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I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudo-science and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive.

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
Science
Cosmos
Siren
Seems
Attractive
Sirens
Years
Edges
Pseudo
Especially
Tempting
Seem
Millennium
Worry
Nearer
Year
Superstition
Sonorous
Song
Superstitions
Unreason

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Perhaps the depth of love can be calibrated by the number of different selves that are actively involved in a given relationship.
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Knowing a great deal is not the same as being smart intelligence is not information alone but also judgement, the manner in which information is coordinated and used.
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If you want to save your child from polio, you can pray or you can inoculate....Try science.
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It is the tension between creativity and skepticism that has produced the stunning and unexpected findings of science.
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My view is that if there is no evidence for it, then forget about it. An agnostic is somebody who doesn’t believe in something until there is evidence for it, so I’m agnostic.
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The way to find out about our place in the universe is by examining the universe and by examining ourselves - without preconceptions, with as unbiased a mind as we can muster.
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The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us -- there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.
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Your religion assumes that people are children and need a boogeyman so they'll behave. You want people to believe in God so they'll obey the law. That's the only means that occurs to you: a strict secular police force, and the threat of punishment by an all-seeing God for whatever the police overlook. You sell human beings short.
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Indeed the reasoned criticism of a prevailing belief is a service to the proponents of that belief if they are incapable of defending it, they are well advised to abandon it. This self-questioning and error-correcting aspect of the scientific method is its most striking property.
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Extraordinary observations require extraordinary evidence to make them believable.
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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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If our long-term survival is at stake, we have a basic responsibility to our species to venture to other worlds. Sailors on a becalmed sea, we sense the stirring of a breeze.
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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.
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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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Curiosity and the urge to solve problems are the emotional hallmarks of our species.
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Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors.
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One of the great commandments of science is: 'Mistrust arguments from authority.'
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The cure for a fallacious argument is a better argument, not the suppression of ideas.
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There are more potential combinations of DNA [physical forms] than there are atoms in the universe.
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