Quote

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

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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
Propensity
Sweet
Overwhelmed
Subverted
Light
Imperfect
Worrisome
Truth
Talked
Propensities
Reason
Surely
Hardwired
Sometimes
Ease
Arisen
Cool
Newly
Disguised
Intelligence

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We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology and yet have cleverly arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology.
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When you look more generally at life on Earth, you find that it is all the same kind of life. There are not many different kinds there's only one kind. It uses about fifty fundamental biological building blocks, organic molecules.
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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.
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Scientists make mistakes. Accordingly, it is the job of the scientist to recognize our weakness, to examine the widest range of opinions, to be ruthlessly self-critical. Science is a collective enterprise with the error-correction machinery often running smoothly.
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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.
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Science is only a Latin word for knowledge
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Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.
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Exploration is in our nature. We began as wanderers, and we are wanderers still. We have lingered long enough on the shores of the cosmic ocean. We are ready at last to set sail for the stars.
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We are an intelligent species and the use of our intelligence quite properly gives us pleasure. In this respect the brain is like a muscle. When we think well, we feel good. Understanding is a kind of ecstasy.
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It's a lazy Saturday afternoon, there's a couple lying naked in bed reading Encyclopediea Brittannica to each other, and arguing about whether the Andromeda Galaxy is more 'numinous' than the Ressurection. Do they know how to have a good time, or don't they?
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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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We are the custodians of life's meaning.
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In the vastness of the Cosmos there must be other civilizations far older and more advanced than ours.
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In all our searching, the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable is each other.
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Virtually every major technological advance in the history of the human species - back to the invention of stone tools and the domestication of fire - has been ethically ambiguous.
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The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion or in politics, but it is not the path to knowledge it has no in the endeavor of science. We do not know in advance who will discover fundamental insights.
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The cannabis experience has greatly improved my appreciation for art, a subject which I had never much appreciated before.
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There is a reward structure in science that is very interesting: Our highest honors go to those who disprove the findings of the most revered among us. So Einstein is revered not just because he made so many fundamental contributions to science, but because he found an imperfection in the fundamental contribution of Isaac Newton.
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Many religions have attempted to make statues of their gods very large, and the idea, I suppose, is to make us feel small. But if that's their purpose, they can keep their paltry icons. We need only look up if we wish to feel small.
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Every thinking person fears nuclear war, and every technological state plans for it. Everyone knows it is madness, and every nation has an excuse
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