Carl Sagan - Wikiquote - 0 views
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Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.
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If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you … On the other hand, if you are open to the point of gullibility and have not an ounce of skeptical sense in you, then you cannot distinguish the useful ideas from the worthless ones.
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The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what's true. We have a method, and that method helps us to reach not absolute truth, only asymptotic approaches to the truth — never there, just closer and closer, always finding vast new oceans of undiscovered possibilities. Cleverly designed experiments are the key.
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We live in a society absolutely dependent on science and technology and yet have cleverly arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. That's a clear prescription for disaster.
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I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue. But much as I want to believe that, and despite the ancient and worldwide cultural traditions that assert an afterlife, I know of nothing to suggest that it is more than wishful thinking. 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 good evidence. Far better it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides.
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If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.
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Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever it has to teach us, or somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved?
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In science it often happens that scientists say, "You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken," and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
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Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.
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We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it's forever.
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It is all a matter of time scale. An event that would be unthinkable in a hundred years may be inevitable in a hundred million.
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The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion and politics, but it is not the path to knowledge; it has no place in the endeavor of science.
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With insufficient data it is easy to go wrong.
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Human beings have a demonstrated talent for self-deception when their emotions are stirred.
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For a long time the human instinct to understand was thwarted by facile religious explanations.
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They (i. e., the Pythagoreans) did not advocate the free confrontation of conflicting points of view. Instead, like all orthodox religions, they practised a rigidity that prevented them from correcting their errors.
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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.
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We embarked on our journey to the stars with a question first framed in the childhood of our species and in each generation asked anew with undiminished wonder: What are the stars? Exploration is in our nature. We began as wanderers, and we are wanderers still. We have lingered long enough on the shores of the cosmic ocean. We are ready at last to set sail for the stars.
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If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.
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A googolplex is precisely as far from infinity as is the number 1... no matter what number you have in mind, infinity is larger still.
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The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent to the concerns of such puny creatures as we are.
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The library connects us with the insights 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 of 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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Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors.
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I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture and our concern for the future can all be tested by how well we support our libraries.
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Other things being equal, it is better to be smart than to be stupid.
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As the ancient myth makers knew, we are children equally of the earth and the sky.
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War is murder writ large.
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Those afraid of the universe as it really is, those who pretend to nonexistent knowledge and envision a Cosmos centered on human beings will prefer the fleeting comforts of superstition. They avoid rather than confront the world. But those with the courage to explore the weave and structure of the Cosmos, even where it differs profoundly from their wishes and prejudices, will penetrate its deepest mysteries.
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there are no sacred truths; all assumptions must be critically examined
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We must understand the Cosmos as it is and not confuse how it is with how we wish it to be.
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whatever is inconsistent with the facts must be discarded or revised.
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Human history can be viewed as a slowly dawning awareness that we are members of a larger group. Initially our loyalties were to ourselves and our immediate family, next, to bands of wandering hunter-gatherers, then to tribes, small settlements, city-states, nations. We have broadened the circle of those we love. We have now organized what are modestly described as super-powers, which include groups of people from divergent ethnic and cultural backgrounds working in some sense together — surely a humanizing and character building experience. If we are to survive, our loyalties must be broadened further, to include the whole human community, the entire planet Earth.
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Human history can be viewed as a slowly dawning awareness that we are members of a larger group.
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the choice, as H. G. Wells once said in a different context, is clearly the universe or nothing.
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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.
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it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true.
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For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.
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Do we, holding that the gods exist, deceive ourselves with insubstantial dreams and lies, while random careless chance and change alone control the world?
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God for you is where you sweep away all the mysteries of the world, all the challenges to our intelligence. You simply turn your mind off and say God did it.
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Humans are very good at dreaming
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For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.
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You can’t convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it’s based on a deep seated need to believe.
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We wish to pursue the truth no matter where it leads. But to find the truth, we need imagination and skepticism both.
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We're made of star-stuff.
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The cosmos is full beyond measure of elegant truths; of exquisite interrelationships; of the awesome machinery of nature.
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We wish to pursue the truth no matter where it leads. But to find the truth, we need imagination and skepticism both. We will not be afraid to speculate, but we will be careful to distinguish speculation from fact. The cosmos is full beyond measure of elegant truths; of exquisite interrelationships; of the awesome machinery of nature.
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We on Earth have just awakened to the great oceans of space and time from which we have emerged. We are the legacy of 15 billion years of cosmic evolution. We have a choice: We can enhance life and come to know the universe that made us, or we can squander our 15 billion-year heritage in meaningless self-destruction. What happens in the first second of the next cosmic year depends on what we do, here and now, with our intelligence and our knowledge of the cosmos.
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The sky calls to us. If we do not destroy ourselves, we will one day venture to the stars.
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History is full of people who out of fear or ignorance or the lust for power have destroyed treasures of immeasurable value which truly belong to all of us. We must not let it happen again
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By exploring other worlds we safeguard this one. By itself, I think this fact more than justifies the money our species has spent in sending ships to other worlds. It is our fate to live during one of the most perilous and, at the same time, one of the most hopeful chapters in human history.
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Exactly the same technology can be used for good and for evil.
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You can use your technology to destroy yourselves or to carry you to the planets and the stars. It's up to you.