Carl Sagan Quotes, Stars Quotes, Weakness Quotes

It will not be we who reach Alpha Centauri, and the other nearby stars. It will be a species very like us - but with more of our strengths and fewer of our weaknesses.

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Stars Quotes , Weakness 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

If chimpanzees have consciousness, if they are capable of abstractions, do they not have what until now has been described as 'human rights'? How smart does a chimp have to be before killing him constitutes murder?

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Smart Quotes , Animal 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.

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , War Quotes , Smart 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

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.

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Science Quotes , Prejudice Quotes

Probably a dozen times since their death I've heard my mother or father, in an ordinary conversational tone of voice, call my name. They had called my name often during my life with them ... It doesn't seem strange to me.

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Mother Quotes , Father Quotes

For years I've been stressing with regard to UFOs that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Stress Quotes , Years 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.

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Science Quotes , Data 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

Even through your hardest days, remember we are all made of stardust.

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Remember Quotes , Stardust Quotes

It is the tension between creativity and skepticism that has produced the stunning and unexpected findings of science.

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Creativity Quotes , Science Quotes

If we ruin the earth, there is no place else to go

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Earth Quotes , Ruins Quotes

Avoidable human misery is more often caused not so much by stupidity as by ignorance, particularly our ignorance about ourselves.

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Stupid Quotes , Ignorance Quotes

We are made of starstuff.

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Stars Quotes , Science Quotes

There is today-in a time when old beliefs are withering-a kind of philosophical hunger, a need to know who we are and how we got here. It is an on-going search, often unconscious, for a cosmic perspective for humanity

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Philosophical Quotes , Perspective Quotes

Centuries hence, when current social and political problems may seem as remote as the problems of the Thirty Years' War are to us, our age may be remembered chiefly for one fact: It was the time when the inhabitants of the earth first made contact with the vast cosmos in which their small planet is embedded.

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , War Quotes , Years Quotes

The desire to be connected with the cosmos reflects a profound reality, but we are connected; not in the trivial ways that astrology promises, but in the deepest ways.

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Reality Quotes , Astrology Quotes

I can find in my undergraduate classes, bright students who do not know that the stars rise and set at night, or even that the Sun is a star.

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Stars Quotes , Night Quotes

In the middle 1970s an astronomer I admire put together a modest manifesto called "Objections to Astrology" and asked me to endorse it. I struggled with his wording, and in the end found myself unable to sign, not because I thought astrology has any validity whatever, but because I felt (and still feel) that the tone of the statement was authoritarian.

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Astrology Quotes , Atheism Quotes