Carl Sagan Quotes, Running Quotes, Jobs Quotes

Scientists make mistakes. Accordingly, it is the job of the scientist to recognize our weakness, to examine the widest range of opinions, to be ruthlessly self-critical. Science is a collective enterprise with the error-correction machinery often running smoothly.

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If we can't think for ourselves, if we're unwilling to question authority, then we're just putty in the hands of those in power.

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Thinking Quotes , Hands Quotes

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.

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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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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Errors Quotes , Inability Quotes

Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge. Its goal is to find out how the world works, to seek what regularities there may be, to penetrate to the connections of things-from subatomic particles, which may be the constituents of all matter, to living organisms, the human social community, and thence to the cosmos as a whole.

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Extraordinary claim requires extraordinary proof.

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I believe that part of what propels science is the thirst for wonder. It's a very powerful emotion. All children feel it. In a first grade classroom everybody feels it; in a twelfth grade classroom almost nobody feels it, or at least acknowledges it. Something happens between first and twelfth grade, and it's not just puberty. Not only do the schools and the media not teach much skepticism, there is also little encouragement of this stirring sense of wonder. Science and pseudoscience both arouse that feeling. Poor popularizations of science establish an ecological niche for pseudoscience.

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Encouragement Quotes , Children Quotes

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.

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Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.

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There are no forbidden questions in science, no matters too sensitive or delicate to be probed, no sacred truths.

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Matter Quotes , Sacred Quotes

Since, in the long run, every planetary society will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring — not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive.

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Real patriots ask questions.

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My view is that if there is no evidence for it, then forget about it. An agnostic is somebody who doesn’t believe in something until there is evidence for it, so I’m agnostic.

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Believe Quotes , Views Quotes

Demon mean knowledge in Greek, especially about the material world. Science means knowledge in Latin. A jurisdictional dispute is exposed, even if we look no further

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For all I know we may be visited by a different extraterrestrial civilization every second Tuesday, but there's no support for this appealing idea. The extraordinary claims are not supported by extraordinary evidence.

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While our behavior is still significantly controlled by our genetic inheritance, we have, through our brains, a much richer opportunity to blaze new behavioral and cultural pathways on short timescales.

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Science Quotes , Opportunity Quotes

The open road still softly calls.

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What's the harm of a little mystification? It sure beats boring statistical analyses.

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We on Earth have just awakened to the great oceans of space and time from which we have emerged.

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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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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Revenge Quotes , Military Quotes