"UFOs: The reliable cases are uninteresting and in the interesting cases are unreliable."
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Quote collection
Carl Sagan quotes (page 27 of 30)
592 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"All inquires carry with them some element of risk. There is no guarantee that the universe will conform to our predispositions."
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"Any faith that admires truth, that strives to know God, must be brave enough to accommodate the universe."
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"We go about our daily lives understanding almost nothing of the world."
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"Eratosthenes's only tools were sticks, eyes, feet, and brains; plus a zest for experiment. With those tools he correctly deduced the circumference of the Earth, to high precision, with an error of only a few percent. That's pretty good figuring for 2200 years ago."
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"Science is far from a perfect instrument of knowledge. It's just the best we have."
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"The fact that so little of the findings of modern science is prefigured in Scripture to my mind casts further doubt on it divine inspiration."
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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."
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"Science is more than a body of knowledge. It's a way of thinking: a way of skeptically interrogating the universe."
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"The Platonists and their Christian successors held the peculiar notion that the Earth was tainted and somehow nasty, while the heavens were perfect and divine. The fundamental idea that the Earth is a planet, that we are citizens of the Universe, was rejected and forgotten."
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"For a long time the human instinct to understand was thwarted by facile religious explanations."
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"The near side of a galaxy is tens of thousands of light-years closer to us than the far side; thus we see the front as it was tens of thousands of years before the back. But typical events in galactic dynamics occupy tens of millions of years, so the error in thinking of an image of a galaxy as frozen in one moment of time is small."
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"I’m struck again by the irony that spaceflight-conceived in the cauldron of nationalist rivalries and hatreds-brings with it a stunning transnational vision. You spend even a little time contemplating the Earth from orbit and the most deeply engrained nationalisms begin to erode. They seem the squabbles of mites on a plum."
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"If we're capable of conjuring up terrifying monsters in childhood, why shouldn't some of us, at least on occasion, be able to fantasize something similar, something truly horrifying, a shared delusion, as adults?"
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"Few scientists now dispute that today's soaring levels of carbon dioxide and other gases in the atmosphere will cause global temperature averages to rise by as much as nine degrees Fahrenheit sometime after the year 2000."
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"Any civilization that doesn't develop space travel dies."
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"There are more potential combinations of DNA [physical forms] than there are atoms in the universe."
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"In more than one respect, the exploring of the Solar System and homesteading other worlds constitutes the beginning, much more than the end, of history."
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"You mustn't think of the Universe as a wilderness. It hasn't been that for billions of years," he said. "Think of it more as... ..cultivated."
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"He sought a way to preserve the past. John Hershel was one of the founders of a new form of time travel.... a means to capture light and memories. He actually coined a word for it... photography. When you think about it, photography is a form of time travel. This man is staring at us from across the centuries, a ghost preserved by light."
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