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Carl Sagan always used to say that when he was trying to explain something to someone, he would go back to that time when he didn't understand it, and then he would retrace his thought steps so that he could make it absolutely clear, and that's one of the infinite number of things I learned from him.

Ann Druyan

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Ann Druyan
Age: 75
Born: 1949
Born: June 13
Author
Film Producer
Journalist
Science Fiction Writer
Writer
Queens
New York
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Absolutely
Things
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Infinite
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Sagan
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More quotes by Ann Druyan

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I don't have any faith, but I have a lot of hope, and I have a lot of dreams of what we could do with our intelligence if we had the will and the leadership and the understanding of how we could take all of our intelligence and our resources and create a world for our kids that is hopeful.
Ann Druyan
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The greatest thing that science teaches you is the law of unintended consequences.
Ann Druyan
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For most of the history of our species we were helpless to understand how nature works. We took every storm, drought, illness and comet personally. We created myths and spirits in an attempt to explain the patterns of nature.
Ann Druyan
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In the 1970s, I think that there was probably a higher degree of respect for science, of hope about the future, and the future-oriented vision.
Ann Druyan
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This planet seems to be in such sorry shape. And I can't ever think about the rest of the universe without coming back home and thinking what the implications for life here would be if we were to really have some definitive proof of extraterrestrial life.
Ann Druyan
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I guess I so desperately want to see us put this planet right. It's so horrifying to me that a fifth of us are starving every night, and that forty thousand children die every single day.
Ann Druyan
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We may be living at that moment, on the cusp, when we go from being a species that feels a kind of loneliness in the cosmos to actually one sometime in the not too distant future being able to confirm the existence of other intelligent life.
Ann Druyan
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I believe that we are a story-driven species and that we understand how things are put together, in the context of narrative. It's a shame that science hasn't been taught that way, in a long time. It's usually the fact completely devoid of any human experience or any idea of how the scientist came to that conclusion.
Ann Druyan
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All of science to me, everything that we have learned, is important to the extent that it brings us to our senses.
Ann Druyan
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If you are searching for sacred knowledge and not just a palliative for your fears, then you will train yourself to be a good skeptic.
Ann Druyan
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A lot of people have this ego need that makes them want to believe that Earth is the center of the universe and humans are the most important species, the supreme expression of creation.
Ann Druyan
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Carl took on the military-industrial complex. He campaigned around the world for an end to the production of weapons of mass destruction. To him it was a perversion of science.
Ann Druyan
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It is a great tragedy that science, this wonderful process for finding out what is true, has ceded the spiritual uplift of its central revelations: the vastness of the universe, the immensity of time, the relatedness of all life, and life's preciousness on our tiny planet.
Ann Druyan
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We smoked the way other American families would have wine with dinner. For us, it was our sacrament. It was something that made a great life sweeter in every possible way.
Ann Druyan
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Science has the cold facts, but lacks religion's social organization and ability to inspire that moves people to act.
Ann Druyan
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Knowing a deep thing well, which is what science asks of its practitioners, is an empowerment that is very profound. It's a liberation.
Ann Druyan
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If you have a beating heart, that's good enough.
Ann Druyan
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The only gratification that science denies to us is deception.
Ann Druyan
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Science is nothing more than a neverending search for the truth.
Ann Druyan
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Interviewer: Didn't [Sagan] want to believe? Druyan: He didn't want to believe. He wanted to know.
Ann Druyan