"The open road still softly calls, like a nearly forgotten song of childhood"
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Quote collection
Carl Sagan quotes (page 15 of 30)
592 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be."
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"In the middle 1970s an astronomer I admire put together a modest manifesto called "Objections to Astrology" and asked me to endorse it. I struggled with his wording, and in the end found myself unable to sign, not because I thought astrology has any validity whatever, but because I felt (and still feel) that the tone of the statement was authoritarian."
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"If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits?"
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"The visions we offer our children shape the future."
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"Those with the courage to explore the weave and structure of the Cosmos, even where it differs profoundly from their wishes and prejudices, will penetrate its deepest mysteries."
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"Human history can be viewed as a slowly dawning awareness that we are members of a larger group."
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"We have entered, almost without noticing, an age of exploration and discovery unparalleled since the Renaissance."
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"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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"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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"[N]o scientist likes to be criticized. ... But you don't reply to critics: "Wait a minute, wait a minute; this is a really good idea. I'm very fond of it. It's done you no harm. Please don't attack it." That's not the way it goes. The hard but just rule is that if the ideas don't work, you must throw them away. Don't waste any neurons on what doesn't work. Devote those neurons to new ideas that better explain the data. Valid criticism is doing you a favor."
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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."
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"We began as wanderers, and we are wanderers still."
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"Your god is too small for my universe."
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"I am not an atheist. An atheist is someone who has compelling evidence that there is no Judeo-Christian-Islamic God. I am not that wise, but neither do I consider there to be anything approaching adequate evidence for such a god. Why are you in such a hurry to make up your mind? Why not simply wait until there is compelling evidence?"
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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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"If we ruin the earth, there is no place else to go"
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"I would suggest that science is, at least in my part, informed worship."
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"We are the only species on the planet, so far as we know, to have invented a communal memory stored neither in our genes nor in our brains. The warehouse of this memory is called the library"
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"If you want to save your child from polio, you can pray or you can inoculate....Try science."
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