Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.
The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.
A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.
If it can be destroyed by the truth, it deserves to be destroyed by the truth.
But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
The nuclear arms race is like two sworn enemies standing waist deep in gasoline, one with three matches, the other with five.
I consider it an extremely dangerous doctrine, because the more likely we are to assume that the solution comes from the outside, the less likely we are to solve our problems ourselves.
The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together.
The fossil record implies trial and error, the inability to anticipate the future, features inconsistent with a Great Designer (though not a Designer of a more remote and indirect temperament.)
If we are merely matter intricately assembled, is this really demeaning? If there’s nothing here but atoms, does that make us less or does that make matter more?
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
I think the discomfort that some people feel in going to the monkey cages at the zoo is a warning sign.
It goes with a courageous intent to greet the universe as it really is, not to foist our emotional predispositions on it but to courageously accept what our explorations tell us.
It is said that men may not be the dreams of the god, but rather that the gods are the dreams of men.
The visions we offer our children shape the future. It _matters_ what those visions are. Often they become self-fulfilling prophecies. Dreams are maps.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
You could just as well say that an agnostic is a deeply religious person with at least a rudimentary knowledge of human fallibility.
Any faith that admires truth, that strives to know God, must be brave enough to accommodate the universe.
Religions are often state-protected nurseries of pseudoscience, although there’s no reason why religions have to play that role. In a way, it’s an artefact from times long gone.
Those at too great a distance may, I am well are, mistake ignorance for perspective.
We’ve arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster.
I would suggest that science is, at least in my part, informed worship.
In that case, on behalf of Earthlife, I urge that, with full knowledge of our limitations, we vastly increase our knowledge of the Solar System and then begin to settle other worlds.
The suppression of uncomfortable ideasmay be common in religion and politics, but it is not the path to knowledge; it has no placein the endeavor of science.
Perhaps the depth of love can be calibrated by the number of different selves that are actively involved in a given relationship.
In the vastness of space and the immensity of time, it is my joy to share a planet and an epoch with Annie.[Dedication to Sagan’s wife, Ann Druyan, in Cosmos]
By looking far out into space we are also looking far back into time, back toward the horizon of the universe, back toward the epoch of the Big Bang.
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.
If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.
We can judge our progress by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers, our willingness to embrace what is true rather than what feels good.
Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.
We are star stuff which has taken its destiny into its own hands.
A blade of grass is a commonplace on Earth; it would be a miracle on Mars. Our descendants on Mars will know the value of a patch of green. And if a blade of grass is priceless, what is the value of a human being?
The way to find out about our place in the universe is by examining the universe and by examining ourselves – without preconceptions, with as unbiased a mind as we can muster.
Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.
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?
There are no forbidden questions in science, no matters too sensitive or delicate to be probed, no sacred truths.
Once we lose our fear of being tiny, we find ourselves on the threshold of a vast and awesome Universe which dwarfs — in time, in space, and in potential — the tidy anthropocentric proscenium of our ancestors.
If we long for our planet to be important, there is something we can do about it. We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers.
You can get into a habit of thought in which you enjoy making fun of all those other people who don’t see things as clearly as you do. We have to guard carefully against it.
Avoidable human misery is more often caused not so much by stupidity as by ignorance, particularly our ignorance about ourselves.
Life is but a momentary glimpse of the wonder of this astounding universe, and it is sad to see so many dreaming it away on spiritual fantasy.
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?
There are many hypotheses in science which are wrong. That’s perfectly all right: it’s the aperture to finding out what’s right. Science is a self-correcting process.
The prediction I can make with the highest confidence is that the most amazing discoveries will be the ones we are not today wise enough to foresee.
But I try not to think with my gut. If I’m serious about understanding the world, thinking with anything besides my brain, as tempting as that might be, is likely to get me into trouble.
Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value the may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder.
What a marvelous cooperative arrangement – plants and animals each inhaling each other’s exhalations, a kind of planet-wide mutual mouth-to-stoma resuscitation, the entire elegant cycle powered by a star 150 million kilometers away.
Arguments from authority carry little weight – authorities have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts.
The lifetime of a human being is measured by decades, the lifetime of the Sun is a hundred million times longer. Compared to a star, we are like mayflies, fleeting ephemeral creatures who live out their lives in the course of a single day.
Science is a way to call the bluff of those who only pretend to knowledge. It is a bulwark against mysticism, against superstition, against religion misapplied to where it has no business being.
When we look up at night and view the stars, everything we see is shinning because of distant nuclear fusion.
And you are made of a hundred trillion cells. We are, each of us, a multitude.
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.
On Titan the molecules that have been raining down like manna from heaven for the last 4 billion years might still be there largely unaltered deep-frozen awaiting the chemists from Earth
We must understand the Cosmos as it is and not confuse how it is with how we wish it to be.
Science cuts two ways, of course; its products can be used for both good and evil. But there’s no turning back from science.
Observation: I can’t see a thing.Conclusion: Dinosaurs.
Significant change might require those who are now high in the hierarchy to move downward many steps. This seems to them undesirable and is resisted.
It may be that there are kernels of truth in a few of these doctrines, but their widespread acceptancebetokens a lack of intellectual rigor, an absence of skepticism, a need to replace experiments by desires.
For ages men had used sticks to club and spear each other—Anaximander of Miletus used the stick to measure time.
Let’s see if I got this right,” she would say to herself. “I’ve taken an inert gas that’s in the air, made it into a liquid, put some impurities in a ruby, attached a magnet, and detected the fires of creation.
Adolf Hitler! Ken, it makes me furious. Forty million people die to defeat that megalomaniac, and he’s the star of the first broadcast to another civilization? He’s representing us. And them. It’s that madman’s dream come true.
If it takes a little myth and ritual to get us through a night that seems endless, who among us cannot sympathize and understand?
Would not a rational society spend more on understanding and preventing, than on preparing for, the next war?
Liberation from superstition is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for science.
Often, superstition and injustice are imposed by the same ecclesiastical and secular authorities, working hand in glove. It is no surprise that political revolutions, scepticism about religion, and the rise of science might go together,
All science asks is to employ the same levels of skepticism we use in buying a used car or in judging the quality of analgesics or beer from their television commercials.
One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.
Books are like seeds. They can lie dormant for centuries and then flower in the most unpromising soil.
Thus, an inhibition center developed below what in humans is the temporal lobe, to turn off much of the functioning of the reptilian brain; and an activation center evolved in the pons to turn on the R-complex, but harmlessly, during sleep.
The sky calls to us. If we do not destroy ourselves, we will one day venture to the stars.
And reading itself is an amazing activity: You glance at a thin, flat object made from a tree…and the voice of the author begins to speak inside your head. (Hello!)
the future belongs to those societies that treat new ideas as delicate, fragile and immensely valuable pathways to the future.
As in all such technological nightmares, the principal task is to foresee what is possible; to educate use and misuse; and to prevent its organizational, bureaucratic and governmental abuse.
Natural selection has served as a kind of intellectual sieve, producing brains and intelligences increasingly competent to deal with the laws of nature.
Our difficulties in understanding or effectuatingcommunication with other animals may arise from our reluctance to grasp unfamiliar ways of dealing with the world.
Perhaps the locale of the subjunctive mood willone day be found. Will Latins turn out to be extravagantly endowed and English-speaking peoples significantly short-changed in this minor piece of brain anatomy?
Do dogs feel for humans something akin to religious ecstasy? What other strong or subtle emotions are felt by animals that do not communicate with us?
Evolution is adventitious and not foresighted. Only through the deaths of an immense number of slightly maladapted organisms are we, brains and all, here today.
Lashley also reported no apparent change in the general behavior of a rat when significant fractions—say 10 percent—of its brain were removed. But no one asked the rat of its opinion.
Once intelligent beings achieve technology and the capacity for self-destruction of their species, the selective advantage of intelligence becomes more uncertain.
You have to know the past to understand the present.
The vast distances that separate the stars are providential. Beings and worlds are quarantined from one another. The quarantine is lifted only for those with sufficient self-knowledge and judgment to have safely traveled from star to star.
In all our searching, the only thing we’ve found that makes the emptiness bearable is each other.
The brain is like a muscle. When it is in use we feel very good. Understanding is joyous.
Might it be possible at some future time, when neurophysiology has advanced substantially, to reconstruct the memories or insight of someone long dead?…It would be the ultimate breach of privacy.
The price we pay for the anticipation of our future is anxiety about it.
Their position seems to be that their God is so great he doesn’t even have to exist.
If you want to save your child from polio, you can pray or you can inoculate. … Choose science.
Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were, but without it we go nowhere.
But in introducing me simultaneously to skepticism and to wonder, they taught me the two uneasily cohabiting modes of thought that are central to the scientific method.
A galaxy is composed of gas and dust and stars – billions upon billions of stars. Every star may be a sun to someone.
All her life, dreams had been her friends. Her dreams were unusually detailed, well-structured, colorful.
To live in the hearts we leave behind is to live forever.
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
Something very strange is going on in the depths of space.
Science gropes and staggers toward improved understanding.
Why are there no nonhuman primates with an existing complex gestural language? One possible answer, it seems to me, is that humans have systematically exterminated those other primates who displayed signs of intelligence.
Human spoken language seems to beadventitious. The exploitation of organ systems with other functions for communication in humans is also indicative of the comparatively recent evolution of our linguistic abilities.
No question; language can free us of feeling, or almost. Maybe that’s one of its functions – so we can understand the world without becoming entirely overwhelmed by it.
But the male lexicographers had somehow neglected to coin a word for the dislike of men. They were almost entirely men themselves, she thought, and had been unable to imagine a market for such a word.
We are all flawed and creatures of our times. Is it fair to judge us by the unknown standards of the future?
It is morally as bad not to care whether a thing is true or not, so long as it makes you feel good, as it is not to care how you got your money as long as you have got it.
The universe is a pretty big place. If it’s just us, seems like an awful waste of space.
The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.
The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent to the concerns of such puny creatures as we are.
The astonishing fact is that similar mathematics applies so well to planets and to clocks. It needn’t have been this way. We didn’t impose it on the Universe. That’s the way the Universe is. If this is reductionism, so be it.
For thousands of years humans were oppressed – as some of us still are – by the notion that the universe is a marionette whose strings are pulled by a god or gods, unseen and inscrutable.
The world is so exquisite, with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there’s little goodevidence.
An atheist is someone who is certain that God doesn’t exist, someone who has compelling evidence against the existence of God. I know of no such compelling evidence.
Curiosity and the urge to solve problems are theemotional hallmarks of our species
The secrets of evolution, are time and death. There’s an unbroken thread that stretches from those first cells to us.
One of the great commandments of science is, ‘Mistrust arguments from authority’. (Scientists, being primates, and thus given to dominance hierarchies, of course do not always follow this commandment.)
Modern science has been a voyage into the unknown, with a lesson in humility waiting at every stop. Many passengers would rather have stayed home.
Science cuts two ways, of course; its products can be used for both good and evil. But there’s no turning back from science. The early warnings about technological dangers also come from science.
Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of magic.
When you look more generally at life on Earth, you find that it is all the same kind of life. There are not many different kinds; there’s only one kind. It uses about fifty fundamental biological building blocks, organic molecules.
There is every reason to think that in the coming years Mars and its mysteries will become increasingly familiar to the inhabitants of the Planet Earth.
The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.
We will know which stars to visit. Our descendants will then skim the light years, the children of Thales and Aristarchus, Leonardo and Einstein.
Meanwhile the Cosmos is rich beyond measure: the total number of stars in the universe is greater than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the planet Earth.
The illegality of cannabis is outrageous, an impediment to full utilization of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship so desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world.
Could we possible manage the next phase of human history without first dealing with this penchant for dehumanizing the adversary?
Neuroanatomy, political history, and introspection all offer evidence that human beings are quite capable of resisting the urge to surrender to every impulse of reptilian core of brain.
[an encounter in space] “Some celestial event. No–no words–no words to describe it. Poetry! They should have sent a poet. So beautiful. So beautiful…I had no idea. I had no idea.
The method of science is tried and true. It is not perfect, it’s just the best we have. And to abandon it, with its skeptical protocols, is the pathway to a dark age.
Across the sea of space, the stars are other suns.
Sailors on a becalmed sea, we sense the stirring of a breeze.
Once upon a time, we soared into the Solar System. For a few years. Then we hurried back. Why? What happened? What was ‘Apollo’ really about?
Everything not forbidden by the laws of nature, he assured her – quoting a colleague down the hall – is mandatory.
Birds know, better than humans, not to spoil the nest.
Even if the aliens are short, dour, and sexually obsessed—if they’re here, I want to know about them.
The total amount of energy from outside the solar system ever received by all the radio telescopes on the planet Earth is less than the energy of a single snowflake striking the ground.
People are not stupid. They believe things for reasons. The last way for skeptics to get the attention of bright, curious, intelligent people is to belittle or condescend or to show arrogance toward their beliefs.
Intuitive: The word conveys, I think, a diffuse annoyance at our inability to understand how we come by such knowledge.
Many religions have attempted to make statues of their gods very large, and the idea, I suppose, is to make us feel small. But if that’s their purpose, they can keep their paltry icons. We need only look up if we wish to feel small.
Black holes collect problems faster than they collect matter.
But if they called everything divine which they do not understand, why, there would be no end of divine beings.
Advertising teaches people not to trust their judgment. Advertising teaches people to be stupid.
Advances in medicine and agriculture have saved vastly more lives than have been lost in all the wars in history.
The same few dozen organic molecules are used over and over again in biology for the widest variety of functions.
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.
Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.
For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.
Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.
It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.
Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense.
We’ve arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology.
I am often amazed at how much more capability and enthusiasm for science there is among elementary school youngsters than among college students.
Personally, I would be delighted if there were a life after death, especially if it permitted me to continue to learn about this world and others, if it gave me a chance to discover how history turns out.
Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.
All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value.