"We are star stuff which has taken its destiny into its own hands. The loom of time and space works the most astonishing transformations of matter."
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Quote collection
Carl Sagan quotes (page 28 of 30)
592 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Each of us is a tiny being, permitted to ride on the outermost skin of one of the smaller planets for a few dozen trips around the local star."
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"The immense distances to the stars and the galaxies mean that we see everything ins pace int he past, some as they were before the Earth came to be. Telescopes are time machines."
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"The politicians and the religious leaders and the weapons scientists have been at it for a long time and they've made a thorough mess of it. I mean, we're in deep trouble."
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"Perhaps the depth of love can be calibrated by the number of different selves that are actively involved in a given relationship."
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"The cosmos is all there is, all there ever was, and all there ever will be."
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"The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together. Information distilled over 4 billion years of biological evolution. Incidentally, all the organisms on the Earth are made essentially of that stuff. An eyedropper full of that liquid could be used to make a caterpillar or a petunia if only we knew how to put the components together."
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"I find science so much more fascinating than science fiction. It also has the advantage of being true."
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"I would be very ashamed of my civilization if we did not try to find out if there is life in outer space."
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"Cleverly designed experiments are the key."
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"We are made of star stuff. For the most part, atoms heavier than hydrogen were created in the interiors of stars and then expelled into space to be incorporated into later stars. The Sun is probably a third generation star."
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"How lucky we are to live in this time / the first moment in human history / when we are in fact visiting other worlds"
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"The fossil record implies trial and error, an inability to anticipate the future, features inconsistent with an efficient Great Designer (although not with a Designer of a more remote and indirect temperament)"
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"Cutting off fundamental, curiosity-driven science is like eating the seed corn. We may have a little more to eat next winter but what will we plant so we and our children will have enough to get through the winters to come?"
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"Any sufficiently crisp question can be answered by a single binary digit-0 or 1, yes or no."
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"Quickly capping 363 oil well fires in a war zone is impossible. The fires would burn out of control until they put themselves out... The resulting soot might well stretch over all of South Asia... It could be carried around the world... [and] the consequences could be dire. Beneath such a pall sunlight would be dimmed, temperatures lowered and droughts more frequent. Spring and summer frosts may be expected... This endangerment of the food supplies... appears to be likely enough that it should affect the war plans."
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"For years I've been stressing with regard to UFOs that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
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"Teller contended, not implausibly, that hydrogen bombs keep the peace, or at least prevent thermonuclear war, because the consequences of warfare between nuclear powers are now too dangerous. We haven't had a nuclear war yet, have we? But all such arguments assume that the nuclear-armed nations are and always will be, without exception, rational actors, and that bouts of anger and revenge and madness will never overtake their leaders (or military and secret police officers in charge of nuclear weapons). In the century of Hitler and Stalin, this seems ingenuous."
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"Nobody listens to mathematicians."
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"In the long run, the aggressive civilizations destroy themselves, almost always. It's their nature. They can't help it."
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