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Carl Sagan Quotes
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Societies will, of course, wish to exercise prudence in deciding which technologies that is, which applications of science are to be pursued and which not. But without funding basic research, without supporting the acquisition of knowledge for its own sake, our options become dangerously limited.
Carl Sagan
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The Bill of Rights decoupled religion from the state, in part because so many religions were steeped in an absolutist frame of mind - each convinced that it alone had a monopoly on the truth and therefore eager for the state to impose this truth on others.
Carl Sagan
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It's sometimes easier to reject strong evidence than to admit that we've been wrong, this is information about ourselves worth having.
Carl Sagan
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We are, almost all of us, descended from people who responded to the dangers of existence by inventing stories about unpredictable or disgruntled deities.
Carl Sagan
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The evidence, so far at least and laws of Nature aside, does not require a Designer. Maybe there is one hiding, maddeningly unwilling to be revealed.
Carl Sagan
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Even today the most jaded city dweller can be unexpectedly moved upon encountering a clear night sky studded with thousands of twinkling stars. When it happens to me after all these years it still takes my breath away.
Carl Sagan
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When theory is not adequate in science, the only realistic approach is experimental. Experiment is the touchstone of science on which the theories are framed. It is the court of last resort.
Carl Sagan
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All over the world there are enormous numbers of smart, even gifted, people who harbor a passion for science. But that passion is unrequited. Surveys suggest that some 95% of Americans are "scientifically illiterate." That's...the same fraction...of slaves who were illiterate before the Civil War...
Carl Sagan
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The wind whips through the canyons of the American Southwest, and there is no one to hear it but us - a reminder of the 40,000 generations of thinking men and women who preceded us, about whom we know almost nothing, upon whom our civilization is based.
Carl Sagan
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Nature does not always conform to our predispositions and preferences, to what we deem comfortable and easy to understand.
Carl Sagan
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Religions contradict one another-on small matters, such as whether we should put on a hat or take one off on entering a house of worship, or whether we should eat beef and eschew pork or the other way around, all the way to the most central issues, such as whether there are no gods, one God, or many gods.
Carl Sagan
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Bovine flatulence — the intimate intestinal activities of cows, reindeer, elephants, and elk — is detectable over interplanetary distances, while the bulk of the activities of mankind are invisible. We would not ordinarily consider the flatulence of cattle as a dominant manifestation of life on Earth, but there it is.
Carl Sagan
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Any sufficiently crisp question can be answered by a single binary digit-0 or 1, yes or no.
Carl Sagan
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Which aspects of our nature will prevail is uncertain, particularly when our visions and prospects are bound to one small part of the small planet Earth. But up there in the Cosmos an inescapable perspective awaits.
Carl Sagan
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In a complex universe, in a society undergoing unprecedented change, how can we find the truth if we are not willing to question everything and to give a fair hearing to everything?
Carl Sagan
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The total amount of energy from outside the solar system ever received by all the radio telescopes on the planet Earth is less than the energy of a single snowflake striking the ground.
Carl Sagan
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Human history can be viewed as a slowly dawning awareness that we are members of a larger group.
Carl Sagan
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UFOs: The reliable cases are uninteresting and the interesting cases are unreliable.
Carl Sagan
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We have entered, almost without noticing, an age of exploration and discovery unparalleled since the Renaissance.
Carl Sagan
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These are the snows of yesteryear, the pristine remnants of the origin of the solar system, waiting frozen in the interstellar dark.
Carl Sagan
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A stars rich in europium; of distant galaxies analyzed through the collective light of a hundred billion constituent stars. Astronomical spectroscopy is an almost magical technique. It amazes me still. Auguste Comte picked a particularly unfortunate example.
Carl Sagan
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I don?t feel rejected by the sky. I?m a part of it- tiny, to be sure, but everything is tiny compared to that overwhelming immensity.
Carl Sagan
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Science requires the most vigorous and uncompromising skepticism, because the vast majority of ideas are simply wrong, and the only way to winnow the wheat from the chaff is by critical experiment and analysis.
Carl Sagan
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Religions are tough. Either they make no contentions which are subject to disproof or they quickly redesign doctrine after disproof.... near the core of the religious experience is something remarkably resistant to rational inquiry.
Carl Sagan
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Apart from an understanding of the solar system as a whole, it is becoming clear that information about any planet or satellite illuminates our knowledge of the others. In particular, if we are to understand the Earth, we must have a comprehensive knowledge of the other planets.
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
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life
stars
species
cosmos
people
years
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