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  • Carl Sagan Quotes   592
  • In college, in the early 1950s, I began to learn a little about how science works, the secrets of its great success, how rigorous the standards of evidence must be if we are really to know something is true, how many false starts and dead ends have plagued human thinking, how our biases can colour our interpretation of evidence, and how often belief systems widely held and supported by the political, religious and academic hierarchies turn out to be not just slightly in error, but grotesquely wrong.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Religious Quotes , College Quotes
  • Indeed the reasoned criticism of a prevailing belief is a service to the proponents of that belief; if they are incapable of defending it, they are well advised to abandon it. This self-questioning and error-correcting aspect of the scientific method is its most striking property.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Errors Quotes , Self Questioning 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
  • Philosophers and scientists confidently offer up traits said to be uniquely human, and the monkeys and apes casually knock them down -- toppling the pretension that humans constitute some sort of biological aristocracy among the beings on Earth.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Aristocracy Quotes , Earth Quotes
  • Eratosthenes was the director of the great library of Alexandria, the Centre of science and learning in the ancient world. Aristotle had argued that humanity was divided into Greeks and everybody else, whom he called barbarians and that the Greeks should keep themselves racially pure. He thought it was fitting for the Greeks to enslave other peoples. But Erathosthenes criticized Aristotle for his blind chauvinism, he believed there was good and bad in every nation.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Greek Quotes , Humanity 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
  • There is much that science doesn't understand, many mysteries still to be resolved. In a Universe tens of billions of light-years across and some ten or fifteen billion years old, this may be the case forever. We are constantly stumbling on new surprises
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Light Quotes , Years Quotes
  • Is it fair to be suspicious of an entire profession because of a few bad apples? There are at least two important differences, it seems to me. First, no one doubts that science actually works, whatever mistaken and fraudulent claim may from time to time be offered. But whether there are any miraculous cures from faith-healing, beyond the body's own ability to cure itself, is very much at issue. Secondly, the expose' of fraud and error in science is made almost exclusively by science. But the exposure of fraud and error in faith-healing is almost never done by other faith-healers.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Atheist Quotes , Healing Quotes
  • We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Motivational Quotes , Education Quotes