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The difference between physics and metaphysics is not that the practitioners of one are smarter than the practitioners of the other. The difference is that the metaphysicist has no laboratory.

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
Laboratory
Smarter
Physics
Difference
Differences
Practitioners
Metaphysics

More quotes by Carl Sagan

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First rule in government spending: why build one when you can have two at twice the price?
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I don't want to believe. I want to know.
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If we continue to accumulate only power and not wisdom, we will surely destroy ourselves.
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It's perilous and foolhardy for the average citizen to remain ignorant about global warming, say, or ozone depletion, air pollution, toxic and radioactive wastes, acid rain, topsoil erosion, tropical deforestation, exponential population growth. Jobs and wages depend on science and technology.
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A googolplex is precisely as far from infinity as is the number 1... no matter what number you have in mind, infinity is larger still.
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Much of human history can, I think, be described as a gradual and sometimes painful liberation from provincialism, the emerging awareness that there is more to the world than was generally believed by our ancestors.
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The universe is a pretty big place. If it's just us, seems like an awful waste of space.
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Think of how many religions attempt to validate themselves with prophecy. Think of how many people rely on these prophecies, however vague, however unfulfilled, to support or prop up their beliefs. Yet has there ever been a religion with the prophetic accuracy and reliability of science? ... No other human institution comes close.
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What an astonishing thing a book is.
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You're capable of such beautiful dreams and such horrible nightmares.
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Every time you look up at the sky, every one of those points of light is a reminder that fusion power is extractable from hydrogen and other light elements, and it is an everyday reality throughout the Milky Way Galaxy.
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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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A stars rich in europium of distant galaxies analyzed through the collective light of a hundred billion constituent stars. Astronomical spectroscopy is an almost magical technique. It amazes me still. Auguste Comte picked a particularly unfortunate example.
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Absolute certainty will always elude us. We will always be mired in error. The most each generation can hope for is to reduce the error. . . .
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Any sufficiently crisp question can be answered by a single binary digit-0 or 1, yes or no.
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Science is merely an extremely powerful method of winnowing what's true from what feels good.
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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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There are more potential combinations of DNA [physical forms] than there are atoms in the universe.
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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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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.
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