Quote

For all its material advantages, the sedentary life has left us edgy, unfulfilled, even after 400 generations in villages and cities, we haven't forgotten: The open road still softly calls like a nearly forgotten song of childhood.

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
Life
Generations
Material
Unfulfilled
Like
Cities
Forgotten
Villages
Open
Road
Edgy
Song
Havens
Softly
Left
Materials
Advantages
Stills
Haven
Village
Still
Childhood
Calls
Even
Advantage
Nearly
Sedentary

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If I finish a book a week, I will read only a few thousand books in my lifetime, about a tenth of a percent of the contents of the greatest libraries of our time. The trick is to know which books to read.
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Human beings have a demonstrated talent for self-deception when their emotions are stirred.
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Even Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel, and Albert Einstein made serious mistakes. But the scientific enterprise arranges things so that teamwork prevails: What one of us, even the most brilliant among us, misses, another of us, even someone much less celebrated and capable, may detect and rectify.
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Any faith that admires truth, that strives to know God, must be brave enough to accommodate the universe.
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Religions contradict one another-on small matters, such as whether we should put on a hat or take one off on entering a house of worship, or whether we should eat beef and eschew pork or the other way around, all the way to the most central issues, such as whether there are no gods, one God, or many gods.
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All over the world there are enormous numbers of smart, even gifted, people who harbor a passion for science. But that passion is unrequited. Surveys suggest that some 95% of Americans are scientifically illiterate. That's...the same fraction...of slaves who were illiterate before the Civil War.
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My long-time view about Christianity is that it represents an amalgam of two seemingly immiscible parts-the religion of Jesus and the religion of Paul. Thomas Jefferson attempted to excise the Pauline parts of the New Testament. There wasn't much left when he was done, but it was an inspiring document.
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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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In the vastness of the Cosmos there must be other civilizations far older and more advanced than ours.
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He didn't want to believe. He wanted to know.
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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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