Quote collection
592 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Virtually every major technological advance in the history of the human species - back to the invention of stone tools and the domestication of fire - has been ethically ambiguous."
"The passion to explore is at the heart of being human."
"We are...capable of using our compassion and our intelligence, our technology and our wealth, to make an abundant and meaningful life for every inhabitant of this planet. To enhance enormously our understanding of the Universe, and to carry us to the stars."
"My deeply held belief is that if a god of anything like the traditional sort exists, our curiosity and intelligence is provided by such a God. We would be unappreciative of that gift if we suppressed our passion to explore the universe and ourselves."
"Football is a thinly disguised re-enactment of hunting; we played it before we were human."
"The Apollo pictures of the whole Earth conveyed to multitudes something well known to astronomers: On the scale of the worlds - to say nothing of stars or galaxies - humans are inconsequential, a thin film of life on an obscure and solitary lump of rock and metal"
"We are the first species to have taken our evolution into our own hands."
"Our intelligence is imperfect, surely, and newly arisen; the ease with which it can be sweet-talked, overwhelmed, or subverted by other hardwired propensities - sometimes themselves disguised as the cool light of reason - is worrisome."
"These are all cases of proved or presumptive baloney. A deception arises, sometimes innocently but collaboratively, sometimes with cynical premeditation. Usually the victim is caught up in a powerful emotion -- wonder, fear, greed, grief. Credulous acceptance of baloney can cost you money; that's what P. T. Barnum meant when he said, 'There's a sucker born every minute.' But it can be much more dangerous than that, and when governments and societies lose the capacity for critical thinking, the results can be catastrophic -- however sympathetic we may be to those who have bought the baloney."
"Otherwise we don't run the government the government runs us"
"Ours is the first generation that has grown up with science-fiction ideas."
"These days there seems to be nowhere left to explore, at least on the land area of the Earth. Victims of their very success, the explorers now pretty much stay home."
"We live at a moment when our relationships to each other, and to all other beings with whom we share this planet, are up for grabs."
"We are all made up of star stuff."
"Our children long for realistic maps of the future that they can be proud of. Where are the cartographers of human purpose?"
"Man is the matter of the cosmos, contemplating itself."
"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."
"We live in an in-between universe where things change all right...but according to patterns, rules, or as we call them, laws of nature."
"Observation: I can't see a thing. Conclusion: Dinosaurs."
"Because men, compared to male chimps, have such relatively small testicles (large testicles indicate a species where many males mate, one after the other, with the same female), we might guess that promiscuous societies were uncommon in the immediate human past."