Ann Druyan Quotes
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It takes a fearless, unflinching love and deep humility to accept the universe as it is. The most effective way he knew to accomplish that, the most powerful tool at his disposal, was the scientific method, which over time winnows out deception. It can't give you absolute truth because science is a permanent revolution, always subject to revision, but it can give you successive approximations of reality.
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The way he treated me & the way I treated him, the way we took care of each other & our family, while he lived. That is so much more important than the idea I will see him someday.
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I believe that we are a story-driven species and that we understand how things are put together, in the context of narrative. It's a shame that science hasn't been taught that way, in a long time. It's usually the fact completely devoid of any human experience or any idea of how the scientist came to that conclusion.
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And what greater might do we possess as human beings than our capacity to question and to learn?
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The greatest thing that science teaches you is the law of unintended consequences.
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It is a great tragedy that science, this wonderful process for finding out what is true, has ceded the spiritual uplift of its central revelations: the vastness of the universe, the immensity of time, the relatedness of all life, and life’s preciousness on our tiny planet.
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We are living in a society that is totally dependent on science and high technology, and yet most of us are effectively alienated and excluded from its workings, from the values of science, the methods of science, and the language of science. A good place to start would be for as many of us as possible to begin to understand the decision-making and the basis for those decisions, and to act independently and not be manipulated into thinking one thing or another, but to learn how to think. That's what science does.
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The only gratification that science denies to us is deception.
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Knowing a deep thing well, which is what science asks of its practitioners, is an empowerment that is very profound. It's a liberation.
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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.
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I guess I so desperately want to see us put this planet right. It's so horrifying to me that a fifth of us are starving every night, and that forty thousand children die every single day.
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Interviewer: "Didn't [Sagan] want to believe?" Druyan: "He didn't want to believe. He wanted to know.
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If you are searching for sacred knowledge and not just a palliative for your fears, then you will train yourself to be a good skeptic.
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Recently there's been a resurgence of rejection of evolution - possibly one of the most concrete and indisputable discoveries of science. To the extent that we deny this, we're wandering in the darkness.
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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.
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Carl took on the military-industrial complex. He campaigned around the world for an end to the production of weapons of mass destruction. To him it was a perversion of science.
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Ten long trips around the sun since I last saw that smile, but only joy and thankfulness that on a tiny world in the vastness, for a couple of moments in the immensity of time, we were one.
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In the 1970s, I think that there was probably a higher degree of respect for science, of hope about the future, and the future-oriented vision.
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I don't have any faith, but I have a lot of hope, and I have a lot of dreams of what we could do with our intelligence if we had the will and the leadership and the understanding of how we could take all of our intelligence and our resources and create a world for our kids that is hopeful.
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I found that it was easiest to convey the information in the context of the life of the scientist or in the context of our own personal experience, and there was no idea that was too complicated that couldn't be explained clearly and directly.
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Carl did not want to believe. He wanted to know.
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The aspirations of democracy are based on the notion of an informed citizenry, capable of making wise decisions. The choices we are asked to make become increasingly complex. They require the longer-term thinking and greater tolerance for ambiguity that science fosters. The new economy is predicated on a continuous pipeline of scientific and technological innovation. It can not exist without workers and consumers who are mathematically and scientifically literate.
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Well, I actually grew up in the sixties. I feel very lucky, actually, that that was my slice of time that I was dealt. Let's remember that the real motivation in the sixties, and even in the fifties, was the Cold War.
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Science has the cold facts, but lacks religion's social organization and ability to inspire that moves people to act.