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Carl Sagan Quotes
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If we teach only the findings and products of science - no matter how useful and even inspiring they may be - without communicating its critical method, how can the average person possibly distinguish science from pseudoscience?
Carl Sagan
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The scientific world view works so well, explains so much and resonates so harmoniously with the most advanced parts of our brains that in time, I think, virtually every culture on the Earth, left to its own devices, would have discovered science.
Carl Sagan
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In our time, we have sifted the sands of Mars, we have established a presence there, we have fulfilled a century of dreams!
Carl Sagan
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Scientists do not seek to impose their needs and wants on Nature, but instead humbly interrogate Nature and take seriously what they find.
Carl Sagan
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In the night sky, when the air is clear, there is a cosmic Rorschach test awaiting us. Thousands of stars, bright and faint, near and far, in a glittering variety of colors, are peppered across the canopy of night. The eye, irritated by randomness, seeking order, tends to organize into patterns these separate and distinct points of light.
Carl Sagan
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Thus the recent rapid evolution of human intelligence is not only the cause of but also the only conceivable solution to the many serious problems that beset us.
Carl Sagan
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Football is a thinly disguised re-enactment of hunting; we played it before we were human.
Carl Sagan
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When permitted to listen to alternative opinions and engage in substantive debate, people have been known to change their minds. It can happen.
Carl Sagan
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Both the Freudian and the Platonic metaphors emphasize the considerable independence of and tension among the constituent parts of the psyche, a point that characterizes the human condition.
Carl Sagan
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The discovery of life on some other world will, among many things, be for us a humbling experience.
Carl Sagan
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It is useless to search for that which cannot exist.
Carl Sagan
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Ours is the first generation that has grown up with science-fiction ideas.
Carl Sagan
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The open road still softly calls, like a nearly forgotten song of childhood
Carl Sagan
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We are rare and precious because we are alive, because we can think as well as we can. We are privileged to influence and perhaps control our future. I believe we have an obligation to fight for life on Earth - not just for ourselves, but for all those, humans and others, who came before us, and to whom we are beholden, and for all those who, if we are wise enough, will come after.
Carl Sagan
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Someone has to propose ideas at the boundaries of the plausible, in order to so annoy the experimentalists or observationalists that they'll be motivated to disprove the idea.
Carl Sagan
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A being quite like us, but with a small physiological difference — a third eye, say or blue hair covering the nose and forehead — somehow evokes feelings of revulsion. Such feelings may have had adaptive value at one time in defending our small tribe against the beasts and neighbors. But in our time such feelings are obsolete and dangerous.
Carl Sagan
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If you want to know when the next eclipse of the Sun will be, you might try magicians or mystics, but you'll do much better with scientists.
Carl Sagan
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The Universe forces those who live in it to understand it. Those creatures who find everyday experience a muddled jumble of events with no predictability, no regularity, are in grave peril. The Universe belongs to those who, at least to some degree, have figured it out.
Carl Sagan
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There are a million other civilizations, all fabulously ugly, and all a lot smarter than us. Knowing this seems to me to be a useful and character-building experience for mankind.
Carl Sagan
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The well-meaning contention that all ideas have equal merit seems to me little different from the disastrous contention that no ideas have any merit.
Carl Sagan
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Science may be hard to understand. It may challenge cherished beliefs. When its products are placed at the disposal of politicians or industrialists, it may lead to weapons of mass destruction and grave threats to the environment. But one thing you have to say about it. It delivers the goods.
Carl Sagan
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Those who seek power at any price detect a societal weakness, a fear that they can ride into office.
Carl Sagan
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Next to nature there is nothing more wonderful than man's gradual understanding of it.
Carl Sagan
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God may be thought of as the cosmic watchmaker, the engineer who constructed the initial state and lit the fuse.
Carl Sagan
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Our ancestors lived out of doors. They were as familiar with the night sky as most of us are with our favorite television programs.
Carl Sagan
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Quote of the day
Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact.
William James
Carl Sagan
Born:
November 9, 1934
Died:
December 20, 1996
(aged 62)
Bio:
Carl Edward Sagan was an American astronomer and popular science writer.
Known for:
Cosmos (1980)
The Demon-Haunted World (1995)
The Dragons of Eden (1977)
Contact (1985)
Most used words:
science
universe
earth
god
time
human
life
stars
species
cosmos
people
years
planet
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