be no humans elsewhere. Only here. Only on this small planet. We are a rare as well as an endangered species. Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1020:You're an interesting species, an interesting mix. You're capable of such beautiful dreams and such horrible nightmares. You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you're not. See, in all our searching, the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable is each other. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1021:Indeed the reasoned criticism of a prevailing belief is a service to the proponents of that belief; if they are incapable of defending it, they are well advised to abandon it. This self-questioning and error-correcting aspect of the scientific method is its most striking property. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1022:The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us -- there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1023:The key point of the Tunguska Event is that there was a tremendous explosion, a great shock wave, an enormous forest fire, and yet there is no impact crater at the site. There seems to be only one explanation consistent with all the facts: In 1908 a piece of a comet hit the Earth. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1024:The neurochemistry of the brain is astonishingly busy, the circuitry of a machine more wonderful than any devised by humans. But there is no evidence that its functioning is due to anything more than the 10(14) neural connections that build an elegant architecture of consciousness. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1025:You're an interesting species. An interesting mix. You're capable of such beautiful dreams, and such horrible nightmares. You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you're not. See, in all our searching, the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable, is each other. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1026:I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy, playing on the seashore, and diverting myself, in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1027:After I give lectures-on almost any subject-I am often asked, "Do you believe in UFOs?" I'm always struck by how the question is phrased, the suggestion that this is a matter of belief and not evidence. I'm almost never asked, "How good is the evidence that UFOs are alien spaceships?" ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1028:Frederick Douglass taught that literacy is the path from slavery to freedom. There are many kinds of slavery and many kinds of freedom, but reading is still the path. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1029:By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out. -this quote is actually found in Carl Sagan's book The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, where he attributes it to engineer James Oberg, who says he stole it from someone else. ~ Richard Dawkins, #NFDB
1030:It is precisely our plasticity, our long childhood, that prevents a slavish adherence to genetically preprogrammed behavior in human beings more than in any other species… Some substantial adjustment of the relative role of each component of the triune brain is well within our powers. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1031:Russell commented that the development of such gifted individuals (referring to polymaths) required a childhood period in which there was little or no pressure for conformity, a time in which the child could develop and pursue his or her own interests no matter how unusual or bizarre. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1032:Briefly illuminated on the wall beside her desk was a quotation from the Parables of Franz Kafka: Now the Sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song, namely their silence . . . Someone might possibly have escaped from their singing; but from their silence, certainly never. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1033:Russell commented that the development of such gifted individuals (referring to polymaths) required a childhood period in which there was little or no pressure for conformity, a time in which the child could develop and pursue his or her own interests no matter how unusual or bizarre. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1034:The entire evolutionary record on our planet, particularly the record contained in fossil endocasts, illustrates a progressive tendency toward intelligence. There is nothing mysterious about this:
smart organisms by and large survive better and leave more offspring than stupid ones. ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
1035:We sometimes hear of things that can travel faster than light. Something called 'the speed of thought' is occasionally proffered. This is an exceptionally silly notion especially since the speed of impulses through the neutrons in our brain is about the same as the speed of a donkey cart. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1036:Why does Alexander the Great never tell us about the exact location of his tomb, Fermat about his Last Theorem, John Wilkes Booth about the Lincoln assassination conspiracy, Hermann Göring about the Reichstag fire? Why don’t Sophocles, Democritus, and Aristarchus dictate their lost books? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1037:After I give lectures—on almost any subject—I often am asked, “Do you believe in UFOs?” I’m always struck by how the question is phrased, the suggestion that this is a matter of belief and not of evidence. I’m almost never asked, “How good is the evidence that UFOs are alien spaceships?” I ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1038:If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits?
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring. ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
1039:[When a religious couple wrote to Sagan about fulfilled prophecies, he wrote back in May 1996:]
If ‘fulfilled prophecy’ is your criterion, why do you not believe in materialistic science, which has an unparalleled record of fulfilled prophecy? Consider, for example, eclipses. ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
1040:MacLean has shown that the R-complex plays an important role in aggressive behavior, territoriality, ritual and the establishment of social hierarchies. Despite occasional welcome exceptions, this seems to me to characterize a great deal of modern human bureaucratic and political behavior. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1041:Science is far from a perfect instrument of knowledge. It's just the best we have. In this respect, as in many others, it's like democracy. Science by itself cannot advocate courses of human action, but it can certainly illuminate the possible consequences of alternative courses of action. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1042:the English philosopher John Stuart Mill argued that silencing an opinion is “a peculiar evil.” If the opinion is right, we are robbed of the “opportunity of exchanging error for truth”; and if it’s wrong, we are deprived of a deeper understanding of the truth in “its collision with error. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1043:In addition to Ameslan, chimpanzees and other nonhuman primates are being taught a variety of other gestural languages. And it is just this transition from tongue to hand that has permitted humans to regain the ability-lost, according to Josephus, since Eden-to communicate with the animals. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1044:Part of the resistance to Darwin and Wallace derives from our difficulty in imagining the passage of the millennia, much less the aeons. What does seventy million years mean to beings who live only one-millionth as long? We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1045:By exploring other worlds we safeguard this one. By itself, I think this fact more than justifies the money our species has spent in sending ships to other worlds. It is our fate to live during one of the most perilous and, at the same time, one of the most hopeful chapters in human history. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1046:Certainly on this planet it is not apparent that there are beings more intelligent than humans, although a case can be made for dolphins and whales, and in fact if humans succeed in destroying themselves with nuclear weapons, a case can be made that ALL other animals are smarter than humans. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1047:Like other mammals, they are capable of strong emotions. They have certainly committed no crimes. I do not claim to have the answer, but I think it is
certainly worthwhile to raise the question: Why, exactly, all over the civilized world, in virtually every major city, are apes in prison? ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
1048:So next time you hear a raving demagogue counseling hatred for other, slightly different groups of humans, for a moment at least see if you can understand his problem: He is heeding an ancient call that—however dangerous, obsolete, and maladaptive it may be today—once benefitted our species. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1049:There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1050:Newton was born on Christmas Day, 1642, so tiny that, as his mother told him years later, he would have fit into a quart mug. Sickly, feeling abandoned by his parents, quarrelsome, unsociable, a virgin to the day he died, Isaac Newton was perhaps the greatest scientific genius who ever lived. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1051:Recent research shows that many children without enough to eat wind up with diminished capacity to understand and learn (“cognitive impairment” ). Children don't have to be starving for this to happen. Even mild undernourishment — the kind most common among poor people in America — can do it. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1052:That we can now think of no mechanism for astrology is relevant but unconvincing. No mechanism was known, for example, for continental drift when it was proposed by Wegener. Nevertheless, we see that Wegener was right, and those who objected on the grounds of unavailable mechanism were wrong. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1053:What does it mean for a civilisation to be a million years old? We have had radio telescopes and spaceships for a few decades; our technical civilisation is a few hundred years old ... an advanced civilisation millions of years old is as much beyond us as we are beyond a bushbaby or a macaque ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1054:But if the Bible is not everywhere literally true, which parts are divinely inspired and which are merely fallible and human? As soon as we admit that there are scriptural mistakes (or concessions to the ignorance of the times), then how can the Bible be an inerrant guide to ethics and morals? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1055:I know of no significant advance in science that did not require major inputs from both cerebral hemispheres. This is not true for art, where apparently there are no experiments by which capable, dedicated and unbiased observers can determine to their mutual satisfaction which works are great. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1056:...individuals so employed need almost never accept responsibility for their actions. They are protected and anonymous. Military secrecy makes the military the most difficult sector of any society for the citizens to monitor. If we do not know what they do, it is very hard for us to stop them. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1057:It's perilous and foolhardy for the average citizen to remain ignorant about global warming, say, or ozone depletion, air pollution, toxic and radioactive wastes, acid rain, topsoil erosion, tropical deforestation, exponential population growth. Jobs and wages depend on science and technology. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1058:The chance of receiving a signal from a civilization exactly as advanced as we are should be minuscule. If they were even a little behind us, they would lack the technological capability to communicate with us at all. So the most likely signal would come from a civilization much more advanced. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1059:We will die and we fear death. This fear is worldwide and transcultural. It probably has significant survival value. Those who wish to postpone or avoid death can improve the world, reduce its perils, make children who will live after us, and create great works by which they will be remembered. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1060:The symbolism seemed so apt. The same technology that can propel apocalyptic weapons from continent to continent would enable the first human voyage to another planet. It was a choice of fitting mythic power: to embrace the planet named after, rather than the madness ascribed to, the god of war. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1061:We are, in a way, temporary ambulatory repositories for our nucleic acids. This does not deny our humanity; it does not prevent us from pursuing the good, the true and the beautiful. But it would be a great mistake to ignore where we have come from in our attempt to determine where we are going. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1062:Widespread intellectual and moral docility may be convenient for leaders in the short term, but it is suicidal for nations in the long term. One of the criteria for national leadership should therefore be a talent for understanding, encouraging, and making constructive use of vigorous criticism. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1063:Societies will, of course, wish to exercise prudence in deciding which technologies that is, which applications of science are to be pursued and which not. But without funding basic research, without supporting the acquisition of knowledge for its own sake, our options become dangerously limited. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1064:All over the world there are enormous numbers of smart, even gifted, people who harbor a passion for science. But that passion is unrequited. Surveys suggest that some 95% of Americans are "scientifically illiterate." That's...the same fraction...of slaves who were illiterate before the Civil War. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1065:Es peligroso y temerario que el ciudadano medio mantenga su ignorancia sobre el calentamiento global, la reducción del ozono, la contaminación del aire, los residuos tóxicos y radiactivos, la lluvia ácida, la erosión del suelo, la deforestación tropical, el crecimiento exponencial de la población. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1066:Perhaps if one less dragonfly had drowned in the Carboniferous swamps, the intelligent organisms on our planet today would have feathers and teach their young in rookeries. The pattern of evolutionary causality is a web of astonishing complexity; the incompleteness of our understanding humbles us. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1067:At the heart of science is an essential balance between two seemingly contradictory attitudes-an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive they may be, and the most ruthless skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new. This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1068:Chlorine is a deadly poison gas employed on European battlefields in World War I. Sodium is a corrosive metal which burns upon contact with water. Together they make a placid and unpoisonous material, table salt. Why each of these substances has the properties it does is a subject called chemistry. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1069:In Italy, the Inquisition was condemning people to death until the end of the eighteenth century, and inquisitional torture was not abolished in the Catholic Church until 1816. The last bastion of support for the reality of witchcraft and the necessity of punishment has been the Christian churches. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1070:We all have a thirst for wonder. It's a deeply human quality. Science and religion are both bound up with it. What I'm saying is, you don't have to make stories up, you don't have to exaggerate. There's wonder and awe enough in the real world. Nature's a lot better at inventing wonders than we are. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1071:At the heart of science is an essential balance between two seemingly contradictory attitudes--an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive they may be, and the most ruthless skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new. This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1072:The impediment to scientific thinking is not, I think, the difficulty of the subject. Complex intellectual feats have been mainstays even of oppressed cultures. Shamans, magicians and theologians are highly skilled in their intricate and arcane arts. No, the impediment is political and hierarchical. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1073:Carl Sagan always used to say that when he was trying to explain something to someone, he would go back to that time when he didn't understand it, and then he would retrace his thought steps so that he could make it absolutely clear, and that's one of the infinite number of things I learned from him. ~ Ann Druyan, #NFDB
1074:So far as I know, childbirth is generally painful in only one of the millions of species on Earth: human beings. This must be a consequence of the recent and continuing increase in cranial volume... Childbirth is painful because the evolution of the human skull has been spectacularly fast and recent. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1075:His argument was not with God but with those who believed that our understanding of the sacred had been completed. Science’s permanently revolutionary conviction that the search for truth never ends seemed to him the only approach with sufficient humility to be worthy of the universe that it revealed. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1076:Every age has its peculiar folly; some scheme, project, or phantasy into which it plunges, spurred on either by the love of gain, the necessity of excitement, or the mere force of imitation. Failing in these, it has some madness, to which it is goaded by political or religious causes, or both combined. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1077:My long-time view about Christianity is that it represents an amalgam of two seemingly immiscible parts-the religion of Jesus and the religion of Paul. Thomas Jefferson attempted to excise the Pauline parts of the New Testament. There wasn't much left when he was done, but it was an inspiring document. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1078:Nevertheless, (Jefferson) believed that the habit of skepticism is an essential prerequisite for responsible citizenship. He argued that the cost of education is trivial compared to the cost of ignorance, of leaving government to the wolves. He taught that the country is safe only when the people rule. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1079:We are the local embodiment of a Cosmos grown to self-awareness. We have begun to contemplate our origins: starstuff pondering the stars; organized assemblages of ten billion billion billion atoms considering the evolution of atoms; tracing the long journey by which, here at least, consciousness arose. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1080:National boundaries are not evident when we view the Earth from space. Fanatical ethnic or religious or national chauvinisms are a little difficult to maintain when we see our planet as a fragile blue crescent fading to become an inconspicuous point of light against the bastion and citadel of the stars. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1081:On the other hand, mere critical thinking, without creative and intuitive insights, without the search for new patterns, is sterile and doomed. To solve complex problems in changing circumstances requires the activity of both cerebral hemispheres: the path to the future lies through the corpus callosum. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1082:Until fairly recently it was thought that humans had
fortv-eight chromosomes in an ordinary somatic cell. We now know that the correct number is forty-six. Chimps apparently really do have forty-eight chromosomes, and in this case a viable cross of a chimpanzee and a human would in any event be rare. ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
1083:But the brain does much more than just recollect it inter-compares, it synthesizes, it analyzes, it generates abstractions. The simplest thought like the concept of the number one has an elaborate logical underpinning. The brain has its own language for testing the structure and consistency of the world. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1084:If we offer too much silent assent about mysticism and superstition - even when it seems to be doing a little good - we abet a general climate in which scepticism is considered impolite, science tiresome, and rigorous thinking somehow stuffy and inappropriate. Figuring out a prudent balance takes wisdom. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1085:That kind of skeptical, questioning, "don't accept what authority tells you" attitude of science - is also nearly identical to the attitude of mind necessary for a functioning democracy. Science and democracy have very consonant values and approaches, and I don't think you can have one without the other. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1086:...that kind of skeptical questioning, don't accept what authority tells you -attitude of science- is also nearly identical to the attitude of mind necessary for a functioning democracy. Science and democracy have very consonant values and approaches, and I don't think you can have one without the other. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1087:I would expect a significant development and elaboration of language in only a few generations if all the chimps unable to communicate were to die or fail to reproduce. Basic English corresponds to about 1,000 words. Chimpanzees are already accomplished in vocabularies exceeding 10 percent of that number. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1088:Religions contradict one another-on small matters, such as whether we should put on a hat or take one off on entering a house of worship, or whether we should eat beef and eschew pork or the other way around, all the way to the most central issues, such as whether there are no gods, one God, or many gods. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1089:Many of the problems facing us may be soluble, but only if we are willing to embrace brilliant, daring and complex solutions. Such solutions require brilliant, daring and complex people. I believe that there are many more of them around—in every nation, ethnic group and degree of affluence—than we realize. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1090:There are already cardiac pacemakers that can sense the beat of the human heart; only when there is the slightest hint of fibrillation does the pacemaker stimulate the heart. This is a mild but very useful sort of machine intelligence. I cannot imagine the wearer of this device resenting its intelligence. I ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1091:When it gets complicated, that’s usually because the world is complicated—or because we’re complicated. When we shy away from it because it seems too difficult (or because we’ve been taught so poorly), we surrender the ability to take charge of our future. We are disenfranchised. Our self-confidence erodes. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1092:Centuries hence, when current social and political problems may seem as remote as the problems of the Thirty Years' War are to us, our age may be remembered chiefly for one fact: It was the time when the inhabitants of the earth first made contact with the vast cosmos in which their small planet is embedded. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1093:[E]ven laws of Nature are not absolutely certain. There may be new circumstances never before examined – inside black holes, say, or within the electron, or close to the speed of light – where even our vaunted laws of Nature break down and, however valid they may be in ordinary circumstances, need correction. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1094:Much of the difficulty in attempting to restructure American and other societies arises form this resistance by groups with vested interests in the status quo. Significant change might require those who are now high in the hierarchy to move downward many steps. This seems to them undesirable and its resisted. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1095:Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us - then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1096:Carl Sagan Quotes
We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.
Carl Sagan ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
1097:Nuestro planeta y nuestro sistema solar se hallan rodeados por un nuevo mundo oceánico, las profundidades del espacio. Y no es más infranqueable que el de otras épocas. Quizá todavía es pronto. Puede que no haya llegado el momento. Pero esos otros mundos, que prometen indecibles oportunidades, nos hacen señas. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1098:...You think if I haven't had your religious experience I can't appreciate the magnificence of your god. But it's just the opposite. I listen to you, and I think, his god is too small! One paltry planet, a few thousand years -- hardly worth the attention of a minor deity, much less the Creator of the universe. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1099:Too much openness and you accept every notion, idea, and hypothesis-which is tantamount to knowing nothing. Too much skepticism-especially rejection of new ideas before they are adequately tested-and you're not only unpleasantly grumpy, but also closed to the advance of science. A judicious mix is what we need. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1100:A healthy young man can produce in a week or two enough spermatozoa to double the human population of the Earth. So is masturbation mass murder? How about nocturnal emissions or just plain sex? When the unfertilized egg is expelled each month, has someone died? Should we mourn all those spontaneous miscarriages? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1101:Carl Sagan was proud to be agnostic when asked whether there was life elsewhere in the universe. When he refused to commit himself, his interlocutor pressed him for a ‘gut feeling’ and he immortally replied: ‘But I try not to think with my gut. Really, it’s okay to reserve judgment until the evidence is in. ~ Richard Dawkins, #NFDB
1102:Pliny suggested that the ostrich, then newly discovered, was the result of a cross between a giraffe and a gnat. (It would, I suppose, have to be a female giraffe and a male gnat.) In practice there must be many such crosses which have not been
attempted because of a certain understandable lack of motivation. ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
1103:The trapdoor beneath our feet swings open. We find ourselves in bottomless free fall. We are lost in a great darkness, and there’s no one to send out a search party. Given so harsh a reality, of course we’re tempted to shut our eyes and pretend that we’re safe and snug at home, that the fall is only a bad dream. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1104:This sort of information gathering is precisely what we call play. And the important function of play is thus revealed: it permits us to gain, without any particular future application in mind, a holistic understanding of the world, which is both a complement of and a preparation for later analytical activities. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1105:Another of Mack’s patients says that the aliens have been taking eggs from her since she was sexually mature, and that her reproductive system baffles her gynecologist. Is it baffling enough to write the case up and submit a research paper to The New England Journal of Medicine? Apparently it’s not that baffling. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1106:Çağımızın üçüncü dünya sorunlarından en önemlisi, okumuş sınıfların zengin çocukları olması, bunların da statükonun sürüp gitmesinden çıkarları bulunması ve kol işçiliğine yatkın olmadıktan başka, alışılmış bilgi sınırlarını aşmak için meydan okumaya kalkışmamalarıdır. Bilimin kök salması çok yavaş gerçekleşiyor. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1107:The more we want it to be true, the more careful we have to be. No witness's say-so is good enough. People make mistakes. People play practical jokes. People stretch the truth for money or attention or fame. People occasionally misunderstand what they're seeing. People sometimes even see things that aren't there. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1108:This process is called artificial selection. In the case of the Heike crab it was effected more or less unconsciously by the fishermen, and certainly without any serious contemplation by the crabs. But humans have deliberately selected which plants and animals shall live and which shall die for thousands of years. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1109:In manned Earth orbital flights, still other problems arise. Consider a religious Muslim or Jew circling the Earth once every ninety minutes. Is he obligated to celebrate the Sabbath every seventh orbit? Spaceflight provides access to environments very different from those in which we and our customs have grown up. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1110:I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue. But as much as I want to believe that, and despite the ancient and worldwide cultural traditions that assert an afterlife, I know of nothing to suggest that it is more than wishful thinking. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1111:Whose interest does ignorance serve? If we humans bear, say, hereditary propensities toward the hatred of strangers, isn’t self-knowledge the only antidote? If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1112:600 million years ago, the monopolizing grip of the algae was broken and an enormous proliferation of new lifeforms emerged, an event called the Cambrian explosion. Life had arisen almost immediately after the origin of the Earth, which suggests that life may be an inevitable chemical process on an Earth-like planet. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1113:I’m told that Sherlock Holmes never said, “Elementary, my dear Watson” (at least in the Arthur Conan Doyle books) Jimmy Cagney never said, “You dirty rat”; and Humphrey Bogart never said, “Play it again, Sam.” But they might as well have, because these apocrypha have firmly insinuated themselves into popular culture. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1114:With their radio telescopes they can capture wisps of radiation so preposterously faint that the total amount of energy collected from outside the solar system by all of them together since collecting began (in 1951) is ‘less than the energy of a single snowflake striking the ground’2, in the words of Carl Sagan. In ~ Bill Bryson, #NFDB
1115:600 million years ago, the monopolizing grip of the algae was broken and an enormous proliferation of new lifeforms emerged, an event called the Cambrian explosion. Life had arisen almost immediately after the origin of the Earth, which suggests that life may be an inevitable chemical process on an Earth-like planet. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1116:Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged (...) Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1117:For all our conceits about being the center of the universe, we live in a routine planet of a humdrum star stuck away in an obscure corner ... on an unexceptional galaxy which is one of about 100 billion galaxies. ... That is the fundamental fact of the universe we inhabit, and it is very good for us to understand that. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1118:There’s plenty of housework to be done here on Earth, and our commitment to it must be steadfast. But we’re the kind of species that needs a frontier—for fundamental biological reasons. Every time humanity stretches itself and turns a new corner, it receives a jolt of productive vitality that can carry it for centuries. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1119:A more cynical formulation by the Roman historian Polybius: Since the masses of the people are inconstant, full of unruly desires, passionate, and reckless of consequences, they must be filled with fears to keep them in order. The ancients did well, therefore, to invent gods, and the belief in punishment after death. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1120:And all I’m saying is that it is within our capability to survive. I don’t guarantee it. Prophecy is a lost art. And I don’t know what the probabilities are that we will go one way or another. And no one says it’s easy. But it is clear, as Einstein said, that if we do not make a change in our way of thinking, all is lost. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1121:I’m struck again by the irony that spaceflight-conceived in the cauldron of nationalist rivalries and hatreds-brings with it a stunning transnational vision. You spend even a little time contemplating the Earth from orbit and the most deeply engrained nationalisms begin to erode. They seem the squabbles of mites on a plum. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1122:Science arouses a soaring sense of wonder. But so does pseudoscience. Sparse and poor popularizations of science abandon ecological niches that pseudoscience promptly fills. If it were widely understood that claims to knowledge require adequate evidence before they can be accepted, there would be no room for pseudoscience. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1123:We invest far off places with a certain romance... Long summers, mild winters, rich harvests, plentiful game; none of them lasts for ever. Your own life, or your bands, or even your species - might be owed to a restless few, drawn by a craving they can hardly articulate or understand, to undiscovered lands, and new worlds. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1124:What worries me the most,” she continued, “is the opposite, the possibility that they’re not trying. They could communicate with us, all right, but they’re not doing it because they don’t see any point to it. It’s like . . .”—she glanced down at the edge of the tablecloth they had spread over the grass—“like the ants. They ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1125:[T]he going-in attitude of many people is highly predetermined. Some are convinced that eyewitness testimony is reliable, that people do not make things up, that hallucinations or hoaxes on such a scale are impossible, and that there must be a long-standing, high level [...] conspiracy to keep the truth from the rest of us. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1126:Even Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel, and Albert Einstein made serious mistakes. But the scientific enterprise arranges things so that teamwork prevails: What one of us, even the most brilliant among us, misses, another of us, even someone much less celebrated and capable, may detect and rectify. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1127:Pale Blue Dot — Carl Sagan
There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known. ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
1128:Exponential increases in population will dominate any arithmetic increases, even those brought about by heroic technological initiatives, in the availability of food and resources, as Malthus long ago realized. While some industrial nations have approached zero population growth, this is not the case for the world as a whole. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1129:The beach reminds us of space. Fine sand grains, all more or less uniform in size, have been produced from the larger rocks through ages of jostling and rubbing, abrasion and erosion, again driven through waves and weather by distinct moon and Sun. The beach also reminds us of time. The world is much older than human species. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1130:Why is the half of humanity with a special sensitivity to the preciousness of life, the half untainted by testosterone poisoning, almost wholly unrepresented in defense establishments and peace negotiations worldwide? [blurb on Daniella Gioseffi's Women on War ; quoted in Carol Lynn Pearson's The Ghost of Eternal Polygamy ] ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1131:En lugar de juzgar a la gente por sus méritos y defectos individuales, nos concentramos en un par de detalles de información sobre ellos y a continuación los colocamos en una serie de casillas previamente establecidas.
Con eso nos ahorramos el esfuerzo de pensar, al precio en muchos casos de cometer una profunda injusticia. ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
1132:Think of the rivers of blood, spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters, of a fraction of a dot...our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe - are challenged by that point of pale light. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1133:You might imagine an uncharitable extraterrestrial observer looking down on our species... - with us excitedly chattering, "The Universe is created for us! We're at the center! Everything pays homage to us!" - and concluding that our pretensions are amusing, our aspirations pathetic, that this must be the planet of the idiots. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1134:Imagine we could accelerate continuously at 1 g-what we're comfortable with on good old terra firma-to the midpoint of our voyage, and decelerate continuously at 1 g until we arrive at our destination. It would take a day to get to Mars, a week and a half to Pluto, a year to the Oort Cloud, and a few years to the nearest stars. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1135:In many cultures it is customary to answer that God created the universe out of nothing. But this is mere temporizing. If we wish courageously to pursue the question, we must, of course ask next where God comes from? And if we decide this to be unanswerable, why not save a step and conclude that the universe has always existed? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1136:I think I’m able to explain things because understanding wasn't entirely easy for me. Some things that the most brilliant students were able to see instantly I had to work to understand. I can remember what I had to do to figure it out. The very brilliant ones figure it out so fast they never see the mechanics of understanding. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1137:Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light-years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1138:Sometimes she would be engaged in a laboratory exercise or a seminar when the instructor would say, "Gentlemen, let's proceed," and sensing Ellie's frown would add, "Sorry, Miss Arroway, but I think of you as one of the boys." The highest compliment they were capable of paying was that in their minds she was not overtly female. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1139:There is some evidence that dreaming is necessary. When people or other mammals are deprived of REM sleep (by awakening them as soon as the characteristic REM and EEG dream patterns emerge), the number of initiations of the dream state per night goes up, and, in severe cases, daytime hallucinations-that is, waking dreams-occur. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1140:The sword of science is double-edged. Its awesome power forces on all of us, including politicians, a new responsibility – more attention to the long-term consequences of technology, a global and transgenerational perspective, an incentive to avoid easy appeals to nationalism and chauvinism. Mistakes are becoming too expensive. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1141:All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value. ~ Carl Sagan & P.K. Ahnelt, (1998). "The photoreceptor mosaic." Eye 12(3B):531–540; as cited in: Stefan Winkler (2013). Digital Video Quality: Vision Models and Metrics. p. 138., #NFDB
1142:The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30-second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1143:There is no other species on Earth that does science. It is, so far, entirely a human invention, evolved by natural selection in the cerebral cortex for one simple reason: it works. It is not perfect. It can be misused. It is only a tool. But it is by far the best tool we have, self-correcting, ongoing, applicable to everything. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1144:You are a collection of almost identical molecules with a different collective label. But is that all? Is there nothing in here but molecules? Some people find this idea somehow demeaning to human dignity. For myself, I find it elevating that our universe permits the evolution of molecular machines as intricate and subtle as we. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1145:The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1146:The fact that we cannot now produce a detailed understanding of, say, altered states of consciousness in terms of brain chemistry no more implies the existence of a ‘spirit world’ than a sunflower following the sun in its course across the sky was evidence of a literal miracle before we knew about phototropism and plant hormones. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1147:There is a reward structure in science that is very interesting: Our highest honors go to those who disprove the findings of the most revered among us. So Einstein is revered not just because he made so many fundamental contributions to science, but because he found an imperfection in the fundamental contribution of Isaac Newton. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1148:Your religion assumes that people are children and need a boogeyman so they'll behave. You want people to believe in God so they'll obey the law. That's the only means that occurs to you: a strict secular police force, and the threat of punishment by an all-seeing God for whatever the police overlook. You sell human beings short. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1149:Or perhaps they are here, but in hiding because of some Lex Galactica , some ethic of noninterference with emerging civilizations. We can imagine them, curious and dispassionate, observing us, as we would watch a bacterial culture in a dish of agar, to determine whether this year again, we manage to avoid self-destruction. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1150:Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light-years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual. So ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1151:There were many women in the Soviet scientific community, proportionately more so than in the United States. But they tended to occupy menial middle-level positions, and male Soviet scientists, like their American counterparts, were puzzled about a pretty woman with evident scientific competence who forcefully expressed her views. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1152:The true scientific understanding of the nature of existence is so utterly fascinating; how could you not want people to share it? Carl Sagan, I think, said 'when you're in love, you want to tell the world.' And who, on understanding a scientific view of reality, would not, as it were, fall in love and want to tell the world. ~ Richard Dawkins, #NFDB
1153:Think of how many religions attempt to validate themselves with prophecy. Think of how many people rely on these prophecies, however vague, however unfulfilled, to support or prop up their beliefs. Yet has there ever been a religion with the prophetic accuracy and reliability of science? ... No other human institution comes close. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1154:The library connects us with the insight and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1155:The world is so exquisite with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there's little good evidence. Far better it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1156:The near side of a galaxy is tens of thousands of light-years closer to us than the far side; thus we see the front as it was tens of thousands of years before the back. But typical events in galactic dynamics occupy tens of millions of years, so the error in thinking of an image of a galaxy as frozen in one moment of time is small. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1157:I am not an atheist. An atheist is someone who has compelling evidence that there is no Judeo-Christian-Islamic God. I am not that wise, but neither do I consider there to be anything approaching adequate evidence for such a god. Why are you in such a hurry to make up your mind? Why not simply wait until there is compelling evidence? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1158:Asimov was a long-time member and Vice President of Mensa International, albeit reluctantly; he described some members of that organization as "brain-proud and aggressive about their IQs", but he also stated that the only two people he had ever met who he would admit were more intelligent than himself were Marvin Minsky and Carl Sagan. ~ Anonymous, #NFDB
1159:We’re Johnny-come-latelies. We live in the cosmic boondocks. We emerged from microbes and muck. Apes are our cousins. Our thoughts and feelings are not fully under our own control. There may be much smarter and very different beings elsewhere. And on top of all this, we’re making a mess of our planet and becoming a danger to ourselves. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1160:Would we argue that ten thousand target nuclear warheads are likely to enhance the prospect for our survival? What account would we give of our stewardship of the planet Earth? We have heard the rationales offered by the nuclear superpowers. We know who speaks for the nations. But who speaks for the human species? Who speaks for Earth? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1161:He sought a way to preserve the past. John Hershel was one of the founders of a new form of time travel.... a means to capture light and memories. He actually coined a word for it... photography. When you think about it, photography is a form of time travel. This man is staring at us from across the centuries, a ghost preserved by light. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1162:There is another connection between infancy and dreams: both are followed by amnesia. When we emerge from either state, we have great difficulty remembering what we have experienced. In both cases, I would suggest, the left hemisphere of the neocortex, which is responsible for analytic
recollection, has been functioning ineffectively. ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
1163:The scientific world view works so well, explains so much and resonates so harmoniously with the most advanced parts of our brains that in time, I think, virtually every culture on the Earth, left to its own devices, would have discovered science. Some culture had to be first. As it turned out, Ionia was the place where science was born. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1164:You squeeze the eyedropper, and a drop of pond water drips out onto the microscope stage. You look at the projected image. The drop is full of life - strange beings swimming, crawling, tumbling; high dramas of pursuit and escape, triumph and tragedy. This is a world populated by beings far more exotic than in any science fiction movie... ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1165:Each star system is an island in space, quarantined from its neighbors by the light-years. I can imagine creatures evolving into glimmerings of knowledge on innumerable worlds, every one of them assuming at first their puny planet and paltry few suns to be all that is. We grow up in isolation. Only slowly do we teach ourselves the Cosmos. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1166:Every major power has some widely publicized justification for its procurement and stockpiling of weapons of mass destruction, often including a reptilian reminder of the presumed character and cultural defects of potential enemies (as opposed to us stout fellows), or of the intentions of others, but never ourselves, to conquer the world. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1167:Some of science is very simple. When it gets complicated, that’s usually because the world is complicated—or because we’re complicated. When we shy away from it because it seems too difficult (or because we’ve been taught so poorly), we surrender the ability to take charge of our future. We are disenfranchised. Our self-confidence erodes. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1168:If chimpanzees have consciousness, if they are capable of abstractions, do they not have what until now has been described as "human rights"? How smart does a chimpanzee have to be before killing him constitutes murder? What further properties must he show before religious missionaries must
consider him worthy of attempts at conversion? ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
1169:In the littered field of discredited self-congratulatory chauvinisms, there is only one that seems to hold up, one sense in which we are special: Due to our own actions or inactions, and the misuse of our technology, we live at an extraordinary moment, for the Earth at least—the first time that a species has become able to wipe itself out. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1170:A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called “leaves”) imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person—perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1171:A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called "leaves") imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person-perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1172:But if humans can make new varieties of plants and animals, must not nature do so also? This related process is called natural selection. That life has changed fundamentally over the aeons is entirely clear from the alterations we have made in the beasts and vegetables during the short tenure of humans on Earth, and from the fossil evidence. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1173:The cerebral cortex is a liberation. We need no longer be trapped in the genetically inherited behavior patterns of lizards and baboons. We are, each of us, largely responsible for what gets put into our brains, for what, as adults, we wind up caring for and knowing about. No longer at the mercy of the reptile brain, we can change ourselves. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1174:There is a place with four suns in the sky-red, white, blue, and yellow; two of them are so close together that they touch, and star-stuff flows between them. I know of a world with a million moons. I know of a sun the size of the Earth-and made of diamond....The universe is vast and awesome, and for the first time we are becoming part of it ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1175:Both Barnum and H. L. Mencken are said to have made the depressing observation that no one ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the American public. The remark has worldwide application. But the lack is not in intelligence, which is in plentiful supply; rather, the scarce commodity is systematic training in critical thinking. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1176:I say you don't need any more proof. There are proofs enough already. Cygnus A and all that are just for the scientists. You think it'll be hard to convince ordinary people that you're telling the truth. I think it'll be easy as pie. You think your story is too peculiar, too alien. But I've heard it before. I know it well. And I bet you do too. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1177:The ancient Aztec and the ancient Greek words for “God” are nearly the same. Is this evidence of some contact or commonality between the two civilizations, or should we expect occasional such coincidences between two wholly unrelated languages merely by chance? Or could, as Plato thought in the Cratylus, certain words be built into us from birth? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1178:The idea that God is an oversized white male with a flowing beard, who sits in the sky and tallies the fall of every sparrow is ludicrous. But if by 'God,' one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying... it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1179:Two billion years ago, our ancestors were microbes; a half-billion years ago, fish; a hundred million years ago, something like mice; ten million years ago, arboreal apes; and a million years ago, proto-humans puzzling out the taming of fire. Our evolutionary lineage is marked by mastery of change. In our time, the pace is quickening. —CARL SAGAN ~ Ray Kurzweil, #NFDB
1180:The wolf stands on its hind legs, places its forelegs on the scientist’s shoulders, and places its jaws around the scientist’s head. This is just the wolf’s way of being friendly. If you’re an animal who doesn’t know how to talk, a very clear signal is communicated: “See my teeth? Feel them? I could hurt you, I really could. But I won’t. I like you. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1181:This looks very much as if the integration of the day's experience into our memory, the forging of new neural links, is either an easier or a more urgent task. As the night wears on and this function is completed, the more affecting dreams, the more bizarre
material, the fears and lusts and other powerful emotions of the
dream material emerge. ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
1182:You mean am I for it or against it? You think this is a key question I'm going to be asked on Vega, and you want to make sure I give the right answer? Okay. Overpopulation is why I'm in favor of homosexuality and a celibate clergy. A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1183:It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1184:The left hemisphere seems to feel quite defensive-in a strange way insecure-about the right hemisphere; and, if this is so, verbal criticism of intuitive thinking becomes suspect on the ground of motive. Unfortunately, there is every reason to think that the right hemisphere has comparable misgivings -expressed nonverbally, of course- about the left. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1185:We will leap at the opportunity to support, to believe, to feel good. Most reporters, editors, and producers—swept up with the rest of us—will shy away from real skeptical scrutiny. He won’t be selling you prayers or crystals or tears. Perhaps he’ll be selling you a war, or a scapegoat, or a much more all-encompassing bundle of beliefs than Carlos’s. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1186:What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. ... Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1187:A new consciousness is developing which sees the earth as a single organism and recognizes that an organism at war with itself is doomed. We are one planet. One of the great revelations of the age of space exploration is the image of the earth finite and lonely, somehow vulnerable, bearing the entire human species through the oceans of space and time. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1188:Both [P. T.] Barnum and H. L. Mencken are said to have made the depressing observation that no one ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the American public. The remark has worldwide application. But the lack is not in intelligence, which is in plentiful supply; rather, the scarce commodity is systematic training in critical thinking. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1189:The reappearance of the crescent moon after the new moon; the return of the Sun after a total eclipse, the rising of the Sun in the morning after its troublesome absence at night were noted by people around the world; these phenomena spoke to our ancestors of the possibility of surviving death. Up there in the skies was also a metaphor of immortality. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1190:In the middle 1970s an astronomer I admire put together a modest manifesto called "Objections to Astrology" and asked me to endorse it. I struggled with his wording, and in the end found myself unable to sign, not because I thought astrology has any validity whatever, but because I felt (and still feel) that the tone of the statement was authoritarian. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1191:Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge. Its goal is to find out how the world works, to seek what regularities there may be, to penetrate to the connections of things-from subatomic particles, which may be the constituents of all matter, to living organisms, the human social community, and thence to the cosmos as a whole. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1192:We humans, as species, are interested in communication with extraterrestrial intelligence. Would not a good beginning be improved communication with terrestral intelligence, with other human beings of different cultures and languages, with the great apes, with the dolphines, but particularly with those intelligent masters of the deep, the great whales? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1193:Each plant and animal is exquisitely made; should not a supremely competent Designer have been able to make the intended variety from the start? The fossil record implies trial and error, an inability to anticipate the future, features inconsistent with an efficient Great Designer (although not with a Designer of a more remote and indirect temperament). ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1194:A proclivity for science is embedded deeply within us, in all times, places, and cultures. It has been the means for our survival. It is our birthright. When, through indifference, inattention, incompetence, or fear of skepticism, we discourage children from science, we are disenfranchisin g them, taking from them the tools needed to manage their future. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1195:Claro que si uno tuviera un receptor con paso de banda estrecha, y escuchara solo un mínimo margen de frecuencias, estaría obligado a aceptar la constante de tiempo larga. Jamás podríamos detectar una modulación rápida. Eso era una simple consecuencia del Teorema Integral de Fourier, estrechamente vinculado con el Principio de Incertidumbre de Heisenberg. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1196:The ancient Ionians were the first we know of to argue systematically that laws and forces of Nature, rather than gods, are responsible for the order and even the existence of the world. As Lucretius summarized their views, “Nature free at once and rid of her haughty lords is seen to do all things spontaneously of herself without the meddling of the gods. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1197:The emerging picture of the early Solar System does not resemble a stately progression of events designed to form the Earth. Instead, it looks as if our planet was made, and survived, by mere lucky chance,* amid unbelievable violence. Our world does not seem to have been sculpted by a master craftsman. Here too, there is no hint of a Universe made for us. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1198:The Somnium makes clear to us, although it did not to all of Kepler’s contemporaries, that “in a dream one must be allowed the liberty of imagining occasionally that which never existed in the world of sense perception.” Science fiction was a new idea at the time of the Thirty Years’ War, and Kepler’s book was used as evidence that his mother was a witch. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1199:The study of the global climate, the comparison of the Earth with other worlds, are subjects in their earliest stages of development. They are fields that are poorly and grudgingly funded. In our ignorance, we continue to push and pull, to pollute the atmosphere and brighten the land, oblivious of the fact that the long-term consequences are largely unknown. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1200:Those who seek power at any price detect a societal weakness, a fear that they can ride into office. It could be ethnic differences, as it was then, perhaps different amounts of melanin in the skin; different philosophies or religions; or maybe it’s drug use, violent crime, economic crisis, school prayer, or “desecrating” (literally, making unholy) the flag. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1201:From the shadow length in Alexandria, the angle A can be measured. But from simple geometry (“if two parallel straight lines are transected by a third line, the alternate interior angles are equal”), angle B equals angle A. So by measuring the shadow length in Alexandria, Eratosthenes concluded that Syene was A = B = 7° away on the circumference of the Earth. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1202:Major scientific insights are characteristically intuitive, and equally characteristically described in scientific papers by linear analytical arguments. There is no anomaly in this: it is, rather, just as it should be. The creative act has major right-hemisphere components. But arguments on the
validity of the result are largely left-hemisphere functions. ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
1203:it does not become us to be so curious and inquisitive in these Things which the Supreme Creator seems to have kept for his own Knowledge: For since he has not been pleased to make any farther Discovery or Revelation of them, it seems little better than presumption to make any inquiry into that which he has thought fit to hide. But these Gentlemen must be told, ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1204:Everyday life depends on the structure of the atom. Turn off the electrical charges and everything crumbles to an invisible fine dust, without electrical forces, there would no longer be things in the universe - merely diffuse clouds of electrons, protons, and neutrons, and gravitating spheres of elementary particles, the featureless remnants of worlds. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1205:Finding the occasional straw of truth awash in a great ocean of confusion and bamboozle requires intelligence, vigilance, dedication, and courage. But if we don't practice these tough habits of thought, we cannot hope to solve the truly serious problems that face us --- and we risk becoming a nation of suckers, up for grabs by the next charlatan who comes along. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1206:In general, human societies are not innovative. They are hierarchical and ritualistic. Suggestions for change are greeted with suspicion: they imply an unpleasant future variation in ritual and hierarchy: an exchange of one set of rituals for another, or perhaps for a less structured society with fewer rituals. And yet there are times when societies must change. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1207:From the point of view of a mayfly, human beings are stolid, boring, almost entirely immovable, offering hardly a hint that they ever do anything. From the point of view of a star, a human being is a tiny flash, one of billions of brief lives flickering tenuously on the surface of a strangely cold, anomalously solid, exotically remote sphere of silicate and iron. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1208:More recently, books, especially paperbacks, have been printed in massive and inexpensive editions. For the price of a modest meal you can ponder the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, the origin of species, the interpretation of dreams, the nature of things. Books are like seeds. They can lie dormant for centuries and then flower in the most unpromising soil. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1209:Nevertheless his prodigious intellectual powers persisted unabated. In 1696, the Swiss mathematician Johann Bernoulli challenged his colleagues to solve an unresolved issue called the brachistochrone problem, specifying the curve connecting two points displaced from each other laterally, along which a body, acted upon only by gravity, would fall in the shortest time. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1210:We need to reduce military budgets; raise living standards; engender respect for learning; support science, scholarship, invention, and industry; promote free inquiry; reduce domestic coercion; involve the workers more in managerial decisions; and promote genuine respect and understanding derived from an acknowledgement of our common humanity and our common jeopardy. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1211:When all is said and done, the invention of writing must be reckoned not only as a brilliant innovation but as a surpassing good for humanity. And assuming that we survive long enough to use their inventions wisely, I believe the same will be said of the modern Thoths and Prometheuses who are today devising computers and programs at the edge of machine intelligence. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1212:Science is an ongoing process. It never ends. There is no single ultimate truth to be achieved, after which all the scientists can retire. And because this is so, the world is far more interesting, both for the scientists and for the millions of people in every nation who, while not professional scientists, are deeply interested in the methods and findings of science. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1213:Nos cursos de laboratório na escola secundária, havia uma resposta que devíamos obter. Ficávamos marcados se não a conseguíamos. Não havia nenhum encorajamento para seguir nossos interesses, intuições ou erros conceituais. Nas páginas finais dos livros didáticos, havia material visivelmente interessante. O ano escolar acabava sempre antes de chegarmos até aquele ponto. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1214:One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1215:When all is said and done, the invention of writing must be reckoned not only as a brilliant innovation but as a surpassing good for humanity. And assuming that we survive long enough to use their inventions wisely, I believe the same will be said of the modern Thoths and Prometheuses who are today devising
computers and programs at the edge of machine intelligence. ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
1216:Goddard represented a unique combination of visionary dedication and technological brilliance. He studied physics because he needed physics to get to Mars. In reading the notebooks of Robert Goddard, I am struck by how powerful his exploratory and scientific motivations were - and how influental speculative ideas, even erroneous ones, can be on the shaping of the future. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1217:Society corrupts the best of us. It is a little unfair, I think, to criticize a person for not sharing the enlightenment of a later epoch, but it is also profoundly saddening that such prejudices were so extremely pervasive. The question raises nagging uncertainties about which of the conventional truths of our own age will be considered unforgivable bigotry by the next. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1218:Una científica compañera mía me contaba un reciente viaje que realizó a la meseta de Nueva Guinea, donde visitó una tribu todavía en la edad de piedra que apenas había tenido contactos con la civilización. Ignoraban lo que son los relojes de pulsera, las bebidas refrescantes y los alimentos congelados. Pero conocían el Apolo 11. Sabían que los humanos han pisado la Luna. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1219:We embarked on our journey to the stars with a question first framed in the childhood of our species and in each generation asked anew with undiminished wonder: What are the stars? Exploration is in our nature. We began as wanderers, and we are wanderers still. We have lingered long enough on the shores of the cosmic ocean. We are ready at last to set sail for the stars. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1220:If God is omnipotent and omniscient, why didn't he start the universe out in the first place so it would come out the way he wants? Why's he constantly repairing and complaining? No, there's one thing the Bible makes clear: The biblical God is a sloppy manufacturer. He's not good at design, he's not good at execution. He'd be out of business, if there was any competition. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1221:we have a theology that is Earth-centered and involves a tiny piece of space, and when we step back, when we attain a broader cosmic perspective, some of it seems very small in scale. And in fact a general problem with much of Western theology in my view is that the God portrayed is too small. It is a god of a tiny world and not a god of a galaxy, much less of a universe. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1222:What skeptical thinking boils down to is the means to construct, and to understand, a reasoned argument and—especially important—to recognize a fallacious or fraudulent argument. The question is not whether we like the conclusion that emerges out of a train of reasoning, but whether the conclusion follow from the premise or starting point and whether that premise is true, ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1223:When we are asked to swear in American courts of law—that we will tell “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth”—we are being asked the impossible. It is simply beyond our powers. Our memories are fallible; even scientific truth is merely an approximation; and we are ignorant about nearly all of the Universe. Nevertheless, a life may depend on our testimony. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1224:the pattern-recognition machinery in our brains is so efficient in extracting a face from a clutter of other detail that we sometimes see faces where there are none. We assemble disconnected patches of light and dark and unconsciously try to see a face. The Man in the Moon is one result. Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Blowup describes another. There are many other examples. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1225:There are many hypotheses in physics of almost comparable brillance and elegance that have been rejected because they did not survive such a confrontation with experiment. In my view, the human condition would be greatly improved if such confrontations and willingness to reject hypotheses were a regular part of our social, political, economic, religious and cultural lives. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1226:We live on a hunk of rock and metal that circles a humdrum star that is one of 400 billion other stars that make up the Milky Way Galaxy which is one of billions of other galaxies which make up a universe which may be one of a very large number, perhaps an infinite number, of other universes. That is a perspective on human life and our culture that is well worth pondering. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1227:Every time a scientific paper presents a bit of data, it's accompanied by an error bar – a quiet but insistent reminder that no knowledge is complete or perfect. It's a calibration of how much we trust what we think we know. If the error bars are small, the accuracy of our empirical knowledge is high; if the error bars are large, then so is the uncertainty in our knowledge. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1228:Human history can be viewed as a slowly dawning awareness that we are members of a larger group Groups of people from divergent ethnic and cultural backgrounds working in some sense together [is] surely a humanizing and character building experience. If we are to survive, our loyalties must be broadened further, to include the whole human community, the entire planet Earth. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1229:Science is generated by and devoted to free inquiry: the idea that any hypothesis, no matter how strange, deserves to be considered on its merits. The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion and politics, but it is not the path to knowledge; it has no place in the endeavor of science. We do not know in advance who will discover fundamental new insights. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1230:The Cosmos may be densely populated with intelligent beings. But the Darwinian lesson is clear: There will be no humans elsewhere. Only here. Only on this small planet. We are a rare as well as an endangered species. Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1231:But, Jefferson worried that the people - and the argument goes back to Thucydides and Aristotle - are easily misled. He also stressed, passionately and repeatedly, that it was essential for the people to understand the risks and benefits of government, to educate themselves, and to involve themselves in the political process. Without that, he said, the wolves will take over. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1232:I don’t believe I can let this subject pass by leaving my own conflicted emotions unconfessed. When Carl Sagan won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 1978, I dismissed it as a minor achievement for a scientist, scarcely worth listing. When I won the same prize the following year, it wondrously became a major literary award of which scientists should take special note. ~ Edward O Wilson, #NFDB
1233:We need more than anniversary sentimentalism and holiday piety and patriotism. Where necessary, we must confront and challenge the conventional wisdom. It is time to learn from those who fell here. Our challenge is to reconcile, not after the carnage and the mass murder, but instead of the carnage and mass murder. It is time to fly into one another's arms. It is time to act. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1234:We've arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1235:Since, in the long run, every planetary civilization will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring--not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive... If our long-term survival is at stake, we have a basic responsibility to our species to venture to other worlds. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1236:Billions of years from now our sun, then a distended red giant star, will have reduced Earth to a charred cinder. But the Voyager record will still be largely intact, in some other remote region of the Milky Way galaxy, preserving a murmur of an ancient civilization that once flourished — perhaps before moving on to greater deeds and other worlds — on the distant planet Earth. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1237:There are many hypotheses in physics of almost comparable brilliance and elegance that have been
rejected because they did not survive such a confrontation with experiment. In my view, the human condition would be greatly improved if such confrontations and willingness to reject hypotheses were a regular part of our social, political, economic, religious and cultural lives. ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
1238:What a splendid perspective contact with a profoundly different civilization might provide! In a cosmic setting vast and old beyond ordinary human understanding we are a little lonely, and we ponder the ultimate significance, if any, of our tiny but exquisite blue planet, the Earth.... In the deepest sense the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is a search for ourselves. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1239:One glance at (a book) and you hear the voice of another person - perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millenia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1240:Because science carries us toward an understanding of how the world is, rather than how we would wish it to be, its findings may not in all cases be immediately comprehensible or satisfying. It may take a little work to restructure our mindsets. Some of science is very simple. When it gets complicated, that’s usually because the world is complicated—or because we’re complicated. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1241:However, in part for reasons of organizational
convenience, modern societies are structured as if all humans had the same sleep requirements; and in many parts of the world there is a satisfying sense of moral rectitude in rising early. The amount of sleep required for buffer dumping would then depend on how much we have both thought and experienced since the last sleep period. ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
1242:The old exhortations to nationalist fervor and jingoist pride have begun to lose their appeal. Perhaps because of rising standards of living, children are being treated better worldwide. In only a few decades, sweeping global changes have begun to move in precisely the directions needed for human survival. A new consciousness is developing which recognizes that we are one species. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1243:An extraterrestrial being, newly arrived on Earth - scrutinizing what we mainly present to our children in television, radio, movies, newspapers, magazines, the comics, and many books - might easily conclude that we are intent on teaching them murder, rape, cruelty, superstition, credulity, and consumerism. We keep at it, and through constant repetition many of them finally get it. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1244:There’s a certain discipline involved. We can’t just go off shouting ‘little green men’ every time we detect something we don’t at first understand, because we’re going to look mighty silly when it turns out to be something else. Special cautions are necessary when the stakes are high. We are not obliged to make up our minds before the evidence is in. It’s permitted to not be sure. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1245:Those who invalidate reason ought seriously to consider whether they argue against reason with or without reason; if with reason, then they establish the principle that they are laboring to dethrone: but if they argue without reason (which, in order to be consistent with themselves they must do), they are out of reach of rational conviction, nor do they deserve a rational argument. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1246:We are rare and precious because we are alive, because we can think as well as we can. We are privileged to influence and perhaps control our future. I believe we have an obligation to fight for life on Earth - not just for ourselves, but for all those, humans and others, who came before us, and to whom we are beholden, and for all those who, if we are wise enough, will come after. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1247:But, Jefferson worried that the people - and the argument goes back to Thucydides and Aristotle - are easily misled. He also stressed, passionately and repeatedly, that it was essential for the people to understand the risks and benefits of government, to educate themselves, and to involve themselves in the political process.
Without that, he said, the wolves will take over. ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
1248:I find these comparisons particularly poignant: life versus death, hope versus fear. Space exploration and the highly mechanized destruction of people use similar technology and manufacturers, and similar human qualities of organization and daring. Can we not make the transition from automated aerospace killing to automated aerospace exploration of the solar system in which we live? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1249:Perhaps when everyone knows that gods come down to Earth, we hallucinate gods; when all of us are familiar with demons, it's incubi and succibi; when fairies are widely accepted, we see fairies; in an age of spiritualism, we encounter spirits; and when the old myths fade and we begin thinking that extraterrestrial beings are plausible, then that's where our hypnogogic imagery tends. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1250:At a few hundred kilometers altitude, the Earth fills half your sky, and the band of blue that stretches from Mindanao to Bombay, which your eye encompasses in a single glance, can break your heart with its beauty. Home you think. Home. This is my world. This is where I come from. Everyone I know, everyone I ever heard of, grew up down there, under that relentless and exquisite blue. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1251:She came to admire him so much that his love for her affected her own self-esteem: She liked herself better because of him. And since he clearly felt the same, there was a kind of infinite regress of love and respect underlying their relationship. At least, that was how she described it to herself. In the presence of so many of her friends, she had felt an undercurrent of loneliness. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1252:In its encounter with Nature, science invariably elicits a sense of reverence and awe. The very act of understanding is a celebration of joining, merging, even if on a very modest scale, with the magnificence of the Cosmos. And the cumulative worldwide build-up of knowledge over time converts science into something only a little short of a trans-national, trans-generational meta-mind. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1253:Or consider the mainstream religions. We are enjoined in Micah to do justly and love mercy; in Exodus we are forbidden to commit murder; in Leviticus we are commanded to love our neighbor as ourselves; and in the Gospels we are urged to love our enemies. Yet think of the rivers of blood spilled by fervent followers of the books in which these well-meaning exhortations are embedded. In ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1254:with rare exceptions (chiefly the social insects), mammals and birds are the only organisms to devote substantial attention to the care of their young; an evolutionary development that, through the long period of plasticity which it permits, takes advantage of the large information-processing capability of the mammalian and primate brains. Love seems to be an invention of the mammals. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1255:The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together. Information distilled over 4 billion years of biological evolution. Incidentally, all the organisms on the Earth are made essentially of that stuff. An eyedropper full of that liquid could be used to make a caterpillar or a petunia if only we knew how to put the components together. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1256:What was an infant's view of air travel? You go to a special place, walk into a large room with seats in it, and sit down. The room rumbles and shakes for four hours. Then you get up and walk off. Magically, you're somewhere else. The means of transportation seems obscure to you, but the basic idea is easy to grasp, and precocious mastery of the Navier-Stokes equations is not required. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1257:The study of the galaxies reveals a universal order and beauty. It also shows us chaotic violence on a scale hitherto undreamed of. That we live in a universe which permits life is remarkable. That we live in one which destroys galaxies and stars and worlds is also remarkable. The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent to the concerns of such puny creatures as we. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1258:We seem, these days, much more willing to recognize the perils before us than we were even a decade ago. The newly recognized dangers threaten all of us, equally. No one can say how it will turn out down here. But this is also, we may note, the first time that a species has become able to journey to the planets and the stars. Sailors on a becalmed sea, we sense a stirring of the breeze. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1259:Every culture has a myth of the world before creation, and of the creation of the world [.]
These myths are tributes to human audacity. The chief difference between them and our modern scientific myth of the Big Bang is that science is self-questioning, and that we can perform experiments and observations to test our ideas. But those other creation stories are worthy of our deep respect. ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
1260:In our time we have less severe standards. We tell children about Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy for reasons we think emotionally sound, but then disabuse them of these myths before they’re grown. Why retract? Because their well-being as adults depends on them knowing the world as it really is. We worry, and for good reason, about adults who still believe in Santa Claus. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1261:The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. On this shore, we've learned most of what we know. Recently, we've waded a little way out, maybe ankle-deep, and the water seems inviting. Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return, and we can, because the cosmos is also within us. We're made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1262:The chief deficiency I see in the skeptical movement is its polarization: Us vs. Them - the sense that we have a monopoly on the truth; that those other people who believe in all these stupid doctrines are morons; that if you're sensible, you'll listen to us; and if not, to hell with you. This is nonconstructive. It does not get our message across. It condemns us to permanent minority status. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1263:The chief deficiency I see in the skeptical movement is its polarization: Us vs. Them — the sense that we have a monopoly on the truth; that those other people who believe in all these stupid doctrines are morons; that if you're sensible, you'll listen to us; and if not, to hell with you. This is nonconstructive. It does not get our message across. It condemns us to permanent minority status. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1264:There were excesses in science and there were excesses in religion. A reasonable man wouldn’t be stampeded by either one. There were many interpretations of Scripture and many interpretations of the natural world. Both were created by God, so both must be mutually consistent. Wherever a discrepancy seems to exist, either a scientist or a theologian—maybe both—hasn’t been doing his job. Palmer ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1265:To make a contented slave,’ [Frederick] Bailey later wrote, ‘it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason.’ This is why the slaveholders must control what slaves hear and see and think. This is why reading and critical thinking are dangerous, indeed subversive, in an unjust society. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1266:When a honeybee dies it releases a death pheromone, a characteristic odour that signals the survivors to remove it from the hive. The corpse is promptly pushed and tugged out of the hive. The death pheromone is oleic acid. What happens if a live bee is dabbed with a drop of oleic acid? Then no matter how strapping and vigourous it might be, it is carried kicking and screaming out of the hive. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1267:For all its material advantages, the sedentary life has left us edgy, unfulfilled. Even after 400 generations in villages and cities, we haven’t forgotten. The open road still softly calls, like a nearly forgotten song of childhood. We invest far-off places with a certain romance. This appeal, I suspect, has been meticulously crafted by natural selection as an essential element in our survival. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1268:The renowned astronomer Carl Sagan once said, "We are made of star stuff." And it is true. The same elements that make up the stars are also inside us. We are a part of a huge, amazing universe, a tiny speck of magick amidst a world full of marvels. So every once in a while, take the time to look at the stars and remember that you have star stuff (and goddess stuff and god stuff) inside you. ~ Deborah Blake, #NFDB
1269:Washburn has reported that infant baboons and other young primates appear to be born with only three inborn fears -of falling, snakes, and the dark-corresponding respectively to the dangers posed by
Newtonian gravitation to tree-dwellers, by our ancient enemies the reptiles, and by mammalian nocturnal predators, which must have been particularly terrifying for the visually oriented primates. ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
1270:Placebos can be astonishingly effective, especially for colds, anxiety, depression, pain, and symptoms that are plausibly generated by the mind. Conceivably, endorphins—the small brain proteins with morphinelike effects—can be elicited by belief. A placebo works only if the patient believes it’s an effective medicine. Within strict limits, hope, it seems, can be transformed into biochemistry. As ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1271:Spaceflight, therefore, is subversive. If they are fortunate enough to find themselves in orbit, most people, after a little meditation, have similar thoughts. The nations that had instituted spaceflight had done so largely for nationalistic reasons; it was a small irony that almost everyone who entered space received a startling glimpse of a transnational perspective, of the Earth as one world. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1272:The others would then fall silent and she would continue about doped gallium arsenide detectors, or the ethanol content of the galactic cloud W-3. The quantity of 200-proof alcohol in this single interstellar cloud was more than enough to maintain the present population of the Earth, if every adult were a dedicated alcoholic, for the age of the solar system. The tamada had appreciated the remark. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1273:For me, the most ironic token of [the first human moon landing] is the plaque signed by President Richard M. Nixon that Apollo 11 took to the moon. It reads, ‘We came in peace for all Mankind.’ As the United States was dropping seven and a half megatons of conventional explosives on small nations in Southeast Asia, we congratulated ourselves on our humanity. We would harm no one on a lifeless rock. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1274:I went to the librarian and asked for a book about stars... and the answer was stunning. It was that the Sun was a star but really close. The stars were suns, but so far away they were just little points of light. The scale of the universe suddenly opened up to me. It was a kind of religious experience. There was a magnificence to it, a grandeur, a scale which has never left me. Never ever left me. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1275:Why do we put up with it? Do we like to be criticized? No, no scientist enjoys it. Every scientist feels a proprietary affection for his or her ideas and findings. Even so, you don’t reply to critics, Wait a minute; this is a really good idea; I’m very fond of it; it’s done you no harm; please leave it alone. Instead, the hard but just rule is that if the ideas don’t work, you must throw them away. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1276:Columbus therefore cheated on his calculations, as the examining faculty of the University of Salamanca quite correctly pointed out. He used the smallest possible circumference of the Earth and the greatest eastward extension of Asia he could find in all the books available to him, and then exaggerated even those. Had the Americas not been in the way, Columbus’ expeditions would have failed utterly. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1277:Einstein's prohibition against travelling faster than light may clash with our common sense, but, on this question, why should we trust common sense? Why should our experience at 10 kilometers-an-hour constrain the laws of nature at 300,000 kilomters per second? Relativity does set limits on what humans can ultimately do, but the universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1278:I … had ambition not only to go farther than anyone had done before,” wrote Captain James Cook, the eighteenth-century explorer of the Pacific, “but as far as it was possible for man to go.” Two centuries later, Yuri Romanenko, on returning to Earth after what was then the longest space flight in history, said “The Cosmos is a magnet … Once you’ve been there, all you can think of is how to get back. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1279:All of us cherish our beliefs. They are, to a degree, self-defining. When someone comes along who challenges our belief system as insufficiently well based - or who, like Socrates, merely asks embarrassing questions that we haven't thought of, or demonstrates that we've swept key underlying assumptions under the rug - it becomes much more than a search for knowledge. It feels like a personal assault. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1280:All of us cherish our beliefs. They are, to a degree, self-defining. When someone comes along who challenges our belief system as insufficiently well-based - or who, like Socrates, merely asks embarrassing questions that we haven't thought of, or demonstrates that we've swept key underlying assumptions under the rug - it becomes much more than a search for knowledge. It feels like a personal assault. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1281:All of us cherish our beliefs. They are, to a degree, self-defining. When someone comes along who challenges our belief system as insufficiently well-based – or who, like Socrates, merely asks embarrassing questions that we haven’t thought of, or demonstrates that we’ve swept key underlying assumptions under the rug – it becomes much more than a search for knowledge. It feels like a personal assault. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1282:All of us cherish our beliefs. They are, to a degree, self-defining. When someone comes along who challenges our belief system as insufficiently well-based - or who, like Socrates, merely asks embarrassing questions that we haven't thought of, or demonstrates that we've swept key underlying assumptions under the rug - it becomes much more than a search for knowledge. It feels like a personal assault. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1283:Now, it would be wholly foolish to deny the existence of laws of nature. And if that is what we are talking about when we say God, then no one can possibly be an atheist, or at least anyone who would profess atheism would have to give a coherent argument about why the laws of nature are inapplicable. I think he or she would be hard-pressed. So with this latter definition of God, we all believe in God. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1284:I went to the librarian and asked for a book about stars.... And the answer was stunning. It was that the Sun was a star but really close. The stars were suns, but so far away they were just little points of light.... The scale of the universe suddenly opened up to me. It was a kind of religious experience. There was a magnificence to it, a grandeur, a scale which has never left me. Never ever left me. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1285:Then science came along and taught us that we are not the measure of all things, that there are wonders unimagined, that the Universe is not obliged to conform to what we consider comfortable or plausible. We have learned something about the idiosyncratic nature of our common sense. Science has carried human self-consciousness to a higher level. This is surely a rite of passage, a step towards maturity. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1286:As science advances, there seems to be less and less for God to do. It's a big universe, of course, so He, She, or It, could be profitably employed in many places. But what has clearly been happening is that evolving before our eyes has been a God of the Gaps; that is, whatever it is we cannot explain lately is attributed to God. And then after a while, we explain it, and so that's no longer God's realm. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1287:I am a collection of water, calcium and organic molecules called Carl Sagan. You are a collection of almost identical molecules with a different collective label. But is that all? Is there nothing in here but molecules? Some people find this idea somehow demeaning to human dignity. For myself, I find it elevating that our universe permits the evolution of molecular machines as intricate and subtle as we. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1288:There is no doubt that right-hemisphere intuitive thinking may perceive patterns and connections too difficult for the left hemisphere; but it may also detect patterns where none exist. Skeptical and
critical thinking is not a hallmark of the right hemisphere. And unalloyed right-hemisphere doctrines, particularly when they are invented during new and trying circumstances, may be erroneous or paranoid. ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
1289:The Milky Way Galaxy is one of billions, perhaps hundreds of billions of galaxies notable neither in mass nor in brightness nor in how its stars are configured and arrayed. Some modern deep sky photographs show more galaxies beyond the Milky Way than stars within the Milky Way. Every one of them is an island universe containing perhaps a hundred billion suns. Such an image is a profound sermon on humility. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1290:Those afraid of the universe as it really is, those who pretend to nonexistent knowledge and envision a Cosmos centered on human beings will prefer the fleeting comforts of superstition. They avoid rather than confront the world. But those with the courage to explore the weave and structure of the Cosmos, even where it differs profoundly from their wishes and prejudices, will penetrate its deepest mysteries. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1291:For a long time the human instinct to understand was thwarted by facile religious explanations, as in ancient Greece in the time of Homer, where there were gods of the sky and the Earth, the thunderstorm, the oceans and the underworld, fire and time and love and war; where every tree and meadow had its dryad and maenad. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1292:Science is more than a body of knowledge. It is a way of thinking; a way of skeptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility.
If we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then, we are up for grabs for the next charlatan (political or religious) who comes rambling along. ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
1293:We are rendering many species extinct; we may even succeed in destroying ourselves. But this is nothing new for the Earth. Humans would then be just the latest in a long sequence of upstart species that arrive on-stage, make some alterations in the scenery, kill off some of the cast, and then themselves exit stage-left forever. New players appear in the next act. The Earth abides. It has seen all this before. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1294:Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us—then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls. The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1295:Since World War II, Japan has spawned enormous numbers of new religions featuring the supernatural.... In Thailand, diseases are treated with pills manufactured from pulverized sacred Scripture. Witches are today being burned in South Africa.... The worldwide TM [Transcendental Meditation] organization has an estimated valuation of $3 billion. For a fee, they promise to make you invisible, to enable you to fly. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1296:One of the reasons for its success is that science has a built-in, error-correcting machinery at its very heart. Some may consider this an overbroad characterization, but to me every time we exercise self-criticism, every time we test our ideas against the outside world, we are doing science. When we are self-indulgent and uncritical, when we confuse hopes and facts, we slide into pseudoscience and superstition. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1297:The past history of human belief is a cautionary tale. We have killed thousands of our fellow human beings because we believed they had signed a contract with the devil, and had become witches. We still kill more than a thousand people each year for witchcraft. In my view, there is only one hope for humankind to emerge from what Carl Sagan called "the demon-haunted world" of our past. That hope is science. ~ Michael Crichton, #NFDB
1298:But humans have deliberately selected which plants and animals shall live and which shall die for thousands of years. We are surrounded from babyhood by familiar farm and domestic animals, fruits and trees and vegetables. Where do they come from? Were they once free-living in the wild and then induced to adopt a less strenuous life on the farm? No, the truth is quite different. They are, most of them, made by us. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1299:A scientific colleague tells me about a recent trip to the New Guinea highlands where she visited a stone age culture hardly contacted by Western civilization. They were ignorant of wristwatches, soft drinks, and frozen food. But they knew about Apollo 11. They knew that humans had walked on the Moon. They knew the names of Armstrong and Aldrin and Collins. They wanted to know who was visiting the Moon these days. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1300:We seem to crave privilege, merited not by our works but by our birth, by the mere fact that, say, we are humans and born on Earth. We might call it the anthropocentric - the 'human-centered' - conceit. This conceit is brought close to culmination in the notion that we are created in God's image: The Creator and Ruler of the entire Universe looks just like me. My, what a coincidence! How convenient and satisfying! ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1301:Science arouses a soaring sense of wonder. But so does pseudoscience. Sparse and poor popularizations of science abandon ecological niches that pseudoscience promptly fills. If it were widely understood that claims to knowledge require adequate evidence before they can be accepted, there would be no room for pseudoscience. But a kind of Gresham’s Law prevails in popular culture by which bad science drives out good. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1302:They became upright and taught themselves the use of tools, domesticated other animals, plants and fire, and devised language. The ash of stellar alchemy was now emerging into consciousness. At an ever-accelerating pace, it invented writing, cities, art and science, and sent spaceships to the planets and the stars. These are some of the things that hydrogen atoms do, given fifteen billion years of cosmic evolution. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1303:Thus we do not yet have experience with the
adult language abilities of monkeys and apes. One of the most intriguing questions is whether a verbally accomplished chimpanzee mother will be able to communicate language to her offspring. It seems very likely that this should be possible and that a community of chimps initially competent in gestural
language could pass down the language to subsequent generations. ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
1304:As my old professor Carl Sagan said so often, 'When you’re in love, you want to tell the world.’ And I base my beliefs on the information and the process that we call science. It fills me with joy to make discoveries every day of things I’ve never seen before. It fills me with joy to know that we can pursue these answers. It is an astonishing thing that we are — you and I are one of the ways the universe knows itself. ~ Bill Nye, #NFDB
1305:neither we nor our planet enjoys a privileged position in Nature. This insight has since been applied upward to the stars, and sideways to many subsets of the human family, with great success and invariable opposition. It has been responsible for major advances in astronomy, physics, biology, anthropology, economics and politics. I wonder if its social extrapolation is a major reason for attempts at its suppression. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1306:One of the reasons for its success is that science has built-in, error-correcting machinery at its very heart. Some may consider this an overbroad characterization, but to me every time we exercise self-criticism, every time we test our ideas against the outside world, we are doing science. When we are self-indulgent and uncritical, when we confuse hopes and facts, we slide into pseudoscience and superstition. Every ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1307:There is child abuse, and there are such things as repressed memories. But there are also such things as false memories and confabulations, and they are not rare at all. Misrememberings are the rule, not the exception. They occur all the time. They occur even in cases where the subject is absolutely confident - even when the memory is a seemingly unforgettable flashbulb, one of those metaphorical mental photographs. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1308:The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. From it we have learned most of what we know. Recently, we have waded a little out to sea, enough to dampen our toes or, at most, wet our ankles. The water seems inviting. The ocean calls. Some part of our being knows this is from where we came. We long to return. These aspirations are not, I think, irreverent, although they may trouble whatever gods may be. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1309:deluded or not, supporters of superstition and pseudoscience are human beings with real feelings, who, like the skeptics, are trying to figure out how the world works and what our role in it might be. Their motives are in many cases consonant with science. If their culture has not given them all the tools they need to pursue this great quest, let us temper our criticism with kindness. None of us comes fully equipped. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1310:In a way, science might be described as paranoid thinking applied to Nature: we are looking for natural conspiracies, for connections among apparently disparate data. Our objective is to abstract patterns from Nature (right-hemisphere thinking), but many proposed patterns do not in fact correspond to the
data. Thus all proposed patterns must be subjected to the sieve of critical analysis (left-hemisphere thinking). ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
1311:The Cosmos extends, for all practical purposes, forever. After a brief and sedentary hiatus we are resuming our ancient nomadic way of life. Our remote descendants, safely arrayed on many worlds though through the Solar System and beyond, will be unified by their common heritage, by their regard for their home planet, and by knowledge that, whatever other life may be, the only humans in all the Universe come from Earth. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1312:The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. From it we have learned most of what we know. Recently, we have waded a little out to sea, enough to dampen our toes or, at most, wet our ankles. The water seems inviting. The ocean calls. Some part of our being knows this is from where we came. We long to return. These aspirations are not, I think, irreverent, although they may trouble whatever gods may be. The ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1313:We are, almost all of us, descended from people who responded to the dangers of existence by inventing stories about unpredictable or disgruntled deities. For a long time the human instinct to understand was thwarted by facile religious explanations [...].
For thousands of years humans were oppressed - as some of us still are - by the notion that the universe is a marionette whose strings are pulled by a god or gods. ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
1314:Condon, quick on his feet, replied that the accusation was untrue. He was not a revolutionary in physics. He raised his right hand: “I believe in Archimedes’ Principle, formulated in the third century B.C. I believe in Kepler’s laws of planetary motion, discovered in the seventeenth century. I believe in Newton’s laws.…” And on he went, invoking the illustrious names of Bernoulli, Fourier, Ampère, Boltzmann, and Maxwell. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1315:Equally, where the technological application of scientific discoveries is clear and obvious—as when a scientist works on nerve gases—he cannot properly claim that such applications are “none of his business,” merely on the ground that it is the military forces, not scientists, who use the gases to disable or kill. This is even more obvious when the scientist deliberately offers help to governments, in exchange for funds. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1316:Pseudoscience speaks to powerful emotional needs that science often leaves unfulfilled. It caters to fantasies about personal powers we lack and long for (like those attributed to comic book superheroes today, and earlier, to the gods). In some of its manifestations, it offers satisfaction of spiritual hungers, cures for disease, promises that death is not the end. It reassures us of our cosmic centrality and importance. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1317:There are so many examples of human misuse of the Earth that even phrasing this question chills me. If there is life on Mars, I believe we should do nothing with Mars. Mars then belongs to the Martians, even if the Martians are only microbes. The existence of an independent biology on a nearby planet is a treasure beyond assessing, and the preservation of that life must, I think, supersede any other possible use of Mars. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1318:Vigorous criticism is more constructive in science than in some other areas of human endeavor because in science there are adequate standards of validity that can be agreed upon by competent practitioners the world over. The objective of such criticism is not to suppress but rather to encourage the advance of new ideas: those that survive a firm skeptical scrutiny have a fighting chance of being right, or at least useful. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1319:One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back. So the old bamboozles tend to persist as the new ones rise. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1320:The significance of our lives and our fragile planet is then determined only by our own wisdom and courage. We are the custodians of life's meaning. We long for a Parent to care for us, to forgive us our errors, to save us from our childish mistakes. But knowledge is preferable to ignorance. Better by far to embrace the hard truth than a reassuring fable. If we crave some cosmic purpose, then let us find ourselves a worthy goal. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1321:But if the Bible is not everywhere literally true, which parts are divinely inspired and which are merely fallible and human? As soon as we admit that there are scriptural mistakes (or concessions to the ignorance of the times), then how can the Bible be an inerrant guide to ethics and morals? Might sects and individuals now accept as authentic the parts of the Bible they like, and reject those that are inconvenient or burdensome? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1322:The Romans called the Christians atheists. Why? Well, the Christians had a god of sorts, but it wasn't a real god. They didn't believe in the divinity of apotheosized emperors or Olympian gods. They had a peculiar, different kind of god. So it was very easy to call people who believed in a different kind of god atheists. And that general sense that an atheist is anybody who doesn't believe exactly as I do prevails in our own time. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1323:(When asked merely if they accept evolution, 45 percent of Americans say yes. The figure is 70 percent in China.) When the movie Jurassic Park was shown in Israel, it was condemned by some Orthodox rabbis because it accepted evolution and because it taught that dinosaurs lived a hundred million years ago-when, as is plainly stated at every Rosh Hashonhan and every Jewish wedding ceremony, the Universe is less than 6,000 years old. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1324:Cuando hablamos de la "ira" del cielo, la "agitación" del mar, la "resistencia" de los diamantes a ser tallados, la "atracción" que ejerce la Tierra sobre un asteroide cercano o la "excitación" de un átomo, de nuevo pensamos en una especie de visión animista del mundo. Estamos atribuyendo existencia real a objetos inertes. Algún nivel primitivo de nuestro pensamiento dota a la Naturaleza inanimada de vida, pasiones y premeditación. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1325:We've begun at last to wonder about our origins, star stuff contemplating the stars, organized collections of ten billion billion billion atoms contemplating the evolution of matter, tracing that long path by which it arrived at consciousness here on the planet Earth and perhaps throughout the cosmos. Our obligation to survive and flourish is owed not just to ourselves but also to that cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1326:If we continue to accumulate only power and not wisdom, we will surely destroy ourselves. Our very existence in that distant time requires that we will have changed our institutions and ourselves. How can I dare to guess about humans in the far future? It is, I think, only a matter of natural selection. If we become even slightly more violent, shortsighted, ignorant, and selfish than we are now, almost certainly we will have no future. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1327:For myself, I like a universe that, includes much that is unknown and, at the same time, much that is knowable. A universe in which everything is known would be static and dull, as boring as the heaven of some weak-minded theologians. A universe that is unknowable is no fit place for a thinking being. The ideal universe for us is one very much like the universe we inhabit. And I would guess that this is not really much of a coincidence. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1328:If we’re absolutely sure that our beliefs are right, and those of others wrong; that we are motivated by good, and others by evil; that the King of the Universe speaks to us, and not to adherents of very different faiths; that it is wicked to challenge conventional doctrines or to ask searching questions; that our main job is to believe and obey—then the witch mania will recur in its infinite variations down to the time of the last man. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1329:Our home planet, as Carl Sagan put it, is a “pale blue dot” . . . The “Pale Blue Dot” is a moving soliloquy by Carl Sagan in his 1980 television series Cosmos. The remake of this series, which aired in 2014 and was hosted by Neil deGrasse Tyson, replayed Sagan’s soliloquy toward the end of the final episode (episode 13, “Unafraid of the Dark”) with stunning graphics to illustrate that the Earth is a “mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. ~ Peter Enns, #NFDB
1330:But before the grandeur and intricacy of Nature, he was, like Ptolemy and Kepler, exhilarated as well as disarmingly modest. Just before his death he wrote: “I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy, playing on the seashore, and diverting myself, in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1331:[Science] is not perfect. It can be misused. It is only a tool. But it is by far the best tool we have, self-correcting, ongoing, applicable to everything. It has two rules. First: there are no sacred truths; all assumptions must be critically examined; arguments from authority are worthless. Second: whatever is inconsistent with the facts must be discarded or revised. ... The obvious is sometimes false; the unexpected is sometimes true. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1332:What is called for is an exquisite balance between two conflicting needs: the most skeptical scrutiny of all hypotheses that are served up to us and at the same time a great openness to new ideas. If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you. On the other hand, if you are open to the point of gullibility and have not an ounce of skeptical sense in you, then you cannot distinguish useful ideas from the worthless ones. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1333:When you buy a used car, you kick the tires, you look at the odometer, you open up the hood. If you do not feel yourself an expert in automobile engines, you bring a friend who is. And you do this with something as unimportant as an automobile. But on the issues of the transcendent, of ethics, of morals, of the origins of the world, of the nature of human beings, on those issues should we not insist upon at least equally skeptical scrutiny? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1334:In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1335:Dois homens chegaram a um buraco no céu. Um pediu ao outro ajuda para se erguer até a abertura... Mas era tão bonito no céu que o homem que espiou pela beirada esqueceu tudo, esqueceu o companheiro a quem tinha prometido ajudar a subir e simplesmente saiu correndo para entrar em todo o esplendor celeste. De um poema em prosa esquimó iglulik, do início do século XX, recitado por Inugpasugjuk a Knud Rasmussen, o explorador ártico da Groenlândia ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1336:...and this second kind of god they called God in a very straightforward way…but by God, they meant something not very different from the sum total of the physical laws of the universe; that is, gravitation plus quantum mechanics plus grand unified field theories….equaled God. And by that all they meant were a set of exquisitely powerful physical principles that seemed to explain a great deal that was otherwise inexplicable about the universe. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1337:Al parecer anhelamos un privilegio, merecido no por nuestros esfuerzos, sino por nacimiento, digamos que por el mero hecho de ser humanos y de haber nacido en la Tierra. Podríamos llamarla la noción antropocéntrica, <>.
Está noción alcanza su culminación en la idea de que fuimos creados a imagen y semejanza de Dios: <> El filósofo griego del siglo VI a. J.C. Jenófanes comprendió la arrogancia de esta perspectiva:
< ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
1338:For their surface area, insects weigh very little. A beetle, falling from a high altitude, quickly achieves terminal velocity: air resistance prevents it from falling very fast, and, after alighting on the ground, it will walk away, apparently none the worse for the experience… In contrast, human beings are characteristically maimed or killed by any fall of more than a few dozen feet: because of our size, we weigh too much for our surface area. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1339:We achieve some measure of adulthood when we recognize our parents as they really were, without sentimentalizing or mythologizing, but also without blaming them unfairly for our imperfections. Maturity entails a readiness, painful and wrenching though it may be, to look squarely into the long dark places, into the fearsome shadows. In this act of ancestral remembrance and acceptance may be found a light by which to see our children safely home. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1340:Those who seek power at any price detect a societal weakness, a fear that they can ride into office. It could be ethnic differences, as it was then, perhaps different amounts of melanin in the skin; different philosophies or religions; or maybe it’s drug use, violent crime, economic crisis, school prayer, or “desecrating” (literally, making unholy) the flag. Whatever the problem, the quick fix is to shave a little freedom off the Bill of Rights. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1341:Out yonder there was this huge world, which exists independently of us human beings and which stands before us like a great, eternal riddle, at least partially accessible to our inspection and thinking. The contemplation of this world beckoned like a liberation … The road to this paradise was not so comfortable and alluring as the road to the religious paradise; but it has proved itself as trustworthy, and I have never regretted having chosen it. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1342:By far the most exciting, satisfying and exhilarating time to be alive is the time in which we pass from ignorance to knowledge on these fundamental issues; the age where we begin in wonder and end in understanding. In all of the four-billion-year history of life on our planet, in all of the four-million-year history of the human family, there is only one generation privileged to live through that unique transitional moment: that generation is ours. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1343:Many statements about God are confidently made by theologians on grounds that today at least sound specious. Thomas Aquinas claimed to prove that God cannot make another God, or commit suicide, or make a man without a soul, or even make a triangle whose interior angles do not equal 180 degrees. But Bolyai and Lobachevsky were able to accomplish this last feat (on a curved surface) in the nineteenth century, and they were not even approximately gods. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1344:The family tree of each of us is graced by all those great inventors: the beings who first tried out self-replication, the manufacture of protein machine tools, the cell, cooperation, predation, symbiosis, photosynthesis, breathing oxygen, sex, hormones, brains, and all the rest-inventions we use, some of them, minute-by-minute without ever wondering who devised them and how much we owe to these unknown benefactors, in a chain 100 billion links long. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1345:There is something stunningly narrow about how the Anthropic Principle is phrased. Yes, only certain laws and constants of nature are consistent with our kind of life. But essentially the same laws and constants are required to make a rock. So why not talk about a Universe designed so rocks could one day come to be, and strong and weak Lithic Principles? If stones could philosophize, I imagine Lithic Principles would be at the intellectual frontiers. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1346:As agonizing a disease as cancer is, I do not think it can be said that our civilization is threatened by it. ... But a very plausible case can be made that our civilization is fundamentally threatened by the lack of adequate fertility control. Exponential increases of population will dominate any arithmetic increases, even those brought about by heroic technological initiatives, in the availability of food and resources, as Malthus long ago realized. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1347:But our energies are directed far more toward war. Hypnotized by mutual mistrust, almost never concerned for the species or the planet, the nations prepare for death. And because what we are doing is so horrifying, we tend not to think of it much. But what we do not consider we are unlikely to put right.
Every thinking person fears nuclear war, and every technological state plans for it. Everyone knows it is madness, and every nation has an excuse. ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
1348:Humans may crave absolute certainty; they may aspire to it; they may pretend, as partisans of certain religions do, to have attained it. But the history of science — by far the most successful claim to knowledge accessible to humans — teaches that the most we can hope for is successive improvement in our understanding, learning from our mistakes, an asymptotic approach to the Universe, but with the proviso that absolute certainty will always elude us. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1349:A handful of sand contains about 10,000 grains, more than the number of stars we can see with the naked eye on a clear night. But the number of stars we can see is only the tiniest fraction of the number of stars that are. What we see at night is the merest smattering of the nearest stars. Meanwhile the Cosmos is rich beyond measure: the total number of stars in the universe is greater than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the planet Earth. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1350:Keeping an open mind is a virtue,” Carl Sagan wrote in The Demon-Haunted World, the last book he published, but “not so open that your brains fall out….I have a foreboding of an America when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.” That was twenty years ago. ~ Kurt Andersen, #NFDB
1351:The word "religion" comes from the Latin for "binding together," to connect that which has been sundered apart. It's a very interesting concept. And in this sense of seeking the deepest interrelations among things that superficially appear to be sundered, the objectives of religion and science, I believe, are identical or very nearly so. But the question has to do with the reliability of the truths claimed by the two fields and the methods of approach. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1352:Keeping an open mind is a virtue,” Carl Sagan wrote in The Demon-Haunted World, the last book he published, but “not so open that your brains fall out…. I have a foreboding of an America when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.” That was twenty years ago. ~ Kurt Andersen, #NFDB
1353:The cosmic calendar compresses the local history of the universe into a single year. If the universe began on January 1st it was not until May that the Milky Way formed. Other planetary systems may have appeared in June, July and August, but our Sun and Earth not until mid-September. Life arose soon after. We humans appear on the cosmic calendar so recently that our recorded history occupies only the last few seconds of the last minute of December 31st. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1354:- Taken together, the dramatic societal shifts – often in ten generations or less – provide a compelling refutation of the claim that we are condemned, without hope of reprieve, to live out our lives in a barely disguised chimpanzee social order. Moreover, the shifts are occurring so swiftly that they cannot possibly be due to natural selection. Instead our culture must be drawing forth propensities and predispositions that already reside deep within us. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1355:[N]o scientist likes to be criticized. ... But you don't reply to critics: "Wait a minute, wait a minute; this is a really good idea. I'm very fond of it. It's done you no harm. Please don't attack it." That's not the way it goes. The hard but just rule is that if the ideas don't work, you must throw them away. Don't waste any neurons on what doesn't work. Devote those neurons to new ideas that better explain the data. Valid criticism is doing you a favor. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1356:He had a natural appetite for the wonders of the Universe. He wanted to know about science. It’s just that all the science had gotten filtered out before it reached him. Our cultural motifs, our educational system, our communications media had failed this man. What the society permitted to trickle through was mainly pretense and confusion. It had never taught him how to distinguish real science from the cheap imitation. He knew nothing about how science works. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1357:If we could travel into the past, it's mind-boggling what would be possible. For one thing, history would become an experimental science, which it certainly isn't today. The possible insights into our own past and nature and origins would be dazzling. For another, we would be facing the deep paradoxes of interfering with the scheme of causality that has led to our own time and ourselves. I have no idea whether it's possible, but it's certainly worth exploring. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1358:It is very difficult to evolve by altering the deep fabric of life; any change there is likely to be lethal. But fundamental change can be accomplished by the addition of new systems on top of old ones…Thus evolution by addition and the functional preservation of the preexisting structure must occur for one of two reasons-either the old function is required as well as the new one, or there is no way of bypassing the old system that is consistent with survival. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1359:It seems to me what is called for is an exquisite balance between two conflicting needs: the most skeptical scrutiny of all hypotheses that are served up to us and at the same time a great openness to new ideas...If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you … On the other hand, if you are open to the point of gullibility and have not an ounce of skeptical sense in you, then you cannot distinguish the useful ideas from the worthless ones. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1360:The approach to Earth of Halley’s Comet in the year 66 is the probable explanation of the account by Josephus of a sword that hung over Jerusalem for a whole year. In 1066 the Normans witnessed another return of Halley’s Comet. Since it must, they thought, presage the fall of some kingdom, the comet encouraged, in some sense precipitated, the invasion of England by William the Conqueror. The comet was duly noted in a newspaper of the time, the Bayeux Tapestry. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1361:Understand people are more than a social media post. Think how many conflicting thoughts you have in a day. Think of the different contradictory positions you have held in your life. Respond to online opinions but never let one rushed opinion define a whole human being. “Every one of us,” said the physicist Carl Sagan, “is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another. ~ Matt Haig, #NFDB
1362:If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you. You become a crotchety old person convinced that nonsense is ruling the world. (There is, of course, much data to support you.) But every now and then, a new idea turns out to be on the mark, valid and wonderful. If you are too much in the habit of being skeptical about everything, you are going to miss or resent it, and either way you will be standing in the way of understanding and progress. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1363:It’s hard to talk about the Cosmos without using big numbers. I said “billion” many times on the Cosmos television series, which was seen by a great many people. But I never said “billions and billions.” For one thing, it’s too imprecise. How many billions are “billions and billions”? A few billion? Twenty billion? A hundred billion? “Billions and billions” is pretty vague. When we reconfigured and updated the series, I checked—and sure enough, I never said it. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1364:Whatever the reason we first mustered the Apollo program, however mired it was in Cold War nationalism and the instruments of death, the inescapable recognition of the unity and fragility of the Earth is its clear and luminous dividend, the unexpected final gift of Apollo . What began in deadly competition has helped us to see that global cooperation is the essential precondition for our survival.
Travel is broadening. It's time to hit the road again. ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
1365:In exact parallel to regressing people so they supposedly retrieve forgotten memories of ‘past lives’, Frankel notes that therapists can as readily progress people under hypnosis so they can ‘remember’ their futures. This elicits the same emotive intensity as in regression or in Mack’s abductee hypnosis. ‘These people are not out to deceive the therapist. They deceive themselves,’ Frankel says. They cannot distinguish their confabulations from their experiences. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1366:There are no forbidden questions in science, no matters to sensitive or delicate to be probed, no sacred truths. That openness to new ideas, combined with the most rigorous, skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, sifts the wheat from the chaff. It makes no difference how smart, august, or beloved you are. You must prove your case in the face of determined, expert criticism. Diversity and debate are valued. Opinions are encouraged to contend–substantively and in depth. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1367:...two chimpanzees were observed maltreating a chicken: One would extend some food to the fowl, encouraging it to approach; whereupon the other would thrust at it with a piece of wire it had concealed behind its back. The chicken would retreat but soon allow itself to approach once again--and be beaten once again. Here is a fine combination of behavior sometimes thought to be uniquely human: cooperation, planning a future course of action, deception and cruelty. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1368:We've tended in our cosmologies to make things familiar. Despite all our best efforts, we've not been very inventive. In the West, Heaven is placid and fluffy, and Hell is like the inside of a volcano. In many stories, both realms are governed by dominance hierarchies headed by gods or devils. Monotheists talked about the king of kings. In every culture we imagined something like our own political system running the Universe. Few found the similarity suspicious. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1369:We on Earth have just awakened to the great oceans of space and time from which we have emerged. We are the legacy of 15 billion years of cosmic evolution. We have a choice: We can enhance life and come to know the universe that made us, or we can squander our 15 billion-year heritage in meaningless self-destruction. What happens in the first second of the next cosmic year depends on what we do, here and now, with our intelligence and our knowledge of the cosmos. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1370:Eratosthenes was the director of the great library of Alexandria, the Centre of science and learning in the ancient world. Aristotle had argued that humanity was divided into Greeks and everybody else, whom he called barbarians and that the Greeks should keep themselves racially pure. He thought it was fitting for the Greeks to enslave other peoples. But Erathosthenes criticized Aristotle for his blind chauvinism, he believed there was good and bad in every nation. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1371:She had to fight against developing too combative a personality or becoming altogether a misanthrope. She suddenly caught herself. "Misanthrope" is someone who dislikes everybody, not just men.
And they certainly had a word for someone who hates women: "misogynist." But the male lexicographers had somehow neglected to coin a word for the dislike of men. They were almost entirely men themselves, she thought, and had been unable to imagine a market for such a word. ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
1372:I do not think it irresponsible to portray even the direst futures if we are to avoid them we must understand that they are possible. But where are the alternatives Where are the dreams that motivate and inspire We long for realistic maps of a world we can be proud to give to our children. Where are the cartographers of human purpose Where are the visions of hopeful futures of technology as a tool for human betterment and not a gun on hair trigger pointed at our heads ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1373:The Hindu religion is the only one of the world’s great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths.
It is the only religion in which the time scales correspond to those of modern scientific cosmology. Its cycles run from our ordinary day and night to a day and night of Brahma, 8.64 billion years long. Longer than the age of the Earth or the Sun and about half the time since the Big Bang. ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
1374:If the structure of the world with all its order and beauty is only an effect of matter left to its own universal laws of motion, and if the blind mechanics of the natural forces can evolve so glorious a product out of chaos, and can attain to such perfection of themselves, then the proof of the Divine Author which is drawn from the spectacle of the beauty of the universe wholly loses its force. Nature is thus sufficient for itself; the Divine government is unnecessary.… ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1375:El siglo XX será recordado por tres grandes innovaciones: medios sin precedentes para salvar, prolongar y mejorar la vida, medios sin precedentes para destruirla (hasta el punto de poner por vez primera en peligro nuestra civilización global) y conocimientos sin precedentes sobre nuestra propia naturaleza y la del universo. Las tres evoluciones han sido fruto de la ciencia y la tecnología, una espada de dos filos bien cortantes. Las tres tienen raíces en el pasado remoto. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1376:What distinguishes our species is thought. The cerebral cortex is in a way a liberation. We need no longer be trapped in the genetically inherited behavior patterns of lizards and baboons: territoriality and aggression and dominance hierarchies. We are each of us largely responsible for what gets put in to our brains. For what as adults we wind up caring for and knowing about. No longer at the mercy of the reptile brain we can change ourselves. Think of the possibilities. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1377:Kepler’s third or harmonic law states that the squares of the periods of the planets (the times for them to complete one orbit) are proportional to the cubes of their average distance from the Sun; the more distant the planet, the more slowly it moves, but according to a precise mathematical law: P2 = a3, where P represents the period of revolution of the planet about the Sun, measured in years, and a the distance of the planet from the Sun measured in “astronomical units. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1378:The scientific way of thinking is at once imaginative and disciplined. This is central to its success. Science invites us to let the facts in, even when they don’t conform to our preconceptions. It counsels us to carry alternative hypotheses in our heads and see which best fit the facts. It urges on us a delicate balance between no-holds-barred openness to new ideas, however heretical, and the most rigorous skeptical scrutiny of everything—new ideas and established wisdom. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1379:The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion or in politics, but it is not the path to knowledge, and there's no place for it in the endeavor of science. We do not know beforehand where fundamental insights will arise from about our mysterious and lovely solar system. The history of our study of our solar system shows us clearly that accepted and conventional ideas are often wrong, and that fundamental insights can arise from the most unexpected sources. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1380:What do we really want from religion? Palliatives? Therapy? Comfort? Do we want reassuring fables or an understanding of our actual circumstances? Dismay that the Universe does not conform to our preferences seems childish. You might think that grown-ups would be ashamed to put such thoughts into print. The fashionable way of doing this is not to blame the Universe -- which seems truly pointless -- but rather to blame the means by which we know the Universe, namely science. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1381:The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1382:The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1383:The major religions on the Earth contradict each other left and right. You can't all be correct. And what if all of you are wrong? It's a possibility, you know. You must care about the truth, right? Well, the way to winnow through all the differing contentions is to be skeptical. I'm not any more skeptical about your religious beliefs than I am about every new scientific idea I hear about. But in my line of work, they're called hypotheses, not inspiration and not revelation. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1384:At the Stourbridge Fair in 1663, at age twenty, he purchased a book on astrology, “out of a curiosity to see what there was in it.” He read it until he came to an illustration which he could not understand, because he was ignorant of trigonometry. So he purchased a book on trigonometry but soon found himself unable to follow the geometrical arguments. So he found a copy of Euclid’s Elements of Geometry, and began to read. Two years later he invented the differential calculus. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1385:Faith is clearly not enough for many people. They crave hard evidence, scientific proof. They long for the scientific seal of approval, but are unwilling to put up with the rigorous standards of evidence that impart credibility to that seal. What a relief it would be: doubt reliably abolished! Then the irksome burden of looking after ourselves would be lifted. We're worried - and for good reason - about what it means for the human future if we have only ourselves to rely upon. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1386:Killing an enemy with teeth and bare hands is emotionally far more demanding than pulling a trigger or pressing a button. In inventing tools and weapons, in contriving civilization, we have disinhibited the controls - sometimes thoughtlessly and inadvertently, but sometimes with cool premeditation. If the beasts who are our nearest relatives engaged recklessly in … mass murder they would have rendered themselves extinct. If our non-human ancestors did it, we would not be here. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1387:Scientists constantly get clobbered with the idea that we spent 27 billion dollars on the Apollo programs, and are asked "What more do you want?" We didn't spend it; it was done for political reasons. ... Apollo was a response to the Bay of Pigs fiasco and to the successful orbital flight of Yuri Gagarin. President Kennedy's objective was not to find out the origin of the moon by the end of the decade; rather it was to put a man on the moon and bring him back, and we did that. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1388:'In his celebrated book, 'On Liberty', the English philosopher John Stuart Mill argued that silencing an opinion is "a peculiar evil." If the opinion is right, we are robbed of the "opportunity of exchanging error for truth"; and if it's wrong, we are deprived of a deeper understanding of the truth in its "collision with error." If we know only our own side of the argument, we hardly know even that: it becomes stale, soon learned by rote, untested, a pallid and lifeless truth.' ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1389:And if the world does not in all respects correspond to our wishes, is this the fault of science, or of those who would impose their wishes on the world? All the mammals—and many other animals as well—experience emotions: fear, lust, hope, pain, love, hate, the need to be led. Humans may brood about the future more, but there is nothing in our emotions unique to us. On the other hand, no other species does science as much or as well as we. How then can science be “dehumanizing”? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1390:Science is much more than a body of knowledge. It is a way of thinking. This is central to its success. Science invites us to let the facts in, even when they don't conform to our preconceptions. It counsels us to carry alternative hypotheses in our heads and see which ones best match the facts. It urges on us a fine balance between no-holds-barred openness to new ideas, however heretical, and the most rigorous skeptical scrutiny of everything - new ideas and established wisdom. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1391:Somewhere else there might be very exotic biologies and technologies and societies. In a cosmic setting vast and old beyond ordinary human understanding, we are a little lonely; and we ponder the ultimate significance, if any, of our tiny but exquisite blue planet. The search for extraterrestrial intelligence is the search for a generally acceptable cosmic context for the human species. In the deepest sense, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is a search for ourselves. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1392:The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1393:Christianity may be good and Satanism evil. Under the Constitution, however, both are neutral. This is an important, but difficult, concept for many law enforcement officers to accept. They are paid to uphold the penal code, not the Ten Commandments … The fact is that far more crime and child abuse has been committed by zealots in the name of God, Jesus and Mohammed than has ever been committed in the name of Satan. Many people don’t like that statement, but few can argue with it. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1394:I believe that even a smattering of such findings in modern science and mathematics is far more compelling and exciting than most of the doctrines of pseudoscience, whose practitioners were condemned as early as the fifth century B.C. by the Ionian philosopher Heraclitus as “nigh -walkers, magicians, priests of Bacchus, priestesses of the wine-vat, mystery-mongers.” But science is more intricate and subtle, reveals a much richer imiverse, and powerfully evokes our sense of wonder. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1395:The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience..... To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1396:We are rare and precious because we are alive, because we can think as well as we can. We are privileged to influence and perhaps control our future. I believe we have an obligation to fight for life on Earth - not just for ourselves, but for all those, humans and others, who came before us, and to whom we are beholden, and for all those who, if we are wise enough, will come after. There is no cause more urgent, no dedication more fitting than to protect the future of our species. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1397:Coal, oil and gas are called fossil fuels, because they are mostly made of the fossil remains of beings from long ago. The chemical energy within them is a kind of stored sunlight originally accumulated by ancient plants. Our civilization runs by burning the remains of humble creatures who inhabited the Earth hundreds of millions of years before the first humans came on the scene. Like some ghastly cannibal cult, we subsist on the dead bodies of our ancestors and distant relatives. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1398:...the idea of a spiritual part of our nature that survives death, the notion of an afterlife, ought to be easy for religions and nations to sell. This is not an issue of which we might anticipate widespread skepticism. People will want to believe it, even if the evidence is meager to nil... compelling testimony ... provides that our personality, character, memory ... resides in the matter of the brain, it is easy not to focus on it, to find ways to evade the weight of the evidence. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1399:universe is almost incompatible with life—or at least what we understand as necessary for life: Even if every star in a hundred billion galaxies had an Earthlike planet, without heroic technological measures life could prosper in only about 10-37 the volume of the Universe. For clarity, let’s write it out: only 0.000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 1 of our universe is hospitable to life. Thirty-six zeroes before the one. The rest is cold, radiation-riddled black vacuum. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1400:The Earth is the only world known so far to harbour life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit? Yes. Settle? Not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. ... To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve, and cherish, the pale blue dot; the only home we've ever known. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1401:Tom Paine wrote in The Age of Reason: Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what one does not believe. It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1402:How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, “This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant?” Instead they say, “No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.” A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1403:In his celebrated little book On Liberty, the English philosopher John Stuart Mill argued that silencing an opinion is “a peculiar evil.” If the opinion is right, we are robbed of the “opportunity of exchanging error for truth”; and if it’s wrong, we are deprived of a deeper understanding of the truth in “its collision with error.” If we know only our own side of the argument, we hardly know even that; it becomes stale, soon learned only by rote, untested, a pallid and lifeless truth. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1404:Somewhere in the steaming jungles of the Carboniferous Period there emerged an organism that for the first time in the history of the world had more information in its brains than in its genes. It was an early reptile which, were we to come upon it in these sophisticated times, we would probably not describe as exceptionally intelligent… Much of the history of life since the Carboniferous Period can be described as the gradual (and certainly incomplete) dominance of brains over genes. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1405:The business of scepticism is to be dangerous. Scepticism challenges established institutions. If we teach everybody, including, say, high school students, habits of sceptical thought, they will probably not restrict their scepticism to UFOs, aspirin commercials and 35,000-year-old channellees. Maybe they’ll start asking awkward questions about economic, or social, or political, or religious institutions. Perhaps they’ll challenge the opinions of those in power. Then where would we be? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1406:My general impression about people like Steve Gould and Carl Sagan and so on is that when they disappear as individuals and are no longer appearing on the stage and they are no longer writing, that their lifetime of acknowledgement by the general reading public is not very long... There were many people in the 19th century who were equally famous people who gave working man's lectures, supporters of Darwin, we as scholars know their names but the general public never heard of them. ~ Richard Lewontin, #NFDB
1407:The Hindu religion is the only one of the world’s great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths. It is the only religion in which the time scales correspond, no doubt by accident, to those of modern scientific cosmology. Its cycles run from our ordinary day and night to a day and night of Brahma, 8.64 billion years long, longer than the age of the Earth or the Sun and about half the time since the Big Bang. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1408:I do not consider myself a religious person in the usual sense, but there is a religious aspect to some highs. The heightened sensitivity in all areas gives me a feeling of communion with my surroundings, both animate and inanimate. Sometimes a kind of existential perception of the absurd comes over me and I see with awful certainty the hypocrisies and posturing of myself and my fellow man. And at other times, there is a different sense of the absurd, a playful and whimsical awareness. . . . ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1409:One of the great commandments of science is, "Mistrust arguments from authority." (Scientists, being primates, and thus given to dominance hierarchies, of course do not always follow this commandment.) Too many such arguments have proved too painfully wrong. Authorities must prove their contentions like everybody else. This independence of science, its occasional unwillingness to accept conventional wisdom, makes it dangerous to doctrines less self critical, or with pretensions of certitude. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1410:All that we have seen is something of a vast and intricate and lovely universe. There is no particular theological conclusion that comes out of an exercise such as the one we have just gone through. What is more, when we understand something of the astronomical dynamics, the evolution of worlds, we recognize that worlds are born and worlds die, they have lifetimes just as humans do, and therefore that there is a great deal of suffering and death in the cosmos if there is a great deal of life. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1411:The issue, as correctly emphasized by Carl Sagan, is the probability of the evolution of high intelligence and an electronic civilization on an inhabited world. Once we have life (and almost surely it will be very different from life on Earth), what is the probability of its developing a lineage with high intelligence? On Earth, among millions of lineages of organisms and perhaps 50 billion speciation events, only one led to high intelligence; this makes me believe in its utter improbability. ~ Ernst Mayr, #NFDB
1412:Compared to a star, we are like mayflies, fleeting ephemeral creatures who live out their whole lives in the course of a single day. From the point of view of a mayfly, human beings are stolid, boring, almost entirely immovable, offering hardly a hint that they ever do anything. From the point of view of a star, a human being is a tiny flash, one of billions of brief lives flickering tenuously on the surface of a strangely cold, anomalously solid, exotically remote sphere of silicate and iron. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1413:Every aspect of Nature reveals a deep mystery and touches our sense of wonder and awe. Those afraid of the universe as it really is, those who pretend to nonexistent knowledge and envision a Cosmos centered on human beings will prefer the fleeting comforts of superstition. They avoid rather than confront the world. But those with the courage to explore the weave and structure of the Cosmos, even where it differs profoundly from their wishes and prejudices, will penetrate its deepest mysteries. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1414:It is pointless to worry about the possible malevolent intentions of an advanced civilization with whom we might make contact. It is more likely that the mere fact they have survived so long means they have learned to live with themselves and others. Perhaps our fears about extraterrestrial contact are merely a projection of our own backwardness, an expression of our guilty conscience about our past history: the ravages that have been visited on civilizations only slightly more backward than we. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1415:What functions do dreams serve today? One view, published in a reputable scientific paper, holds that the function of dreams is to wake us up a little, every now and then, to see if anyone is about to eat us. But dreams occupy such a relatively small part of normal sleep that this explanation does not seem very compelling. Moreover, as we have seen, the evidence points just the other way: today it is the mammalian predators, not the mammalian prey, who characteristically have dream-filled sleep. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1416:We are the local embodiment of a Cosmos grown to self-awareness. We have begun to contemplate our origins: starstuff pondering the stars; organized assemblages of ten billion billion billion atoms considering the evolution of atoms; tracing the long journey by which, here at least, consciousness arose. Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth. Our obligation to survive is owed not just to ourselves but also to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1417:Pero ¿por qué hemos de empeñarnos en pensar que el universo fue hecho para nosotros? ¿Por qué resulta tan atractiva esa idea? ¿Por qué seguimos alimentándola? ¿Es tan precaria nuestra autoestima que no podemos conformarnos con nada inferior a un universo hecho a nuestra medida?
Naturalmente, la cuestión apela a nuestra vanidad. "Lo que un hombre desea, también lo imagina como cierto", dijo Demóstenes. "La luz de la fe nos hace ver lo que creemos", admitió alegremente santo Tomás de Aquino. ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
1418:Plainly, there's something within me that's ready to believe in life after death. And it's not the least bit interested in whether there's any sober evidence for it.
So I don't guffaw at the woman who visits her husband's grave and chats him up every now and then, maybe on the anniversary of his death. It's not hard to understand. And if I have difficulties with the ontological status of who she's talking to, that's all right.
That's not what this is about. This is about humans being human. ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
1419:Coal, oil and gas are called fossil fuels, because they are mostly made of the fossil remains of beings from long ago. The chemical energy within them is a kind of stored sunlight originally accumulated by ancient plants. Our civilization runs by burning the remains of humble creatures who inhabited the Earth hundreds of millions of years before the first humans came on the scene. Like some ghastly cannibal cult, we subsist on the dead bodies of our ancestors and distant relatives. - Dr. Carl Sagan ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1420:In college, in the early 1950s, I began to learn a little about how science works, the secrets of its great success, how rigorous the standards of evidence must be if we are really to know something is true, how many false starts and dead ends have plagued human thinking, how our biases can colour our interpretation of evidence, and how often belief systems widely held and supported by the political, religious and academic hierarchies turn out to be not just slightly in error, but grotesquely wrong. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1421:We must surrender our skepticism only in the face of rock-solid evidence. Science demands a tolerance for ambiguity. Where we are ignorant, we withhold belief. Whatever annoyance the uncertainty engenders serves a higher purpose: It drives us to accumulate better data. This attitude is the difference between science and so much else. Science offers little in the way of cheap thrills. The standards of evidence are strict. But when followed they allow us to see far, illuminating even a great darkness. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1422:Magnetism also was an influence felt at a distance, and in a stunning anticipation of the idea of universal gravitation, Kepler suggested that the underlying cause was akin to magnetism: My aim in this is to show that the celestial machine is to be likened not to a divine organism but rather to a clockwork …, insofar as nearly all the manifold movements are carried out by means of a single, quite simple magnetic force, as in the case of a clockwork [where] all motions [are caused] by a simple weight. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1423:Consideraba que había aprobado la prueba por pura casualidad, ya que por azar había respondido bien a numerosas preguntas de elección múltiple. Con escasos conocimientos, solo lo necesario para excluir todas las respuestas menos dos, tenía una posibilidad entre mil de obtener todas las respuestas correctas, se dijo. Para lograr veinte, las posibilidades eran de una entre un millón. Sin embargo, ese mismo test lo habían realizado quizás un millón de jóvenes en todo el país. Alguno había de tener suerte. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1424:The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what's true. We have a method, and that method helps us to reach not absolute truth, only asymptotic approaches to the truth — never there, just closer and closer, always finding vast new oceans of undiscovered possibilities. Cleverly designed experiments are the key. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1425:There are many other (besides testosterone) behaviour-eliciting hormones fundamental for humen well-being, including estrogen and progesterone in females. The fact that complex behavioural patterns can be triggered by a tiny concentration of moleculas coursing through the bloodstream, and that different animals of the same species generate different amounts of these hormones, is something worth thinking about when it's time to judge such matters as free will, individual responsibility, and law and order. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1426:But there was also a notable decline in many quarters of the world of jingoist rhetoric and puerile self-congratulatory nationalism. There was a sense of the human species, billions of tiny beings spread over the world, collectively presented with an unprecedented opportunity, or even a grave common danger. To many, it seemed absurd for the contending nation states to continue their deadly quarrels when faced with a nonhuman civilization of vastly greater capabilities. There was a whiff of hope in the air. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1427:We have held the peculiar notion that a person or society that is a little different from us, whoever we are, is somehow strange or bizarre, to be distrusted or loathed. Think of the negative connotations of words like alien or outlandish. And yet the monuments and cultures of each of our civilizations merely represent different ways of being human. An extraterrestrial visitor, looking at the differences among human beings and their societies, would find those differences trivial compared to the similarities. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1428:That place, called the heliopause, is one definition of the outer boundary of the Empire of the Sun. But the Voyager spacecraft will plunge on, penetrating the heliopause sometime in the middle of the twenty-first century, skimming through the ocean of space, never to enter another solar system, destined to wander through eternity far from the stellar islands and to complete its first circumnavigation of the massive center of the Milky Way a few hundred million years from now. We have embarked on epic voyages. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1429:How vast those Orbs must be, and how inconsiderable this Earth, the Theatre upon which all our mighty Designs, all our Navigations, and all our Wars are transacted, is when compared to them. A very fit consideration, and matter of Reflection, for those Kings and Princes who sacrifice the Lives of so many People, only to flatter their Ambition in being Masters of some pitiful corner of this small Spot. —Christiaan Huygens, New Conjectures Concerning the Planetary Worlds, Their Inhabitants and Productions, c. 1690 ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1430:For all the tenure of humans on Earth, the night sky had been a companion and an inspiration. The stars were comforting. They seemed to demonstrate that the heavens were created for the benefit and instruction of humans. This pathetic conceit became the conventional wisdom worldwide. No culture was free of it. Some people found in the skies an aperture to the religious sensibility. Many were awestruck and humbled by the glory and scale of the cosmos. Others were stimulated to the most extravagant flights of fancy. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1431:Before we invented civilization our ancestors lived mainly in the open out under the sky. Before we devised artificial lights and atmospheric pollution and modern forms of nocturnal entertainment we watched the stars. There were practical calendar reasons of course but there was more to it than that. Even today the most jaded city dweller can be unexpectedly moved upon encountering a clear night sky studded with thousands of twinkling stars. When it happens to me after all these years it still takes my breath away. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1432:It is sometimes said that scientists are unromantic, that their passion to figure out robs the world of beauty and mystery. But is it not stirring to understand how the world actually works — that white light is made of colors, that color is the way we perceive the wavelengths of light, that transparent air reflects light, that in so doing it discriminates among the waves, and that the sky is blue for the same reason that the sunset is red? It does no harm to the romance of the sunset to know a little bit about it. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1433:Quickly capping 363 oil well fires in a war zone is impossible. The fires would burn out of control until they put themselves out... The resulting soot might well stretch over all of South Asia... It could be carried around the world... [and] the consequences could be dire. Beneath such a pall sunlight would be dimmed, temperatures lowered and droughts more frequent. Spring and summer frosts may be expected... This endangerment of the food supplies... appears to be likely enough that it should affect the war plans. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1434:Mi smo ovdašnje utjelovljenje jednog kozmosa koji je izrastao do samosvijesti. Počeli smo razmišljati o našem porijeklu: zvjezdana tvar koja razmišlja o zvijezdama; organizirani skupovi od deset milijardi milijarda atoma koji razmišljaju o evoluciji atoma slijedeći u mislima dugi put na kraju kojeg je, barem ovdje, niknula svijest. Naša je odanost upućena ljudskoj vrsti i planetu. Mi govorimo u ime Zemlje. Obavezu da preživimo ne dugujemo samo sebi samima već i tom kozmosu, prostranom i golemom iz kojeg smo ponikli. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1435:I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us—then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1436:Scientists can routinely predict a solar eclipse, to the minute, a millennium in advance. You can go to the witch doctor to lift the spell that causes your pernicious anaemia, or you can take Vitamin B12. If you want to save your child from polio, you can pray or you can inoculate. If you're interested in the sex of your unborn child, you can consult plumb-bob danglers all you want . . . but they'll be right, on average, only one time in two. If you want real accuracy . . . try amniocentesis and sonograms. Try science. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1437:Perhaps the most striking aspect of this entire subject is that there are nonhuman primates so close to the edge of language, so willing to learn, so entirely competent in its use and inventive in its application once the language is taught. But this raises a curious question: Why are they all on the edge? Why are there no nonhuman primates with an existing complex gestural language? One possible answer, it seems to me, is that humans have systematically exterminated those other primates who displayed signs of intelligence. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1438:I am convinced there are genuine and valid levels of perception available with cannabis (and probably with other drugs) which are, through the defects of our society and our educational system, unavailable to us without such drugs. Such a remark applies not only to self-awareness and to intellectual pursuits, but also to perceptions of real people, a vastly enhanced sensitivity to facial expression, intonations, and choice of words which sometimes yields a rapport so close it's as if two people are reading each other's minds. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1439:He argued that we are so helpless at birth that, if the first human infants had been put into the world on their own, they would immediately have died. From this Anaximander concluded that human beings arose from other animals with more self-reliant newborns: He proposed the spontaneous origin of life in mud, the first animals being fish covered with spines. Some descendants of these fishes eventually abandoned the water and moved to dry land, where they evolved into other animals by the transmutation of one form into another. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1440:Some foolish men declare that a Creator made the world. The doctrine that the world was created is ill-advised, and should be rejected. If God created the world, where was He before creation?… How could God have made the world without any raw material? If you say He made this first, and then the world, you are faced with an endless regression … Know that the world is uncreated, as time itself is, without beginning and end. And it is based on the principles … —The Mahapurana (The Great Legend), Jinasena (India, ninth century) ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1441:Vast migrations of people—some voluntary, most not—have shaped the human condition. More of us flee from war, oppression, and famine today than at any other time in human history. As the Earth’s climate changes in the coming decades, there are likely to be far greater numbers of environmental refugees. Better places will always call to us. Tides of people will continue to ebb and flow across the planet. But the lands we run to now have already been settled. Other people, often unsympathetic to our plight, are there before us. * ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1442:There are some who look on our global problems here on Earth—at our vast national antagonisms, our nuclear arsenals, our growing populations, the disparity between the poor and the affluent, shortages of food and resources, and our inadvertent alterations of the natural environment—and conclude that we live in a system that has suddenly become unstable, a system that is destined soon to collapse. There are others who believe that our problems are soluble, that humanity is still in its childhood, that one day soon we will grow up. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1443:There was a most revealing rule: Slaves were to remain illiterate. In the antebellum South, whites who taught a slave to read were severely punished. “[To] make a contented slave,” Bailey later wrote, “it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision, and, as far as possible, to annihilate the power of reason.” This is why the slaveholders must control what slaves hear and see and think. This is why reading and critical thinking are dangerous, indeed subversive, in an unjust society. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1444:If we can't think for ourselves, if we're unwilling to question authority, then we're just putty in the hands of those in power. But if the citizens are educated and form their own opinions, then those in power work for us. In every country, we should be teaching our children the scientific method and the reasons for a Bill of Rights. With it comes a certain decency, humility and community spirit. In the demon-haunted world that we inhabit by virtue of being human, this may be all that stands between us and the enveloping darkness. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1445:A deception arises, sometimes innocently but collaboratively, sometimes with cynical premeditation. Usually the victim is caught up in a powerful emotion - wonder, fear, greed, grief. Credulous acceptance of baloney can cost you money; that’s what P.T. Barnum meant when he said, “There’s a sucker born every minute’. But it can be much more dangerous than that, and when governments and societies lose the capacity for critical thinking, the results can be catastrophic, however sympathetic we may be to those who have bought the baloney. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1446:Another glorious feature of many modern science museums is a movie theater showing IMAX or OMNIMAX films. In some cases the screen is ten stories tall and wraps around you. The Smithsonian's National Air & Space Museu, the popular museum on Earth, has premiered in its Langley Theater some of the best of these films. 'To Fly' brings a catch to my throat even after five or six viewings. I've seen religious leaders of many denominations witness 'Blue Planet' and be converted on the spot to the need to protect the Earth's environment ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1447:She began to understand why lovers talk baby talk to one another. There was no other socially acceptable circumstance in which the children inside her were permitted to come out. If the one-year-old, the five-year-old, the twelve-year-old, and the twenty-year-old all find compatible personalities in the beloved, there is a real chance to keep all of these sub-personas happy. Love ends their long loneliness. Perhaps the depth of love can be calibrated by the number of different selves that are actively involved in a given relationship. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1448:She began to understand why lovers talk baby talk to one another. There was no other socially acceptable circumstance in which the children inside her were permitted to come out. If the one-year-old, the five-year- old, the twelve-year-old, and the twenty-year-old all find compatible personalities in the beloved, there is a real chance to keep all of these sub-personas happy. Love ends their long loneliness. Perhaps the depth of love can be calibrated by the number of different selves that are actively involved in a given relationship. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1449:[Science] works. It is not perfect. It can be misused. It is only a tool. But it is by far the best tool we have, self-correcting, ongoing, applicable to everything. It has two rules. First: there are no sacred truths; all assumptions must be critically examined; arguments from authority are
worthless. Second: whatever is inconsistent with the facts must be discarded or revised. We must understand the Cosmos as it is and not confuse how it is with how we wish it to be. The obvious is sometimes false; the unexpected is sometimes true. ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
1450:In every such society, there is a cherished world of myth and metaphor which co-exists with the workaday world. Efforts to reconcile the two are made, and any rough edges at the joints tend to be off-limits and ignored. We compartmentalize. Some scientists do this too, effortlessly stepping between the skeptical world of science and the credulous world of religious belief without skipping a beat. Of course, the greater the mismatch between these two worlds, the more difficult it is to be comfortable, with untroubled conscience, with both. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1451:A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called "leaves") imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time ― proof that humans can work magic. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1452:I can talk about my father in ordinary conversation without feeling more than the slightest pang of loss. But if I permit myself to remember him closely—his sense of humor, say, or his passionate egalitarianism—the facade crumbles and I want to weep because he is gone. There is no question that language can almost free us of feeling. Perhaps that is one of its functions—to let us consider the world without in the process becoming entirely overwhelmed by feeling. If so, then the invention of language is simultaneously a blessing and a curse. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1453:The claim is also sometimes made that science is as arbitrary or irrational as all other claims to knowledge, or that reason itself is an illusion. As Ethan Allen said Those who invalidate reason ought seriously to consider whether they argue against reason with or without reason; if with reason, then they establish the principle that they are labouring to dethrone. If they argue without reason, which they must do, in order to be consistent with themselves, they are out of reach of rational conviction, nor do they deserve a rational argument. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1454:Seances occur only in darkened rooms, where the ghostly visitors can be seen dimly at best. If we turn up the lights a little, so we have a chance to see what’s going on, the spirits vanish. They’re shy, we’re told, and some of us believe it. In twentieth-century parapsychology laboratories, there is the ‘observer effect’: those described as gifted psychics find that their powers diminish markedly whenever sceptics arrive, and disappear altogether in the presence of a conjuror as skilled as James Randi. What they need is darkness and gullibility. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1455:Individual killings and wars on the largest scale are, he said, two ends of a continuum, an unbroken curve. It follows, not only in a trivial sense but also I believe in a very deep psychological sense, that war is murder writ large. When our well-being is threatened, when our illusions about ourselves are challenged, we tend - some of us at least - to fly into murderous rages. And when the same provocations are applied to nation states, they, too, sometimes fly into murderous rages, egged on often enough by those seeking personal power or profit. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1456:I remember that one time Carl Sagan was giving a talk, and he spelled out, in a kind of withering succession, these great theories of demotion that science has dealt us, all of the ways in which science is telling us we are not who we would like to believe we are. At the end of it, a young man came up to him and he said: "What do you give us in return? Now that you've taken everything from us? What meaning is left, if everything that I've been taught since I was a child turns out to be untrue?" Carl looked at him and said, Do something meaningful. ~ Ann Druyan, #NFDB
1457:It is now almost possible to assign color combinations, based on the colors of clouds and sky, to every planet in the Solar System—from the sulfur-stained skies of Venus and the rusty skies of Mars to the aquamarine of Uranus and the hypnotic and unearthly blue of Neptune. Sacre-jaunt, sacre-rouge, sacre-vert. Perhaps they will one day adorn the flags of distant human outposts in the Solar System, in that time when the new frontiers are sweeping out from the Sun to the stars, and the explorers are surrounded by the endless black of space. Sacre-noir. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1458:Humans — who enslave, castrate, experiment on, and fillet other animals — have had an understandable penchant for pretending animals do not feel pain. A sharp distinction between humans and 'animals' is essential if we are to bend them to our will, make them work for us, wear them, eat them — without any disquieting tinges of guilt or regret. It is unseemly of us, who often behave so unfeelingly toward other animals, to contend that only humans can suffer. The behavior of other animals renders such pretensions specious. They are just too much like us. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1459:El escepticismo tiene por función ser peligroso. Es un desafío a las instituciones establecidas. Si enseñamos a todo el mundo, incluyendo por ejemplo a los estudiantes de educación secundaria, unos hábitos de pensamiento escéptico, probablemente no limitarán su escepticismo a los ovnis, los anuncios de aspirinas y los profetas canalizados de 35.000 años. Quizá empezarán a hacer preguntas importantes sobre las instituciones económicas, sociales, políticas o religiosas. Quizá desafiarán las opiniones de los que están en el poder. ¿Dónde estaremos entonces? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1460:Imagine a room awash in gasoline, and there are two implacable enemies in that room. One of them has nine thousand matches. The other has seven thousand matches. Each of them is concerned about who's ahead, who's stronger. Well that's the kind of situation we are actually in. The amount of weapons that are available to the United States and the Soviet Union are so bloated, so grossly in excess of what's needed to dissuade the other, that if it weren't so tragic, it would be laughable. What is necessary is to reduce the matches and to clean up the gasoline. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1461:We’ve arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements—transportation, communications, and all other industries; agriculture, medicine, education, entertainment, protecting the environment; and even the key democratic institution of voting—profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1462:In less than ten thousand years, domestication has increased the weight of wool grown by sheep from less than one kilogram of rough hairs to ten or twenty kilograms of uniform, fine down; or the volume of milk given by cattle during a lactation period from a few hundred to a million cubic centimeters. If artificial selection can make such major changes in so short a period of time, what must natural selection, working over billions of years, be capable of? The answer is all the beauty and diversity of the biological world. Evolution is a fact, not a theory. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1463:Imagine, a room, awash in gasoline. And there are two implacable enemies in that room. One of them has nine thousand matches. The other has seven thousand matches. Each of them is concerned about who's ahead, who's stronger. Well, that's the kind of situation we are actually in. The amount of weapons that are available to the United States and the Soviet Union are so bloated, so grossly in excess of what's needed to dissuade the other, that if it weren't so tragic, it would be laughable. What is necessary is to reduce the matches and to clean up the gasoline. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1464:A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called "leaves") imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person—perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew each other. Books break the shackles of time, proof that humans can work magic. ~ Carl Sagan, Cosmos (1980), p. 279., #NFDB
1465:Teller contended, not implausibly, that hydrogen bombs keep the peace, or at least prevent thermonuclear war, because the consequences of warfare between nuclear powers are now too dangerous. We haven't had a nuclear war yet, have we? But all such arguments assume that the nuclear-armed nations are and always will be, without exception, rational actors, and that bouts of anger and revenge and madness will never overtake their leaders (or military and secret police officers in charge of nuclear weapons). In the century of Hitler and Stalin, this seems ingenuous. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1466:I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time - [...] when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1467:I never said it. Honest. Oh, I said there are maybe 100 billion galaxies and 10 billion trillion stars. It's hard to talk about the Cosmos without using big numbers. I said "billion" many times on the Cosmos television series, which was seen by a great many people. But I never said "billions and billions." For one thing, it's too imprecise. How many billions are "billions and billions"? A few billion? Twenty billion? A hundred billion? "Billions and billions" is pretty vague. When we reconfigured and updated the series, I checked-and sure enough, I never said it. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1468:In science it often happens that scientists say, "You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken," and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion. ~ Carl Sagan (1987) Keynote address at CSICOP conference, as quoted in Do Science and the Bible Conflict? (2003) by Judson Poling, p. 30, #NFDB
1469:In the way that scepticism is sometimes applied to issues of public concern, there is a tendency to belittle, to condescend, to ignore the fact that, deluded or not, supporters of superstition and pseudoscience are human beings with real feelings, who, like the sceptics, are trying to figure out how the world works and what our role in it might be. Their motives are in many cases consonant with science. If their culture has not given them all the tools they need to pursue this great quest, let us temper our criticism with kindness. None of us comes fully equipped. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1470:In the way that skepticism is sometimes applied to issues of public concern, there is a tendency to belittle, to condescend, to ignore the fact that, deluded or not, supporters of superstition and pseudoscience are human beings with real feelings, who, like the skeptics, are trying to figure out how the world works and what our role in it might be. Their motives are in many cases consonant with science. If their culture has not given them all the tools they need to pursue this great quest, let us temper our criticism with kindness. None of us comes fully equipped. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1471:- Ten thousand years ago, when we were divided into many small groups, the propensities may have served our species well. We can understand why they should be easy to evoke, why they are stock in trade of every demagogue and hack politician. But we cannot wait for natural selection to further mitigate these ancient primate algorithms. That would take too long. We must work with what tools we have – to understand who we are, how we got to be that way, and how to transcend our deficiencies. Then we can begin to create a society less apt to bring out the worst in us. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1472:And yet there is no sign of humans in this picture, not our reworking of the Earth’s surface, not our machines, not ourselves: We are too small and our statecraft is too feeble to be seen by a spacecraft between the Earth and the Moon. From this vantage point, our obsession with nationalism is nowhere in evidence. The Apollo pictures of the whole Earth conveyed to multitudes something well known to astronomers: On the scale of worlds—to say nothing of stars or galaxies—humans are inconsequential, a thin film of life on an obscure and solitary lump of rock and metal. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1473:But we humans now represent a new and perhaps decisive factor. Our intelligence and our technology have given us the power to affect the climate. How will we use this power? Are we willing to tolerate ignorance and complacency in matters that affect the entire human family? Do we value short-term advantages above the welfare of the Earth? Or will we think on longer time scales, with concern for our children and our grandchildren, to understand and protect the complex life-support systems of our planet? The Earth is a tiny and fragile world. It needs to be cherished. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1474:The time scale for evolutionary or genetic change is very long. A characteristic period for the emergence of one advanced species from another is perhaps a hundred thousand years; and very often the difference in behavior between closely related species -say, lions and tigers- do not seem very great... But today we do not have ten million years to wait for the next advance. We live in a time when our world is changing at an unprecedented rate. While the changes are largely of our own making, they cannot be ignored. We must adjust and adapt and control, or we perish. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1475:But the history of science—by far the most successful claim to knowledge accessible to humans—teaches that the most we can hope for is successive improvement in our understanding, learning from our mistakes, an asymptotic approach to the Universe, but with the proviso that absolute certainty will always elude us. We will always be mired in error. The most each generation can hope for is to reduce the error bars a little, and to add to the body of data to which error bars apply. The error bar is a pervasive, visible self-assessment of the reliability of our knowledge. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1476:An atheist is someone who is certain that God does not exist, someone who has compelling evidence against the existence of God. I know of no such compelling evidence. Because God can be relegated to remote times and places and to uptime causes, we would have to know a great deal more about the Universe than we do now to be sure that no such God exists. To be certain of the existence of God and you be certain of the nonexistence of God seem to me to be the confident extremes in a subject so riddled with doubt and uncertainty as to inspire very little confidence indeed. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1477:An atheist is someone who is certain that God does not exist, someone who has compelling evidence against the existence of God. I know of no such compelling evidence. Because God can be relegated to remote times and places and to ultimate causes, we would have to know a great deal more about the universe than we do now to be sure that no such God exists. To be certain of the existence of God and to be certain of the nonexistence of God seem to me to be the confident extremes in a subject so riddled with doubt and uncertainty as to inspire very little confidence indeed. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1478:The time scale for evolutionary or genetic change is very long. A characteristic period for the emergence of one advanced species from another is perhaps a hundred thousand years; and very often the difference in behavior between closely related
species-say, lions and tigers-do not seem very great... But today we do not have ten million years to wait for the next advance. We live in a time when our world is changing at an unprecedented rate. While the changes are largely of our own making, they cannot be ignored. We must adjust and adapt and
control, or we perish. ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
1479:Nós criamos uma civilização global em que os elementos mais cruciais — o transporte, as comunicações e todas as outras indústrias, a agricultura, a medicina, a educação, o entretenimento, a proteção ao meio ambiente e até a importante instituição democrática do voto — dependem profundamente da ciência e da tecnologia. Também criamos uma ordem em que quase ninguém compreende a ciência e a tecnologia. É uma receita para o desastre. Podemos escapar ilesos por algum tempo, porém mais cedo ou mais tarde essa mistura inflamável de ignorância e poder vai explodir na nossa cara. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1480:Por regla general, las sociedades humanas no son innovadoras, sino más bien jerárquicas y ritualistas. Cualquier sugerencia de cambio se acoge con recelo, ya que implica la incómoda transformación futura del ritual y la jerarquía imperantes, es decir, la sustitución de una serie de rituales por otra o, tal vez, por una sociedad menos estructurada y regida por un número inferior de rituales. Sin embargo, llega un momento en que es preciso que las sociedades cambien. «Los dogmas de un pasado tranquilo son insuficientes para un presente tumultuoso», aseveró Abraham Lincoln. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1481:And yet, the chief deficiency I see in the sceptical movement is in its polarization: Us v. Them - the sense that we have a monopoly on the truth; that those other people who believe in all these stupid doctrines are morons; that if you're sensible, you'll listen to us; an if not, you're beyond redemption. This is unconstructive. It does not get the message across. It condemns the sceptics to permanent minority status; whereas, a compassionate approach that from the beginning acknowledges the human roots of pseudoscience and superstition might be much more widely accepted. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1482:What worries me the most,' she continued, 'is the opposite, the possibility that they're not trying. They could communicate with us, all right, but they're not doing it because they don't see any point to it. It's like..."--she glanced down at the edge of the tablecloth they had spread over the grass--"like the ants. They occupy the same landscape that we do. They have plenty to do, things to occupy themselves. On some level they're very well aware of their environment. But we don't try to communicate with them. So I don't think they have the foggiest notion that we exist. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1483:And yet, the chief deficiency I see in the sceptical movement is in its polarization: Us v. Them - the sense that we have a monopoly on the truth; that those other people who believe in all these stupid doctrines are morons; that if you’re sensible, you’ll listen to us; and if not, you’re beyond redemption. This is unconstructive. It does not get the message across. It condemns the sceptics to permanent minority status; whereas, a compassionate approach that from the beginning acknowledges the human roots of pseudoscience and superstition might be much more widely accepted. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1484:n every culture, the sky and the religious impulse are intertwined. I lie back in an open field and the sky surrounds me. I’m overpowered by its scale. It’s so vast and so far away that my own insignificance becomes palpable. But I don’t feel rejected by the sky. I’m a part of it - tiny, to be sure, but everything is tiny compared to that overwhelming immensity. And when I concentrate in the stars, the planets, and their motions, I have an irresistible sense of machinery, clockwork, elegant precision working on a scale that, however lofty out aspirations, dwarfs and humbles us. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1485:These days, there seems to be nowhere left to explore. Victims of their very success, the explorers now, pretty much, stay home. Maybe it's a little early- maybe the time is not quite yet- but those other worlds, promising untold opportunities, beckon. Just now, there a great many mattters that are pressing in on us that compete for the money it takes to send people to other worlds. Should we solve those problems first, or are they a reason for going? Our planet and our solar system are surrounded by a New World ocean: the depths of space. It is no more impassable than the last. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1486:Is it fair to be suspicious of an entire profession because of a few bad apples? There are at least two important differences, it seems to me. First, no one doubts that science actually works, whatever mistaken and fraudulent claim may from time to time be offered. But whether there are any miraculous cures from faith-healing, beyond the body's own ability to cure itself, is very much at issue. Secondly, the expose' of fraud and error in science is made almost exclusively by science. But the exposure of fraud and error in faith-healing is almost never done by other faith-healers. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1487:But we have no [Marian] apparitions cautioning the Church against, say, accepting the delusion of an Earth-centered Universe, or warning it of complicity with Nazi Germany — two matters of considerable moral as well as historical import....
Not a single saint criticized the practice of torturing and burning “witches” and heretics. Why not? Were they unaware of what was going on? Could they not grasp its evil? And why is [the Virgin] Mary always admonishing the poor peasant to inform the authorities? Why doesn’t she admonish the authorities herself? Or the King? Or the Pope? ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
1488:More praise for The Demon-Haunted World “As I close this eloquent and fascinating book, I recall the final chapter title from one of Carl Sagan’s earlier works, Cosmos. ‘Who Speaks for Earth?’ is a rhetorical question, but I presume to answer it. My candidate for planetary ambassador can be none other than Carl Sagan himself. He is wise, humane, witty, well read, and incapable of composing a dull sentence.… I wish I had written The Demon-Haunted World. Having failed to do so the least I can do is press it upon my friends. Please read this book.” —Richard Dawkins The Times (London) ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1489:Present global culture is a kind of arrogant newcomer. It arrives on the planetary stage following four and a half billion years of other acts, and after looking about for a few thousand years declares itself in possession of eternal truths. But in a world that is changing as fast as ours, this is a prescription for disaster. No nation, no religion, no economic system, no body of knowledge, is likely to have all the answers for our survival. There must be many social systems that would work far better than any now in existence. In the scientific tradition, our task is to find them. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1490:Si queremos que el mundo escape de las temibles consecuencias del crecimiento de la población global y de los diez mil o doce mil millones de personas en el planeta a finales del siglo XXI, debemos inventar medios seguros y más eficientes de cultivar alimentos, con el consiguiente abastecimiento de semillas, riego, fertilizantes, pesticidas, sistemas de transporte y refrigeración. También se necesitarán métodos contraconceptivos ampliamente disponibles y aceptables, pasos significativos hacia la igualdad política de las mujeres y mejoras en las condiciones de vida de los más pobres. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1491:The values of science and the values of democracy are concordant, in many cases indistinguishable. Science and democracy began - in their civilized incarnations - in the same time and place, Greece in the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. . . . Science thrives on, indeed requires, the free exchange of ideas; its values are antithetical to secrecy. Science holds to no special vantage points or privileged positions. Both science and democracy encourage unconventional opinions and vigorous debate. Both demand adequate reason, coherent argument, rigorous standards of evidence and honesty. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1492:Royalty has traditionally been vulnerable to psychic frauds. In ancient China and Rome astrology was the exclusive property of the emperor; any private use of this potent art was considered a capital offense. Emerging from a particularly credulous Southern California culture, Nancy and Ronald Reagan relied on an astrologer in private and public matters—unknown to the voting public. Some portion of the decision-making that influences the future of our civilization is plainly in the hands of charlatans. If anything, the practice is comparatively muted in America; its venue is worldwide. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1493:When the training is unchanged for immense periods of time, traditions are passed on intact to the next generation. But when what needs to be learned changes quickly, especially in the course of a single generation, it becomes much harder to know what to teach and how to teach it. Then, students complain about relevance; respect for their elders diminishes. Teachers despair at how educational standards have deteriorated, and how lackadaisical students have become. In a world in transition, students and teachers both need to teach themselves one essential skill - learning how to learn. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1494:Perhaps the records will never be intercepted. Perhaps no one in five billion years will ever come upon them. Five billion years is a long time. In five billion years, all human beings will have become extinct or evolved into other beings, none of our artifacts will have survived on Earth, the continents will have become unrecognizably altered or destroyed, and the evolution of the Sun will have burned the Earth to a crisp or reduced it to a whirl of atoms.
Far from home, untouched by these remote events, the Voyagers, bearing the memories of a world that is no more, will fly on. ~ Carl Sagan,#NFDB
1495:There’s a category of prayer in which god is begged to intervene in human history or just to right some real or imagined injustice or calamity—for example, when a bishop from the American West prays for god to intervene and end a devastating dry spell. Why is the prayer needed? Didn’t god know of the drought? Was he unaware that it threatened the bishop’s parishioners? What is implied here about the limitations of a supposedly omnipotent and omniscient deity? The bishop asked his followers to pray as well. Is god more likely to intervene when many pray for mercy than when only a few do? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1496:I believe that part of what propels science is the thirst for wonder. It's a very powerful emotion. All children feel it. In a first grade classroom everybody feels it; in a twelfth grade classroom almost nobody feels it, or at least acknowledges it. Something happens between first and twelfth grade, and it's not just puberty. Not only do the schools and the media not teach much skepticism, there is also little encouragement of this stirring sense of wonder. Science and pseudoscience both arouse that feeling. Poor popularizations of science establish an ecological niche for pseudoscience. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1497:It is properly said that the Devil can “quote Scripture to his purpose.” The Bible is full of so many stories of contradictory moral purpose that every generation can find scriptural justification for nearly any action it proposes—from incest, slavery, and mass murder to the most refined love, courage, and self-sacrifice. And this moral multiple personality disorder is hardly restricted to Judaism and Christianity. You can find it deep within Islam, the Hindu tradition, indeed nearly all the world’s religions. Perhaps then it is not so much scientists as people who are morally ambiguous. It ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1498:My deeply held belief is that if a god of anything like the traditional sort exists, our curiosity and intelligence are provided by such a god. We would be unappreciative of those gifts (as well as unable to take such a course of action) if we suppressed our passion to explore the universe and ourselves. On the other hand, if such a traditional god does not exist, our curiosity and our intelligence are the essential tools for managing our survival. In either case, the enterprise of knowledge is consistent with both science and religion, and is essential for the welfare of the human species. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1499:These are all cases of proved or presumptive baloney. A deception arises, sometimes innocently but collaboratively, sometimes with cynical premeditation. Usually the victim is caught up in a powerful emotion -- wonder, fear, greed, grief. Credulous acceptance of baloney can cost you money; that's what P. T. Barnum meant when he said, 'There's a sucker born every minute.' But it can be much more dangerous than that, and when governments and societies lose the capacity for critical thinking, the results can be catastrophic -- however sympathetic we may be to those who have bought the baloney. ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
1500:Our television signals leave this planet and go out into space...the signals spread out from the earth in spherical waves, a little like ripples in a pond. They travel at the speed of light, 186,000 miles a second, and essentially go on forever. The better some other civilizations receivers are, the farther away they could be and still pick up our tv signals. Even we could detect a strong tv transmission from a planet going around the nearest star.' President: 'You mean everything? You mean to say all that crap on television - the car crashes, wrestling, the porno channels, the evening news? ~ Carl Sagan, #NFDB
2 Integral Yoga
2 George Van Vrekhem
2 Preparing for the Miraculous
1.05 - 2010 and 1956 - Doomsday?, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
decade of the twentieth century, wrote the late Carl Sagan,
who built a glamorous career on his much-professed en-
1.06 - Being Human and the Copernican Principle, #Preparing for the Miraculous, #George Van Vrekhem, #Integral Yoga
are time and death, wrote Carl Sagan. (Once again we
16 Sri Aurobindo: The Life Divine, p. 635.b e ing human an d the cope r nican princi ple
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Goodreads author - Joscelyn_Godwin
Goodreads author - William_Godwin
Goodreads author - Scott_Godwin
Goodreads author - Parke_Godwin
Goodreads author - Gail_Godwin
Goodreads author - Rebecca_T_Godwin
Goodreads author - Richard_Godwin
Goodreads author - Peter_Godwin
Goodreads author - Pam_Godwin
Goodreads author - Rex_Godlike
https://poznan.wikia.org/wiki/Tygodnik_Wielkopolski
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Category:God_in_Christianity
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Category:Names_of_God_in_Judaism
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Church_of_God_in_Christ
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/God_in_Abrahamic_religions
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/God_in_Abrahamic_religions#Bah.C3.A1.27.C3.AD_Faith
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/God_in_Abrahamic_religions#Christianity
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/God_in_Abrahamic_religions#Contemporary_religion
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/God_in_Abrahamic_religions#History
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/God_in_Abrahamic_religions#Islam
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/God_in_Abrahamic_religions#Judaism
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/God_in_Abrahamic_religions#Mormonism
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/God_in_Abrahamic_religions#References
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/God_in_Abrahamic_religions#See_also
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/God_in_Buddhism
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/God_in_Buddhism#Attitudes_towards_theories_of_creation
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/God_in_Buddhism#Brahma_in_the_Pali_Canon
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/God_in_Buddhism#Brahmins_and_communion_with_God
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/God_in_Buddhism#Devas
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/God_in_Buddhism#External_links
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/God_in_Buddhism#God_as_a_maintainer_and_the_force_behind_the_world
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/God_in_Buddhism#God_as_manifestation_of_mind
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/God_in_Buddhism#God_in_early_Buddhism
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/God_in_Buddhism#Literature
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/God_in_Buddhism#Mahayana
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/God_in_Buddhism#Mahayana_and_tantric_mystical_doctrines
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/God_in_Buddhism#Other_common_gods_referred_to_in_the_Canon
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/God_in_Buddhism#Primordial_Buddhas
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/God_in_Buddhism#References
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/God_in_Buddhism#Schopenhauer
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/God_in_Buddhism#See_also
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/God_in_Buddhism#Tathagata_and_Dharmakaya_as_God_equivalents
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/God_in_Buddhism#Theravada
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/God_in_Buddhism#The_Supernatural_in_Buddhism
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/God_in_Buddhism#Thought_as_creator
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/God_in_Buddhism#Vajrayana
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/God_in_Buddhism#Veneration_of_the_Buddha
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/God_in_Christianity
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/God_in_Christianity#.22Father.2C_Son_and_Holy_Spirit.22
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/God_in_Christianity#Ambivalence_to_Trinitarian_doctrine
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/God_in_Christianity#Christology
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/God_in_Christianity#External_links
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/God_in_Christianity#God_as_Father
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/God_in_Christianity#God_as_Holy_Spirit
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/God_in_Christianity#God_as_Son
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/God_in_Christianity#Nontrinitarianism
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/God_in_Christianity#Nontrinitarians
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/God_in_Christianity#Notes
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/God_in_Christianity#See_also
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/God_in_Christianity#The_term_.22Trinity.22
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/God_in_Christianity#Trinitarian_doctrine
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/God_in_Christianity#Trinitarianism
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/God_in_Hinduism
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/God_in_Islam
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/God_in_Islam#Bibliography
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/God_in_Islam#Cross-religion_comparison
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/God_in_Islam#External_links
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/God_in_Islam#God.27s_attributes
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/God_in_Islam#God.27s_omniscience
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/God_in_Islam#Notes
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/God_in_Islam#See_also
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/God_in_Jainism
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/God_in_Judaism
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/God_in_Mormonism
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/God_in_Sikhism
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/God_in_the_Bah
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/God_in_the_Bah%C3%A1'%C3%AD_Faith
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/God_is_dead
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/God_is_dead#Death_of_God_theological_movement
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Jewish_principles_of_faith#God_is_One
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/John_Hick#The_Metaphor_of_God_Incarnate.2C_1993
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_God#Islam
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Laman_and_Lemuel#God_intervening
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Names_of_God_in_China
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Names_of_God_in_Christianity
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Names_of_God_in_Islam
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Names_of_God_in_Judaism
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Names_of_God_in_Judaism#Ehyeh-Asher-Ehyeh
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Names_of_God_in_Judaism#The_Tetragrammaton
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Names_of_God_in_Judaism#Yah
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Names_of_God_in_Judaism#YHWH_Tzevaot.2FSabaoth
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Names_of_God_in_the_Qur'an
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Names_of_God_in_the_Qur'an#100th_name
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Names_of_God_in_the_Qur'an#Baha.27_ad-Din_al-.60Amili
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Names_of_God_in_the_Qur'an#B.C3.A1b.C3.AD_and_Bah.C3.A1.27.C3.AD
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Names_of_God_in_the_Qur'an#Comparisons
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Names_of_God_in_the_Qur'an#External_links
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Names_of_God_in_the_Qur'an#List_of_names
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Names_of_God_in_the_Qur'an#Notes
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Names_of_God_in_the_Qur'an#Origin
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Names_of_God_in_the_Qur'an#Personal_names
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Names_of_God_in_the_Qur'an#See_also
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Son_of_God#In_the_New_Testament
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Talk:God_in_Abrahamic_religions
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Talk:God_in_Buddhism
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Talk:God_in_Christianity
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Talk:God_in_Islam
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Talk:God_in_the_Bah
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/Talk:Names_of_God_in_the_Qur'an
https://religion.wikia.org/wiki/The_Kingdom_of_God_is_Within_You
Integral World - Your God Is Dead, But Mine Still Lives, Andrea Diem-Lane
Integral World - God is Not Only Great, Be Scofield
Integral World - Is God in the Garbage?: A Critical Appraisal of Adi Da's Philosophy, essay by Andrew Smith
Integral World - God is Not in the Quad: A Summary of My Challenge to Wilber, Andy Smith
Integral World - God in the Vacuum, A Critique of Lexi Neale's Integral Relativity, Andy Smith
Integral World - Trinitarian Speculations, God in the Integral Age, Frank Visser
Evolutionary Panentheism: A Godview for Today’s World
The Expanded Trinity: The Three Faces of God-in-Three-Persons
selforum - knowledge of god is found in
selforum - god is mans first and longest lasting
dedroidify.blogspot - god-is-dead-overman-emerges
dedroidify.blogspot - god-is-astronaut-fire-flies-and-empty
Dharmapedia - God_in_Hinduism
Psychology Wiki - Yoga#God_in_Yoga_philosophy
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy - godwin
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/crowner.php/ImagePickin/LiteratureNESGodzillaCreepypasta
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Analysis/TheReturnOfGodzilla
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Anime/GodSigma
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Anime/GodzillaCityOnTheEdgeOfBattle
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Anime/GodzillaPlanetOfTheMonsters
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Anime/GodzillaSingularPoint
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Anime/GodzillaThePlanetEater
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Godzilla: The Series (1998 - 2000) - Born of radiation on a French Polynesian island, Godzilla wreaks havoc on the city while attempting to find a nest to give birth to its young. The overgrown lizard appears unstoppable, until biologist NICK TATOPOULOS and French Secret Service operative PHILLIPE ROACHE team up to take down the beast....
The Godzilla Power Hour (1978 - 1981) - The Godzilla Power Hour was a 60-minute Saturday morning animated series co-produced between Hanna-Barbera Productions and Toho in 1978 and aired on NBC in the US and TV Tokyo in Japan.
Space Giants (1966 - 1967) - SPACE GIANTS was a Japanese import that was shown on WTBS in the 1960's and early 1980's. It was in the same vein as GODZILLA except way, way, more campy. (ie. there is a scene where two Japs are having a conversation in a room and one guy comments that he thinks the room is bugged, then there is an...
Maison Ikkoku (1986 - 1988) - Godai is a ronin (someone who has failed university entrance exams) living in a run down apartment house called Maison Ikkoku. Among the other residents are the nosy Ichinose, the sexy Akemi Roppongi, and the mysterious Yotsuya. The others are given to having wild parties which makes it difficult fo...
Angelic layer (2001 - 2001) - a 26-episode anime series produced by Bones, takes place in the same universe as Clamp's later work Chobits, which similarly deals with the relationship between humans, human-created devices, toys, and godlike power. Several characters also appear in Clamp's Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle including mo...
Godzilla(1998) - Based on the character created & owned by the Japan-based Toho Co.
The Return of Godzilla(1985) - Released in America as the heavily re-edited Godzilla 1985, this 16th Godzilla film ignores all previous sequels and serves as a direct follow-up to the original 195
Godzilla vs. Megalon(1973) - Possibly one of the most humorous of the Godzilla films, Godzilla vs. Megalon stars everyone's favorite giant lizard who fights the beetle-like Megalon and the chicken alien Gigan with the assistance of the freaky looking robot, Je
Godzilla vs Hedorah(1971) - One of the worst Godzilla films in the series. The King of the Monsters versus a beast spawned from pollution by the name of Hedorah. I don't know about you I think the writers were on acid or LSD when it comes to making a film like this. This disgraceful monster movie features musical numbers (e.g...
Godzilla Vs. Gigan(1972) - Giant alien cockroaches try to conqure earth with there remote controlled monsters, Gigan and King Ghidorah. When the millitary fails to stop these collosle walking nightmares, our only hope is Godzilla king of the monsters, and his best buddy Anguirus, as well as a cartoonist a kung fu bimbo and a...
Godzilla 2000(1999) - After the dissapointing 1998 American version, Godzilla was back! In this movie, Godzilla faces off against yet another alien monster, Orga, who invades Tokyo!
King Kong VS Godzilla(1962) - Japan is getting trampled by the two mightiest monsters of ALL time, KING KONG and GODZILLA. See King Kong go throw a BILLION BOLTS, and Godzilla destory an ENTIRE army... Nothing is stopping these two creatures, the only hope Japan has to survive, is to make these two creatures kill each other, bef...
Yog! Monster from Space(1971) - The year was 1970. There was no Godzilla film out back then, so Toho decided to come up with an oringal non-Godzilla film. This was the result. A space amoeba coems to earth and goes into an island where ite causes a giant squied (Gezora), a giant turtle (Kameba) and a giant crab (Ganime) to grow in...
Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla(1974) - The King of the Monsters faces his greatest challange ever. A robot designed to be just like him in every way! Built by a race of alien gorilla people who want the Earth for themselves. Does Godzilla stand a chance? Even with the Azumi Royal Guardian King Ceasar at his side?
Terror of Mechagodzilla(1975) - The last of the Showa Godzilla movies, Terror of Mechagodzilla features Godzilla, who solo fights against two powerful monsters; Mechagodzilla an
Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II(1993) - Godzilla faces off against the second Mechagodzilla incarnation, but this time assisted by Rodan. This movie also stars Baby Godzilla, who isn't nearly as cute as the one featured in Godzilla vs. SpaceGodzilla.
Godzilla VS. Spacegodzilla(1994) - In this movie, Godzilla teams up with the military robot M.O.G.U.E.R.A. to fight SpaceGodzilla! SpaceGodzilla was created by stray Godzilla cells drifting through a black hole, and coming out a whit
Godzilla and Mothra: The Battle for Earth(1992) - Basically a crewed remake of 1961's "Mothra" with Godzilla and Battra thrown into the mix, this movie is a rather forgettable kaiju film. That doesn't mean it isn't good, however.
Godzilla vs. Destoroyah(1995) - Godzilla battles the powerful Destroroyah as Meltdown Godzilla!
Godzilla Vs. King Ghidorah(1991) - Time travelers from the 23rd century return to 1992 to warn Japan that Godzilla will cause a catastrophic nuclear incident in the 21st century and suggest a way to rid the world of him forever. They intend to go back to 1944, to Ragos Island, where a dinosaur was exposed to radiation from the Bikini...
Thank God It's Friday(1978) - After a long week of work and school we all need a break and Friday night has finally arrived and everybody is headed to the big dance contest at the hottest disco in town: The Zoo. Among the contests, a pair of underage girls who need to find a way inside and a man in leather who can dance his way...
Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster(1966) - Three castaways voyage on an island to stop a madman and their monster, Ebirah, a giant shrimp. So they have to fight fire with fire by using Godzilla with helping hand...I mean wing fro
Godzilla Raids Again(1955) - Two pilots are shocked when they see two giant monsters waging war before falling into the ocean. The two pilots race back to Japan to inform the government what they saw. Soon the world comes to the realization, that a monster closely related to the original Godzilla is on the loose as well as a ne...
Godzilla, King of the Monsters!(1956) - An Young News Reporter Steve Martin (Raymond Burr) finds a Unknown Atomic Dinosaur from Flash of Light and Sea of Fire "Godzilla".
Godzilla vs. Monster Zero(1965) - Aliens from the mysterious Planet X, which resides on the dark side of of Jupiter, come to Earth asking its people to help them save their world from the dreaded King Ghidrah by letting them "borrow" Godzilla and Rodan. The aliens are actually planning to use the three monsters to take over our plan...
Godzilla vs. Mothra(1964) - A greedy developer has placed huge machines to suck dry a part of the ocean near Tokyo so he can put luxury condos there. After a storm, a giant egg washes up on the beach nearby and is immediately put on public display. The developer's plans go awry when he disrupts Godzilla's rest and the monster...
Ghidorah, The Three-Headed Monster(1964) - The fifth film in the Showa era Godzilla film series, the film involves an alien from Venus possessing the body of a princess telling Japan about the coming of the destroyer of her planet King Ghidorah, assassins sent to kill the princess, the return of Rodan and the first pairing of Rodan and Godzi...
Son of Godzilla(1967) - Godzilla adopts a son, Minya and fights off three praying mantises and a hug
Frankenstein Conquers the World(1965) - The heart from the scientist's experiment gets exposed to the nuclear bombings in Hiroshima and mutates into the giant humanoid monster, Frankenstein! Meanwhile, another giant monster is running rampant, Baragon! It is a duel of the monsters in this sister production to KING KONG VS. GODZILLA
Godzilla's Revenge(1969) - Ichiro, a young boy, is sick and tired of the horrors and stresses of everyday life so he dreams he goes to Monster Island and meets Minya, the son of Godzilla, to help him give courage and be strong to take on unwanted obstacles ranging from a pair of Abbot and Costello-like robbers to bullies. Wo...
Godzilla vs. Megaguirus(2000) - The Japanese Self-Defense Force must find a new way to stop Godzilla. By warping out into another dimension, but it unleashes the dreaded new monster, Megauirus! Only Godzilla can stop this beast. Released in Japan in 2000, but did not get an American release until August 2003. It aired on the Sc...
Godzilla(2014) - The king of all monsters returns in this Warner Bros./Legendary Pictures production helmed by Gareth Edwards. As the story opens in Japan, we find dedicated nuclear power-plant manager Joe Brody so caught up in his work that he forgets it's his birthday. Sending his young son Ford off to school befo...
Atragon(1963) - The 1963 Japanese science fiction film from Toho. The lost city of Mu plans to resurface threatening humanity. The world's only hope is a special warship called Atragon led by a former WWII captain. This is the film that introduced Godzilla fans Manda, the sea serpent like monster who later re-appea...
Shin Godzilla(2016) - Japan is plunged into chaos when a skyscraper-sized lizard monster rises from the deep of Tokyo Bay and lays waste to Tokyo. From director Hideaki Anno, creator of the cult classic anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion.
Godzilla (MonsterVerse series)(2014) - Ford Brody (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), a Navy bomb expert, has just reunited with his family in San Francisco when he is forced to go to Japan to help his estranged father, Joe (Bryan Cranston). Soon, both men are swept up in an escalating crisis when Godzilla, King of the Monsters, arises from the sea...
King Kong vs. Godzilla(1962) - The Eighth Wonder of the World meets King of the Monsters. When Godzilla pops out the Iceberg and King Kong goes to Tokyo. to battle double creature features who will won?
Godzilla (Gojira)(1954) - In Ishir Honda's 1954 classic, nuclear tests unleash the unstoppable radioactive beast known as "Gojira", or "Godzilla", upon Japan's major cities. In order to stop the creature's colossal rampage, ship captain Hideto Ogata, paleontologist Kyohei Yamane, his daughter Emiko, and Dr. Daisuke Serizawa...
Son of God(2014) - Son of God is a 2014 American epic biblical drama film directed by Christopher Spencer, and produced by Mark Burnett and Roma Downey. The film premiered in New York, and Los Angeles for a limited release on February 21, 2014, and then into a wide release on February 28, 2014. The film retells the li...
The Wind Rises(2013) - A lifelong love of flight inspires Japanese aviation engineer Jiro Horikoshi (Hideaki Anno, creator of Neon Genesis Evangelion and director of Shin Godzilla), whose storied career includes the creation of the A6M World War II fighter plane.
Mr. Baseball(1992) - Tom Selleck is a biggest baseball player to hot Japan since the monster called Godzilla.
https://myanimelist.net/anime/33783/Godzilla_1__Kaijuu_Wakusei --
https://myanimelist.net/anime/36816/Godzilla_2__Kessen_Kidou_Zoushoku_Toshi -- Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi
https://myanimelist.net/anime/37897/Godzilla_3__Hoshi_wo_Kuu_Mono -- Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi
Godzilla (2014) ::: 6.4/10 -- PG-13 | 2h 3min | Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi | 16 May 2014 (USA) -- The world is beset by the appearance of monstrous creatures, but one of them may be the only one who can save humanity. Director: Gareth Edwards Writers: Ishir Honda (based on the character: Godzilla, owned and created by)
Godzilla: Final Wars (2004) ::: 6.4/10 -- Gojira: Fainaru uzu (original title) -- Godzilla: Final Wars Poster -- Godzilla's fiftieth Anniversary project, in which Godzilla travels around the world to fight his old foes and his allies plus a new, mysterious monster named Monster X. Directors: Ryhei Kitamura, Koji Hashimoto (uncredited) | 6 more credits Writers:
Godzilla: King of the Monsters! (1956) ::: 6.5/10 -- Not Rated | 1h 20min | Action, Horror, Sci-Fi | 27 April 1956 (USA) -- A 400-foot (122-meter) dinosaur-like beast, awoken from undersea hibernation off the Japanese coast by atomic-bomb testing, attacks Tokyo. Directors: Ishir Honda (as Ishiro Honda), Terry O. Morse (as Terry Morse) Writers:
Godzilla: King of the Monsters! (1956) ::: 6.5/10 -- Not Rated | 1h 20min | Action, Horror, Sci-Fi | 27 April 1956 (USA) -- A 400-foot (122-meter) dinosaur-like beast, awoken from undersea hibernation off the Japanese coast by atomic-bomb testing, attacks Tokyo.
Godzilla: Tokyo S.O.S. (2003) ::: 6.6/10 -- Gojira tai Mosura tai Mekagojira: Tky S.O.S. (original title) -- Godzilla: Tokyo S.O.S. Poster One year after the fight between Godzilla and Mechagodzilla, the two monsters along with Mothra face off in a conclusive battle royale. Directors: Masaaki Tezuka, Koji Hashimoto (uncredited) | 2 more credits Writers: Masaaki Tezuka (screenplay), Masahiro Yokotani (screenplay) Stars:
Godzilla vs. Biollante (1989) ::: 6.6/10 -- Gojira vs. Biorante (original title) -- Godzilla vs. Biollante Poster Desolate by the loss of his daughter, a geneticist creates a monstrous new mutation. Directors: Kazuki Ohmori, Koji Hashimoto (uncredited) | 1 more credit Writers: Shinichir Kobayashi (story), Kazuki Ohmori | 1 more credit Stars:
Godzilla vs. Destoroyah (1995) ::: 7.0/10 -- Gojira vs. Desutoroi (original title) -- Godzilla vs. Destoroyah Poster The aftermath of the Oxygen Destroyer brings forth Destoroyah, a beast intent on killing Godzilla, who is on the verge of a nuclear meltdown. Directors: Takao Okawara, Ishir Honda | 4 more credits Writers: Kaoru Kamigiku (story "Gojira tai Juniagojira") (as Kaoru Kamikiku), Kichi Kawakita (story "Gojira tai Barubaroi") | 6 more credits
Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah (1991) ::: 6.6/10 -- Gojira vs. Kingu Gidor (original title) -- (Japan) Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah Poster Time travelers use Godzilla in their scheme to destroy Japan to prevent the country's future economic reign. Directors: Kazuki Ohmori, Koji Hashimoto (uncredited) | 1 more credit Writer: Kazuki Ohmori
Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II (1993) ::: 6.6/10 -- Gojira vs. Mekagojira (original title) -- Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II Poster -- The United Nations assembles the ultimate weapon to defeat Godzilla, while scientists discover a fresh pteranodon egg on a remote Japanese island. Directors: Takao Okawara, Kazuki Ohmori (uncredited) Writers:
Hand of God ::: TV-MA | 1h | Crime, Drama | TV Series (20142017) -- A morally-corrupt judge suffers a breakdown and believes God is compelling him onto a path of vigilante justice. Creator: Ben Watkins
Hand of God ::: TV-MA | 1h | Crime, Drama | TV Series (2014-2017) Episode Guide 20 episodes Hand of God Poster -- A morally-corrupt judge suffers a breakdown and believes God is compelling him onto a path of vigilante justice. Creator: Ben Watkins
Invasion of Astro-Monster (1965) ::: 6.4/10 -- Kaij daisens (original title) -- Invasion of Astro-Monster Poster -- Aliens known as the Xiliens arrive on Earth seeking to borrow Godzilla and Rodan to save their planet from Monster Zero. Sent on the expedition are astronauts Glenn and Fuji who discover it's none other than King Ghidorah. Director: Ishir Honda (as Inoshir Honda)
Mary Shelley (2017) ::: 6.4/10 -- PG-13 | 2h | Biography, Drama, History | 5 July 2018 (Australia) -- Life and facts of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, who at 16 met 21 year old poet Percy Shelley, resulting in the writing of Frankenstein. Director: Haifaa Al-Mansour Writers: Emma Jensen, Haifaa Al-Mansour (additional writing by)
On Becoming a God in Central Florida ::: TV-MA | 46min | Comedy | TV Series (2019) -- In 1992 Central Florida, a minimum-wage water park employee lies, schemes, and cons her way up the ranks of the cultish, multibillion-dollar pyramid scheme that drove her family to ruin. Creators:
Shin Godzilla (2016) ::: 6.8/10 -- Shin Gojira (original title) -- Shin Godzilla Poster -- Japan is plunged into chaos upon the appearance of a giant monster. Directors: Hideaki Anno, Shinji Higuchi (co-director) Writers: Hideaki Anno, Sean Whitley
Takva: A Man's Fear of God (2006) ::: 7.5/10 -- Takva (original title) -- Takva: A Man's Fear of God Poster A promotion brings a Muslim's relationship with God into question. Director: zer Kiziltan Writer: nder akar Stars:
The Discovery of Heaven (2001) ::: 6.7/10 -- 2h 30min | Drama, Fantasy | 25 October 2001 (Netherlands) -- God is disappointed with the human race and wants his stone tablets back. An angel is given the assignment and, with Gabrils help, tries to manipulate several humans on earth to get his ... S Director: Jeroen Krabb Writers: Harry Mulisch (novel), Edwin de Vries Stars:
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A.F -- -- - -- 1 ep -- Original -- Action Sci-Fi Space Mecha -- A.F A.F -- A 20 minutes 100% CG animation presented by "buildup", a company that brought many japanese CG movies such as Godzilla vs Biollante, Stray Dog - Kerberos Panzer Cops, Godzilla vs King Ghidora, Kappa, Gundam Mission To The Rise and D. -- -- The story takes place in the future, the year is 2124. A dangerous container is to be secretly loaded into medical transport ship which goes into the earth orbit because it's forbidden to store dangerous container on earth. -- -- It's so secret that no crew members on the ship were told about the container's contents or any possible hazzards. The truth is, the container carries a dangerous living body in some form like liquid / worm which is capable of reading DNA information of other living beings and then transforms itself as an exact copy. Of course, the original object then will be killed. -- -- (Source: AniDB) -- Special - Sep 6, 2002 -- 1,081 4.42
Cross Fight B-Daman eS -- -- SynergySP -- 52 eps -- - -- Game Kids -- Cross Fight B-Daman eS Cross Fight B-Daman eS -- The anime takes place in Crest Land, where the mysterious B-Crystal has started to go berserk. The main protagonist Godai Kamon lives in the south area of Crest Land, and is an energetic boy who loves B-Daman. However, he lost his all past memories of B-Daman and his family, except for his big sister Aona who lives with him. One day, Kamon meets Galvan, a B-Daman at his local B-Daman shop, B-Junk, and he finds Galvan strangely familiar. Galvan becomes his partner, and he returns to the B-Daman battles once again. -- -- (Source: ANN) -- TV - Oct 7, 2012 -- 2,319 6.36
Dragon Ball Z Movie 14: Kami to Kami -- -- Toei Animation -- 1 ep -- Manga -- Action Adventure Super Power Martial Arts Fantasy Shounen -- Dragon Ball Z Movie 14: Kami to Kami Dragon Ball Z Movie 14: Kami to Kami -- Following the defeat of a great adversary, Gokuu Son and his friends live peaceful lives on Earth. Meanwhile, in space, Beerus the God of Destruction awakens from his long slumber, having dreamed of an entity known as a Super Saiyan God. With the help of his assistant, Whis, Beerus looks for this powerful being, as he wishes to fight a worthy opponent. After discovering that the Saiyan home planet was destroyed, he tracks down the remaining Saiyans on Earth, looking for Gokuu specifically. -- -- Having only heard of the Super Saiyan God in legends, Gokuu and his comrades summon Shen Long the Eternal Dragon, who they find out is afraid of Beerus. After learning the secret of the Super Saiyan God, an intense battle between Gokuu and Beerus commences, the immense power of which puts the Earth in terrible danger. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Funimation -- Movie - Mar 30, 2013 -- 161,588 7.40
Dragon Ball Z Movie 14: Kami to Kami -- -- Toei Animation -- 1 ep -- Manga -- Action Adventure Super Power Martial Arts Fantasy Shounen -- Dragon Ball Z Movie 14: Kami to Kami Dragon Ball Z Movie 14: Kami to Kami -- Following the defeat of a great adversary, Gokuu Son and his friends live peaceful lives on Earth. Meanwhile, in space, Beerus the God of Destruction awakens from his long slumber, having dreamed of an entity known as a Super Saiyan God. With the help of his assistant, Whis, Beerus looks for this powerful being, as he wishes to fight a worthy opponent. After discovering that the Saiyan home planet was destroyed, he tracks down the remaining Saiyans on Earth, looking for Gokuu specifically. -- -- Having only heard of the Super Saiyan God in legends, Gokuu and his comrades summon Shen Long the Eternal Dragon, who they find out is afraid of Beerus. After learning the secret of the Super Saiyan God, an intense battle between Gokuu and Beerus commences, the immense power of which puts the Earth in terrible danger. -- -- Movie - Mar 30, 2013 -- 161,588 7.40
Godzilla 1: Kaijuu Wakusei -- -- Polygon Pictures -- 1 ep -- Original -- Action Adventure Sci-Fi -- Godzilla 1: Kaijuu Wakusei Godzilla 1: Kaijuu Wakusei -- Twenty thousand years after the fall of humanity, Earth succumbed to legions of ravenous creatures who now freely roam the planet. Far away in the depths of space, the last surviving members of humanity float aimlessly in the same ship they escaped Earth with so many years ago. With the spacecraft running dangerously low on resources, the survivors’ leading council must decide on their path forward: should they continue to gamble on finding another Earth-like planet to inhabit, or take to heart an anonymous essay theorizing what may be the only weakness of the"Godzilla," who forced the last remnants of humanity off their home world? -- -- The author of the controversial essay is Haruo, a man who witnessed the death of his parents to Godzilla at a young age, which has led him to harbor an obsessive hatred for the monster. Now, he spearheads the operation aimed at reclaiming humanity's birthright from the King of monsters and slay him once and for all. But, alongside humanity, Earth has undergone drastic change since their departure; Godzilla and its numerous spawns may pale in comparison to the darkness lurking within the hearts of this close-knit community of survivors. -- -- Movie - Nov 17, 2017 -- 49,615 6.50
Godzilla 2: Kessen Kidou Zoushoku Toshi -- -- Polygon Pictures -- 1 ep -- Original -- Action Adventure Sci-Fi -- Godzilla 2: Kessen Kidou Zoushoku Toshi Godzilla 2: Kessen Kidou Zoushoku Toshi -- By the advent of the 21st century, much of humanity was dead, having been trampled over by a new master, Godzilla. A select few among mankind took to the stars in a spacefaring vessel called the Aratrum in search of "the promised land," the planet Tau-e that could sustain human life. But the migration plan fails, and the remnants of the human race decide to return to Earth. But the distortions in space-time and the distance traveled means that mankind is returning to a completely changed Earth some 20,000 years later. The returnees, led by hero Haruo, prepare to take the fight to Godzilla based on a strategy that has been 20 years in the making. Carried out with the help of two alien species, the Exif and the Bilusaludo, the humans succeed in defeating Godzilla in a costly battle to the death. -- -- But the victory is short-lived. Rising from the depths of the planet is a new breed of monster, dubbed "Godzilla Earth." Evolving for 20,000 years, the creature stands 300 meters high, weighs over 100,000 tons and wields such overwhelmingly destructive power that Haruo and company have no choice but to run for their lives. -- -- Coming to Haruo's rescue, however, is Miana, a member of an aboriginal tribe called the Houtua. They are the first humanoid people the returnees have encountered. Could they descend from humans? "Our tribal god was destroyed by Godzilla. All that we have left are these eggs. Anyone who has tried to fight or resist him has been drowned in fire," the tribespeople say to Haruo, who responds with: "This is our last hope of recovering our home." -- -- Meanwhile, Bilusaludo commander, Galu-gu is elated to discover that the Houtua tribe's arrowheads are made of a nanometal or a self-sustaining metal. It had been developed in the 21st century as an "anti-Godzilla" killer weapon deployed at their decisive battle fought at the foot of Mt. Fuji, but had been destroyed before it could be activated in the form of a "Mecha-Godzilla." The nanometal was its base substance, and proof that the manufacturing plant can still be used. -- -- (Source: Official site) -- Movie - May 18, 2018 -- 30,710 6.64
Godzilla 3: Hoshi wo Kuu Mono -- -- Polygon Pictures -- 1 ep -- Original -- Action Adventure Sci-Fi -- Godzilla 3: Hoshi wo Kuu Mono Godzilla 3: Hoshi wo Kuu Mono -- A door opens, and a golden seal shatters a star. -- -- It is the early 21st century. Mankind has lost the battle for planet Earth to Godzilla, and has taken to the stars in search of a new home. But the search ends in vain, forcing them and their alien allies back to Earth. But 20,000 years have passed in their absence, and the Earth is a wholly different place. -- -- The planet's flora and fauna now embody and serve Godzilla. Earth is a monster's planet, ruled by the largest Godzilla ever at 300 meters in height. Godzilla Earth. -- -- Human protagonist, Captain Haruo, yearns to defeat Godzilla and retake the planet for mankind. There, he meets aboriginal descendants of the human race, the Houtua tribe. The Houtua twin sisters, Maina and Miana, lead him to the skeletal remains of Mecha-Godzilla, an old anti-Godzilla weapon, which to everyone's surprise is still alive in the form of self-generating nanometal. Taken from the Mecha-Godzilla carcass, the nanometals have gradually been rebuilding a "Mecha-Godzilla City," a potential weapon capable of destroying Godzilla Earth. -- -- As the strategy develops, a rift forms between the humans and the Bilusaludo, one of several alien races that had joined the humans on their exodus from Earth. Their leader, Galu-gu, believes that the secret to defeating Godzilla lies in the use of superhuman powers – namely, the nanometal integration – but Haruo resists, fearing that in defeating monsters, they must not become monsters themselves. Haruo ultimately uses his means for defeating Godzilla Earth to destroy the Mecha-Godzilla city so as to prevent nanometal assimilation, killing Galu-gu. However, his childhood friend, Yuuko, has been absorbed by the nanometal integration and has fallen into a brain dead coma. -- -- The human race, once again, is lost. Metphies, commander of the priestly alien race, Exif, marvels at the miraculous survival of Haruo, he begins to attract a following. The Exif has secretly harbored this outcome as their "ultimate goal." Miana and Maina issue warnings against Metphies, while Haruo begins to question mankind's next move. -- -- With no means for defeating Godzilla Earth, mankind watches as King Ghidorah, clad in a golden light, descends on the planet. The earth shakes once again with as war moves to a higher dimension. -- -- What is Godzilla exactly? Does mankind stand a chance? Is there a future vision in Haruo's eyes? Find out in the finale. -- -- (Source: Official site) -- Movie - Nov 9, 2018 -- 23,950 6.26
Godzilla: S.P -- -- Bones, Orange -- 13 eps -- Original -- Action Sci-Fi Mecha -- Godzilla: S.P Godzilla: S.P -- This series features an original story, which depicts the young geniuses Mei Kamino, a female researcher, and Yun Arikawa, a male engineer, as they take on an unprecedented threat with their companions. When danger comes up from the depths, only young geniuses Mei, Yun, and their team can face the threat in Godzilla Singular Point! -- -- (Source: Netflix) -- 30,055 7.02
Katsute Kami Datta Kemono-tachi e -- -- MAPPA -- 12 eps -- Manga -- Action Drama Fantasy Military Shounen -- Katsute Kami Datta Kemono-tachi e Katsute Kami Datta Kemono-tachi e -- With the initiation of the Patrian civil war came the creation of half-beast, half-human soldiers—a development of the outnumbered Northerners in a desperate attempt to counter the overwhelming Southern forces. Able to quickly dominate battlefields and achieve victory with ease, the soldiers' godlike abilities earned them the name "Incarnates." However, as the war raged on, the Incarnates encountered a problem involving the beasts inside them that they were unable to rectify by ordinary means. -- -- Once the war was over, mysteries and accounts of the Incarnates submitting to the misfortune of their war days surfaced. Aware of the horrors they faced during the war, Special Sergeant Major and former captain of the Incarnates Hank Henriette becomes a Beast Hunter—those who take the lives of Incarnates who have succumbed to the issues they experienced on the battlefields. -- -- After witnessing her father, a former Incarnate soldier, meet his end at the hands of one such Beast Hunter, Nancy Schaal Bancroft resolves to hunt the man who took her father's life. However, Nancy's eye-opening encounter with the Beast Hunter influences her to instead seek the reason behind her father's death and the Incarnates' problematic existence in society. -- -- 95,746 6.40
Keishichou Tokumubu Tokushu Kyouakuhan Taisakushitsu Dainanaka: Tokunana -- -- Anima&Co. -- 12 eps -- Original -- Action Police Vampire Fantasy -- Keishichou Tokumubu Tokushu Kyouakuhan Taisakushitsu Dainanaka: Tokunana Keishichou Tokumubu Tokushu Kyouakuhan Taisakushitsu Dainanaka: Tokunana -- In Tokyo, there exists a peaceful cohabitation between supernatural creatures—elves, dwarves, vampires, and more—and humans. However, contrary to history, powerful dragons once ruled over this world of creatures and humans but have since disappeared. Consequently, a diabolical group under the alias "Nine," who seek the miracles of the once godlike dragons, stirs up trouble in the streets of Tokyo, commiting mass murder and causing destruction. To combat the dangerous group of Nine, the police organize the Special 7—a group of highly skilled professionals whose abilities exceed those of ordinary humans. -- -- Caught up in a bank robbery turned hostage crisis, Seiji Nanatsuki, having recently become a detective, has a chance encounter with Shiori Ichinose, a member of Special 7. Assisting with the resolution of the robbery, Seiji is recognized for his clear sense of justice and refreshing character, suddenly earning him a spot on the elite unit. -- -- As he takes on new missions, Seiji finds that being a detective as part of Special 7 isn't the police work he expected, where working alongside a team of different species with special abilities and vibrant personalities brings unpredictability to his daily life and police work. While the everyday crime in Tokyo continues, Seiji and the Special 7 will fight not only to resolve special cases, but also obstruct the ill-intentioned plans of the merciless group of Nine. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Funimation -- 38,207 6.02
Kuroko no Basket -- -- Production I.G -- 25 eps -- Manga -- Comedy School Shounen Sports -- Kuroko no Basket Kuroko no Basket -- Teikou Junior High School's basketball team is crowned champion three years in a row thanks to five outstanding players who, with their breathtaking and unique skills, leave opponents in despair and fans in admiration. However, after graduating, these teammates, known as "The Generation of Miracles", go their separate ways and now consider each other as rivals. -- -- At Seirin High School, two newly recruited freshmen prove that they are not ordinary basketball players: Taiga Kagami, a promising player returning from the US, and Tetsuya Kuroko, a seemingly ordinary student whose lack of presence allows him to move around unnoticed. Although Kuroko is neither athletic nor able to score any points, he was a member of Teikou's basketball team, where he played as the "Phantom Sixth Man," who easily passed the ball and assisted his teammates. -- -- Kuroko no Basket follows the journey of Seirin's players as they attempt to become the best Japanese high school team by winning the Interhigh Championship. To reach their goal, they have to cross pathways with several powerful teams, some of which have one of the five players with godlike abilities, whom Kuroko and Taiga make a pact to defeat. -- -- 861,881 8.13
Maison Ikkoku -- -- Studio Deen -- 96 eps -- Manga -- Slice of Life Comedy Drama Romance Seinen -- Maison Ikkoku Maison Ikkoku -- In the town of Clock Hill, there is an old boarding house called Maison Ikkoku. While the residence itself is fairly normal, most of its occupants are not. Yuusaku Godai, its most quiet tenant, has finally reached his limit with his neighbors' constant disruptions and boisterous partying. Wanting a calmer place to call home so that he can study in peace, he prepares to move away. -- -- However, his plans to leave are suddenly interrupted when he meets the new boarding house manager, Kyoko Otonashi. Falling madly in love with her, he decides that the boarding house may not be such a bad place to live after all. Unfortunately for him, Kyoko has her own romantic troubles: she is a widow whose husband died six months into their marriage. And despite her blossoming feelings for Godai, Kyoko still cherishes her dearly departed husband, and she believes that no other man could possibly fill the void in her heart. But with Godai's persistence and some help of the other eccentric tenants, she may experience true love once again. -- -- -- Licensor: -- VIZ Media -- 52,561 8.19
Momo Kyun Sword -- -- Project No.9, Tri-Slash -- 12 eps -- Light novel -- Comedy Ecchi Fantasy -- Momo Kyun Sword Momo Kyun Sword -- Momoko is a beautiful young sword fighter who was born inside a peach (momo in Japanese). She lives with her constant companions—the dog god Inugami, the monkey god Sarugami, and the pheasant god Kijigami—in a peaceful paradise. However, a demon army led by devil king invades the paradise and steals the precious treasure that protects Momoko's land. To retrieve the treasure and save the people, Momoko embarks on a great adventure with her three companions. -- -- (Source: ANN) -- -- Licensor: -- Sentai Filmworks -- TV - Jul 9, 2014 -- 29,403 5.59
Munto -- -- Kyoto Animation -- 1 ep -- Original -- Fantasy Magic Romance -- Munto Munto -- Above Earth, invisible to humans, float the Heavens—a collection of floating island kingdoms supported by the magic of their godlike inhabitants. The mysterious power source known as Akuto enables this magic to exist, but this is quickly running out. In response to this energy crisis, most of the kingdoms in the Heavens agree to use the minimum amount of Akuto required to sustain themselves, except for the Magical Kingdom. The leader of this kingdom, the Magical King Munto, believes that Akuto can be replenished if he travels to Earth and meets a mysterious girl shown to him by a seer. While Munto sets off on the dangerous journey, the other kingdoms attempt to destroy the Magical Kingdom and acquire the remaining Akuto for themselves. -- -- On Earth, Yumemi Hidaka is dealing with her own problems. She can see floating islands in the sky that nobody else can. While her best friend Ichiko Ono believes her, Yumemi wonders if she is going insane. When Munto suddenly appears before her, Yumemi dismisses him as a mere delusion. She is more concerned about her 13-year-old friend Suzume Imamura, who is attempting to elope with her delinquent boyfriend. As the Magical Kingdom nears the point where it will fall from the sky, Munto's quest to save both the Heavens and Earth grows increasingly desperate. -- -- -- Licensor: -- Central Park Media -- OVA - Mar 18, 2003 -- 18,005 6.82
Rayearth -- -- TMS Entertainment -- 3 eps -- Manga -- Action Adventure Fantasy -- Rayearth Rayearth -- The Earth lies darkened and deserted. Despite the best efforts of the film's heroine, Hikaru, the evil-filled castle of Cephiro has taken over the world and stands in the center of a lifeless Tokyo. Before the ice-witch Alcyone can take her revenge on Hikaru, she is rescued by Lantis, a young man who seals her into a magical maze where she is challenged to prove her powers while her friends are hunted down by Cephiro's warlocks. -- -- Fleeing through the silent city, Umi and Fuu must seek out the sleeping Mashin; godlike creatures that will fuse with them to form giant warriors of awesome destructive power. But the Magic Knights are afraid, untrained and alone... will even the Mashin be enough to save them from the evil acts of Cephiro? -- -- (Source: AniDB) -- -- Licensor: -- Manga Entertainment -- OVA - Jul 25, 1997 -- 13,406 6.89
Slam Dunk: Zenkoku Seiha Da! - Sakuragi Hanamichi -- -- Toei Animation -- 1 ep -- Manga -- Slice of Life Comedy Sports Drama School Shounen -- Slam Dunk: Zenkoku Seiha Da! - Sakuragi Hanamichi Slam Dunk: Zenkoku Seiha Da! - Sakuragi Hanamichi -- Set during the Inter High Championships, Shohoku take on Tsukubu, one of this year's dark horses. It's a clash of acquaintances as Anzai will face his former student which is now the coach of Tsukubu, while Akagi & Kogure meet Godai their former classmate and Tsukubu's captain. Finally Sakuragi is irked by the presence of Nango, Tsukubu's center, who vies for Haruko's attention. -- -- (Source: ANN) -- Movie - Aug 20, 1994 -- 12,919 7.55
The Urotsuki -- -- Phoenix Entertainment -- 3 eps -- - -- Adventure Fantasy Hentai Demons Horror -- The Urotsuki The Urotsuki -- An immortal beast-man of supernatural lusts, Amano Jaku escapes prison to gratify his appetites at Meishin College. But the campus is not just a hotbed of luscious coeds – it’s the breeding ground of a hideous monster! The Ultra God is Amano Jaku’s nemesis, a vile killing machine, and the ancient harbinger of the coming apocalypse. Now, immortals will clash in a battle that will bathe the Earth in innocent blood! -- -- (Source: AniDB) -- OVA - May 3, 2002 -- 3,300 5.69
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West Angeles Church of God in Christ
Where Love Is, God Is
William Godwin
Yagodninsky District
Yu Godai
Zagodzie
Zilla (Godzilla)
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