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If we can't think for ourselves, if we're unwilling to question authority, then we're just putty in the hands of those in power.

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
Power
Think
Thinking
Putty
Unwilling
Demon
Authority
Question
Hands

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The desire to be connected with the cosmos reflects a profound reality, but we are connected not in the trivial ways that astrology promises, but in the deepest ways.
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If the press descended, the science would surely suffer.
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Science is more than a body of knowledge. It's a way of thinking: a way of skeptically interrogating the universe.
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As the ancient myth makers knew, we are children equally of the earth and the sky.
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The cure for a fallacious argument is a better argument, not the suppression of ideas.
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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.
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If you want to make a [rhubarb] pie from scratch, first you have to create the universe.
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While our behavior is still significantly controlled by our genetic inheritance, we have, through our brains, a much richer opportunity to blaze new behavioral and cultural pathways on short timescales.
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Recent research shows that many children without enough to eat wind up with diminished capacity to understand and learn (“cognitive impairment” ). Children don't have to be starving for this to happen. Even mild undernourishment — the kind most common among poor people in America — can do it.
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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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The illegality of cannabis is outrageous.
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And you are made of a hundred trillion cells. We are, each of us, a multitude.
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A multitude of aspects of the natural world that were considered miraculous only a few generations ago are now thoroughly understood in terms of physics and chemistry.
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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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The open road still softly calls, like a nearly forgotten song of childhood
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The Bill of Rights decoupled religion from the state, in part because so many religions were steeped in an absolutist frame of mind - each convinced that it alone had a monopoly on the truth and therefore eager for the state to impose this truth on others.
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The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.
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If chimpanzees have consciousness, if they are capable of abstractions, do they not have what until now has been described as 'human rights'? How smart does a chimp have to be before killing him constitutes murder?
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The idea that God is an oversized white male with a flowing beard, who sits in the sky and tallies the fall of every sparrow is ludicrous. But if by 'God,' one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying... it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.
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He didn't want to believe. He wanted to know.
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