"In science it often happens that scientists say, "You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken...""
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Quote collection
Carl Sagan quotes (page 5 of 30)
592 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Don't judge everyone else by your own limited experience."
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"We are the product of 4.5 billion years of fortuitous, slow biological evolution. There is no reason to think that the evolutionary process has stopped. Man is a transitional animal. He is not the climax of creation."
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"We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces."
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"Organic as a dandelion seed, [the ship of our imagination] will carry us to worlds of dreams and worlds of facts"
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"We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology and yet have cleverly arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology."
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"It is of interest to note that while some dolphins are reported to have learned English - up to fifty words used in correct context - no human being has been reported to have learned dolphinese."
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"Every star may be a sun to someone."
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"One of the greatest gifts adults can give - to their offspring and to their society - is to read to children."
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"It is sometimes said that scientists are unromantic, that their passion to figure out robs the world of beauty and mystery. But is it not stirring to understand how the world actually works — that white light is made of colors, that color is the way we perceive the wavelengths of light, that transparent air reflects light, that in so doing it discriminates among the waves, and that the sky is blue for the same reason that the sunset is red? It does no harm to the romance of the sunset to know a little bit about it."
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"We are made of stellar ash. Our origin and evolution have been tied to distant cosmic events. The exploration of the cosmos is a voyage of self-discovery."
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"A millennium before Europeans were willing to divest themselves of the Biblical idea that the world was a few thousand years old, the Mayans were thinking of millions and the Hindus billions."
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"The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion or in politics, but it is not the path to knowledge; it has no in the endeavor of science. We do not know in advance who will discover fundamental insights."
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"The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home."
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"Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception."
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"Even Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel, and Albert Einstein made serious mistakes. But the scientific enterprise arranges things so that teamwork prevails: What one of us, even the most brilliant among us, misses, another of us, even someone much less celebrated and capable, may detect and rectify."
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"The library connects us with the insight and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species."
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"Not all birds can fly. What separates the flyers from the walkers is the ability to take off."
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"And you are made of a hundred trillion cells. We are, each of us, a multitude."
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"I can find in my undergraduate classes, bright students who do not know that the stars rise and set at night, or even that the Sun is a star."
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