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If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits?
Carl Sagan
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Carl Sagan
Age: 62 †
Born: 1934
Born: November 9
Died: 1996
Died: December 20
Astronomer
Astrophysicist
Cosmologist
Naturalist
Non-Fiction Writer
Novelist
Physicist
Planetary Scientist
Science Communicator
Brooklyn
New York
Carl Edward Sagan
Sagan
Carl E. Sagan
Carl E Sagan
C. E. Sagan
C.E. Sagan
C E Sagan
C. Sagan
C Sagan
Sagan C
Sagan C.
Sagan C. E.
Sagan CE
Believe
Rise
Thinking
Atheism
Stars
Universe
Science
Doe
Conceits
Reason
Disservice
Long
Conceit
More quotes by Carl Sagan
Thus the recent rapid evolution of human intelligence is not only the cause of but also the only conceivable solution to the many serious problems that beset us.
Carl Sagan
I think if we ever reach the point where we think we thoroughly understand who we are and where we came from, we will have failed.
Carl Sagan
I am often amazed at how much more capability and enthusiasm for science there is among elementary school youngsters than among college students.
Carl Sagan
The uniqueness of humans has been claimed on many grounds, but most often because of our tool-making, culture, language, reason and morality. We have them, the other animals don't, and -- so the argument goes -- that's that.
Carl Sagan
Science is merely an extremely powerful method of winnowing what's true from what feels good.
Carl Sagan
Better the hard truth, I say, than the comforting fantasy. And in the final tolling it often turns out that the facts are more comforting than the fantasy.
Carl Sagan
The evidence, so far at least and laws of Nature aside, does not require a Designer. Maybe there is one hiding, maddeningly unwilling to be revealed.
Carl Sagan
Our intelligence is imperfect, surely, and newly arisen the ease with which it can be sweet-talked, overwhelmed, or subverted by other hardwired propensities - sometimes themselves disguised as the cool light of reason - is worrisome.
Carl Sagan
The Hindu religion is the only of the World's great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths.
Carl Sagan
If the constellations had been named in the twentieth century, I suppose we would see bicycles and refrigerators in the sky.
Carl Sagan
Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense.
Carl Sagan
We are not smart enough to decide which pieces of knowledge are permissible and which are not.
Carl Sagan
Arguments from authority carry little weight – authorities have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities at most, there are experts.
Carl Sagan
The wind whips through the canyons of the American Southwest, and there is no one to hear it but us - a reminder of the 40,000 generations of thinking men and women who preceded us, about whom we know almost nothing, upon whom our civilization is based.
Carl Sagan
The Platonists and their Christian successors held the peculiar notion that the Earth was tainted and somehow nasty, while the heavens were perfect and divine. The fundamental idea that the Earth is a planet, that we are citizens of the Universe, was rejected and forgotten.
Carl Sagan
Extraordinary claim requires extraordinary proof.
Carl Sagan
I believe our future depends powerfully on how well we understand this cosmos in which we float, like a mote of dust in the morning sky.
Carl Sagan
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?
Carl Sagan
If intelligence is our only edge, we must learn to use it better, to shape it, to understand its limitations and deficiencies -- to use it as cats use stealth, as katydids use camouflage -- to make it the tool of our survival.
Carl Sagan
A millennium before Europeans were willing to divest themselves of the Biblical idea that the world was a few thousand years old, the Mayans were thinking of millions and the Hindus billions.
Carl Sagan
