Carl Sagan Quotes, Mother Quotes, Father 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

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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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Latin Quotes , Mean Quotes

There are many hypotheses in science which are wrong. That’s perfectly all right: it’s the aperture to finding out what’s right. Science is a self-correcting process.

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Truth Quotes , Self Quotes

We are prodding, challenging, seeking contradictions or small, persistent residual errors, proposing alternative explanations, encouraging heresy. We give our highest rewards to those who convincingly disprove established beliefs.

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Errors Quotes , Giving Quotes

Our perceptions are fallible. We sometimes see what isn't there. We are prey to optical illusions. Occasionally we hallucinate. We are error-prone.

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Errors Quotes , Perception Quotes

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

What does it mean for a civilisation to be a million years old? We have had radio telescopes and spaceships for a few decades; our technical civilisation is a few hundred years old ... an advanced civilisation millions of years old is as much beyond us as we are beyond a bushbaby or a macaque

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Mean Quotes , Technology Quotes

Who are we, if not measured by our impact on others?

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Impact Quotes

Science is far from a perfect instrument of knowledge. It's just the best we have.

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Science Quotes , Perfect Quotes

Which aspects of our nature will prevail is uncertain, particularly when our visions and prospects are bound to one small part of the small planet Earth. But up there in the Cosmos an inescapable perspective awaits.

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Perspective Quotes , Vision Quotes

The gears of poverty, ignorance, hopelessness and low self-esteem interact to create a kind of perpetual failure machine that grinds down dreams from generation to generation. We all bear the cost of keeping it running. Illiteracy is its linchpin.

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Running Quotes , Dream Quotes

Billions and billions.

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Astronomy Quotes , Billions 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

Many statements about God are confidently made by theologians on grounds that today at least sound specious. Thomas Aquinas claimed to prove that God cannot make another God, or commit suicide, or make a man without a soul, or even make a triangle whose interior angles do not equal 180 degrees. But Bolyai and Lobachevsky were able to accomplish this last feat (on a curved surface) in the nineteenth century, and they were not even approximately gods.

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Suicide Quotes , Atheist Quotes

The Big Bang is our modern scientific creation myth. It comes from the same human need to solve the cosmological riddle [Where did the universe come from?]

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Bangs Quotes , Needs Quotes

Human beings have a demonstrated talent for self-deception when their emotions are stirred.

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Self Quotes , Deception Quotes

Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of magic.

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Book Quotes , Writing Quotes

Sailors on a becalmed sea, we sense the stirring of a breeze.

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Sea Quotes , Sailor Quotes

A still more glorious dawn awaits / not a sunrise, but a galaxy-rise / a morning filled with 400 billion suns / the rising of the milky way

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Morning Quotes , Sunrise Quotes

What a splendid perspective contact with a profoundly different civilization might provide! In a cosmic setting vast and old beyond ordinary human understanding we are a little lonely, and we ponder the ultimate significance, if any, of our tiny but exquisite blue planet, the Earth.... In the deepest sense the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is a search for ourselves.

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Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Lonely Quotes , Blue Quotes