Quote

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.

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
Create
Generation
Grind
Running
Bears
Perpetual
Dream
Ignorance
Machine
Linchpin
Self
Failure
Keeping
Grinds
Kind
Cost
Esteem
Illiteracy
Dreams
Lows
Hopelessness
Poverty
Bear
Gears
Generations
Machines
Interact

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Other things being equal, it is better to be smart than to be stupid.
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Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors.
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We are star stuff which has taken its destiny into its own hands.
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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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I think the discomfort that some people feel in going to the monkey cages at the zoo is a warning sign.
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I'd like the [Cosmos] series to be so visually stimulating that somebody who isn't even interested in the concepts will just watch for the effects. And I'd like people who are prepared to do some thinking to be really stimulated.
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Except for children (who don't know enough not to ask the important questions), few of us spendtime wondering why nature is the way it is . . .
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The method of science, as stodgy and grumpy as it may seem, is far more important than the findings of science.
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Even today the most jaded city dweller can be unexpectedly moved upon encountering a clear night sky studded with thousands of twinkling stars. When it happens to me after all these years it still takes my breath away.
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If we continue to accumulate only power and not wisdom, we will surely destroy ourselves.
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A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.
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The politicians and the religious leaders and the weapons scientists have been at it for a long time and they've made a thorough mess of it. I mean, we're in deep trouble.
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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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I believe that in every person is a kind of circuit which resonates to intellectual discovery-and the idea is to make that resonance work
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Humans - who enslave, castrate, experiment on, and fillet other animals - have had an understandable penchant for pretending animals do not feel pain.
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