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Most of the people that I deal with are human. So I've had a lot of experience with that.
Carl Sagan -
There is no question that religions have historically played the role of making people contented with their lot. ...such a doctrine would be very appealing to the ruling classes of a society. ...Many societies, for this reason alone, encourage the contentment with your lot that the religious premise of heaven affords.
Carl Sagan
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Something dreadful happens to students between first and twelfth grades, and it's not just puberty.
Carl Sagan -
I think people in power have a vested interest to oppose critical thinking.
Carl Sagan -
She too had found the experience transforming. How could she not? A demon had been exorcised. Several. And just when she felt more capable of love than she had ever been, she found herself alone.
Carl Sagan -
In the vastness of the Cosmos there must be other civilizations far older and more advanced than ours.
Carl Sagan -
The history of science-especially physics-has in part been the tension between the natural tendency to project our everyday experience on the universe and the universe's noncompliance...
Carl Sagan -
Astronomically, the U. S. S. R. and the United States are the same place.
Carl Sagan
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We are the representatives of the cosmos; we are an example of what hydrogen atoms can do, given 15 billion years of cosmic evolution.
Carl Sagan -
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 -
Suppose your father... walked into this room at the ordinary human pace of walking. And suppose just behind him was his father. How long would we have to wait before the ancestor who enters the now-open door is a creature who normally walked on all fours? The answer is a week.
Carl Sagan -
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 -
No other planet in the solar system is a suitable home for human beings; it's this world or nothing. That's a very powerful perception.
Carl Sagan -
Every thinking person fears nuclear war and every technological nation plans for it. Everyone knows it's madness, and every country has an excuse.
Carl Sagan
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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 -
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 -
The old man made himself look hard at the Raven and saw that it was not a great bird from the sky but the work of men like himself. This first encounter turned out to be peaceful. The men of the La Pérouse expedition were under strict orders to treat with respect any people they might discover, an exceptional policy for its time and after.
Carl Sagan -
If there's nothing in here but atoms, does that make us less or does that make matter more?
Carl Sagan -
If we crave some cosmic purpose, then let us find ourselves a worthy goal.
Carl Sagan -
This is Phobos... Its mean density is known, and it is consistent with organic matter. Deimos... same story.
Carl Sagan
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It’s hard to kill a creature once it lets you see its consciousness.
Carl Sagan -
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.
Carl Sagan -
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 -
War is murder writ large.
Carl Sagan