Carl Sagan Quotes, Science Quotes, Data Quotes

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.

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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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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.

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Thinking Quotes , Hands Quotes

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.

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Heart Quotes , Tree Quotes

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?

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Long Quotes , Tree Quotes

We are the custodians of life's meaning.

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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.

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Home Quotes , Heart Quotes

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.

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Thinking Quotes , Years Quotes

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.

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All civilizations become either spacefaring or extinct.

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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.

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Comfort Quotes , Cosmos Quotes

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.

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Opportunity Quotes , Other Worlds Quotes

Has there ever been a religion with the prophetic accuracy and reliability of science? . . . No other human institution comes close.

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Life Quotes , Reliability Quotes

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.

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Moon Quotes , Rocks Quotes

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.

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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?

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Details Of Life Quotes , Atheism Quotes

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.

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Stars Quotes , Space Quotes

When we look up at night and view the stars, everything we see is shinning because of distant nuclear fusion.

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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.

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Thinking Quotes , World Quotes

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.

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Peace Quotes , Fall Quotes