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  • Carl Sagan Quotes   592
  • Religions contradict one another-on small matters, such as whether we should put on a hat or take one off on entering a house of worship, or whether we should eat beef and eschew pork or the other way around, all the way to the most central issues, such as whether there are no gods, one God, or many gods.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Religious Quotes , Issues Quotes
  • If some good evidence for life after death were announced, I'd be eager to examine it; but it would have to be real scientific data, not mere anecdote. As with the face on Mars and alien abductions, better the hard truth, I say, than the comforting fantasy.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Atheist Quotes , Real Quotes
  • Think of how many religions attempt to validate themselves with prophecy. Think of how many people rely on these prophecies, however vague, however unfulfilled, to support or prop up their beliefs. Yet has there ever been a religion with the prophetic accuracy and reliability of science? ... No other human institution comes close.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Science Quotes , Thinking Quotes
  • 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.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Revenge Quotes , Military Quotes
  • When a honeybee dies it releases a death pheromone, a characteristic odour that signals the survivors to remove it from the hive. The corpse is promptly pushed and tugged out of the hive. The death pheromone is oleic acid. What happens if a live bee is dabbed with a drop of oleic acid? Then no matter how strapping and vigourous it might be, it is carried kicking and screaming out of the hive.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Science Quotes , Survivor Quotes
  • Science is based on experiment, on a willingness to challenge old dogma, on an openness to see the universe as it really is. Accordingly, science sometimes requires courage - at the very least the courage to question the conventional wisdom.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Challenges Quotes , Dogma Quotes
  • All over the world there are enormous numbers of smart, even gifted, people who harbor a passion for science. But that passion is unrequited. Surveys suggest that some 95% of Americans are "scientifically illiterate." That's...the same fraction...of slaves who were illiterate before the Civil War.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , War Quotes , Smart Quotes
  • 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.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Christian Quotes , Ideas Quotes
  • If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you. You become a crotchety old person convinced that nonsense is ruling the world. (There is, of course, much data to support you.) But every now and then, a new idea turns out to be on the mark, valid and wonderful. If you are too much in the habit of being skeptical about everything, you are going to miss or resent it, and either way you will be standing in the way of understanding and progress.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Science Quotes , Data Quotes