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Since, in the long run, every planetary society will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring — not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive.

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
Long
Since
Staying
Surviving
World
Term
Romantic
Zeal
Space
Survival
Obliged
Society
Impact
Venture
Exploratory
Running
Species
Stakes
Planetary
Become
Civilization
Exploration
Imaginable
Reason
Responsibility
Practicals
Endangered
Every
Alive
Practical
Impacts

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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.
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The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.
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We are the custodians of life's meaning.
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Frederick Douglas taught that literacy is the path from slavery to freedom. There are many kinds of slavery and many kinds of freedom, but reading is still the path.
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Real patriots ask questions.
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The nuclear arms race is like two sworn enemies standing waist deep in gasoline, one with three matches, the other with five.
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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.
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Other things being equal, it is better to be smart than to be stupid.
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Much of human history can, I think, be described as a gradual and sometimes painful liberation from provincialism, the emerging awareness that there is more to the world than was generally believed by our ancestors.
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There are more potential combinations of DNA [physical forms] than there are atoms in the universe.
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Writing a novel is like trying to solve a very long mathematical equation. Changing anything can change everything else.
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It does no harm to the romance of the sunset to know a little bit about it.
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Religions are often state-protected nurseries of pseudoscience, although there's no reason why religions have to play that role. In a way, it's an artefact from times long gone.
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When you realize that no one really knows what they are doing and that everyone is doing the best they can according to their own level of consciousness, life gets a lot easier. Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense.
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Modern science has been a voyage into the unknown, with a lesson in humility waiting at every stop. Many passengers would rather have stayed home.
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We are the universe experiencing itself.
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The well-meaning contention that all ideas have equal merit seems to me little different from the disastrous contention that no ideas have any merit.
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And you are made of a hundred trillion cells. We are, each of us, a multitude.
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Religions are tough. Either they make no contentions which are subject to disproof or they quickly redesign doctrine after disproof. ... near the core of the religious experience is something remarkably resistant to rational inquiry.
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