Carl Sagan Quotes
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It’s hard to kill a creature once it lets you see its consciousness.
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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.
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That it will never come againIs what makes life so sweet.
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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.
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Not explaining science seems to me perverse. When you're in love, you want to tell the world.
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War is murder writ large.
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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.
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There is a very stunning range of studies... of interstellar organic matter... the cold, dark spaces between the stars are also loaded with organic matter. ...complex organic materials are everywhere.
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With insufficient data it is easy to go wrong.
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The fossil record implies trial and error, an inability to anticipate the future, features inconsistent with an efficient Great Designer.
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Do we, holding that the gods exist,deceive ourselves with insubstantial dreamsand lies, while random careless chance andchange alone control the world?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The chiliasts made an atheist out of me.
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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.
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'Do you understand what’s going on?''Not at all,' he shouted back. 'I can almost prove this can’t be happening.'
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In the long run, the aggressive civilizations destroy themselves, almost always. It’s their nature. They can’t help it.
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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.
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If we seek... nature, then love can be informed by truth instead of being based on ignorance or self-deception.
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Science is ... 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’re up for grabs for the next charlatan, political or religious, who comes ambling along.'
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For a long time the human instinct to understand was thwarted by facile religious explanations.
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We find a set of data that strongly implies the presence of complex organic molecules in the outer solar system.
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We could not guess how different from us they (extraterrestrials) might be. It was hard enough to guess the intentions of our elected representatives in Washington.