Carl Sagan Quotes, Book Quotes, Library Quotes

If I finish a book a week, I will read only a few thousand books in my lifetime, about a tenth of a percent of the contents of the greatest libraries of our time. The trick is to know which books to read.

5 years ago

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Book Quotes , Library Quotes

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.

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Inspirational Quotes , Motivational Quotes

Has there ever been a religion with the prophetic accuracy and reliability of science? . . . No other human institution comes close.

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Life Quotes , Reliability Quotes

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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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Teacher Quotes , Inspire Quotes

I'd like the [Cosmos] series to be so visually stimulating that somebody who isn't even interested in the concepts will just watch for the effects. And I'd like people who are prepared to do some thinking to be really stimulated.

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Science Quotes , Thinking Quotes

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?

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Doe Quotes , Atoms Quotes

I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudo-science and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive.

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Song Quotes , Years Quotes

Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works.

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Education Quotes , Atheist Quotes

'In his celebrated book, 'On Liberty', the English philosopher John Stuart Mill argued that silencing an opinion is "a peculiar evil." If the opinion is right, we are robbed of the "opportunity of exchanging error for truth"; and if it's wrong, we are deprived of a deeper understanding of the truth in its "collision with error." If we know only our own side of the argument, we hardly know even that: it becomes stale, soon learned by rote, untested, a pallid and lifeless truth.'

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Truth Quotes , Book Quotes

We have heard the rationales offered by the nuclear superpowers. We know who speaks for the nations. But who speaks for the human species? Who speaks for Earth?

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Nuclear Quotes , Earth Quotes

I would suggest that science is, at least in my part, informed worship.

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Worship Quotes

There is a lurking fear that some things are not “meant" to be known, that some inquiries are too dangerous for human beings to make.

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Keeping Secrets Quotes , Some Things Are Meant To Be Quotes

The Apollo pictures of the whole Earth conveyed to multitudes something well known to astronomers: On the scale of the worlds - to say nothing of stars or galaxies - humans are inconsequential, a thin film of life on an obscure and solitary lump of rock and metal

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Stars Quotes , Rocks Quotes

We are made of star-stuff. Our bodies are made of star-stuff. There are pieces of star within us all.

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Stars Quotes , Pieces 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.

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Revenge Quotes , Military Quotes

I think the discomfort that some people feel in going to the monkey cages at the zoo is a warning sign.

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Zoos Quotes , Thinking Quotes

Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth.

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Loyalty Quotes , Cosmos Quotes

If we're capable of conjuring up terrifying monsters in childhood, why shouldn't some of us, at least on occasion, be able to fantasize something similar, something truly horrifying, a shared delusion, as adults?

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Atheist Quotes , Childhood Quotes

Any civilization that doesn't develop space travel dies.

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Civilization Quotes , Space Quotes

Perhaps, in retrospect, there would be little motivation even for malevolent extraterrestrials to attack the Earth; perhaps, after a preliminary survey, they might decide it is more expedient just to be patient for a little while and wait for us to self-destruct.

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Motivation Quotes , Self Quotes