Carl Sagan Quotes
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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.
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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.
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Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.
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We hunger to understand, so we invent myths about how we imagine the world is constructed - and they're, of course, based upon what we know, which is ourselves and other animals. So we make up stories about how the world was hatched from a cosmic egg or created after the mating of cosmic deities or by some fiat of a powerful being.
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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.
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The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.
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The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.
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There is a wide, yawning black infinity. In every direction, the extension is endless; the sensation of depth is overwhelming. And the darkness is immortal. Where light exists, it is pure, blazing, fierce; but light exists almost nowhere, and the blackness itself is also pure and blazing and fierce.
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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.
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The boundary between space and the earth is purely arbitrary. And I'll probably always be interested in this planet - it's my favorite.
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Humans are good, she knew, at discerning subtle patterns that are really there, but equally so at imagining them when they are altogether absent.
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I have...a terrible need...shall I say the word?...of religion. Then I go out at night and paint the stars.
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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.
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Once upon a time, the best minds of the human species believed that the planets were attached to crystal spheres. ...Both in classic and in medieval times, it was prominently speculated that gods or angels propelled them, gave them a twirl every now and then. The Newtonian gravitational superstructure replaced angels with GMm/r
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Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
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In our obscurity - in all this vastness - there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us.
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Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.
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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 judgement to have safely traveled from star to star.
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Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.
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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.
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For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.
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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.
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Superstition is marked not by its pretension to a body of knowledge but by its method of seeking truth.
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Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense.