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Those with the courage to explore the weave and structure of the Cosmos, even where it differs profoundly from their wishes and prejudices, will penetrate its deepest mysteries.

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
Prejudice
Profoundly
Structure
Mysteries
Mystery
Penetrate
Courage
Superstitions
Universe
Cosmos
Wish
Explore
Differs
Even
Deepest
Weave
Wishes
Prejudices

More quotes by Carl Sagan

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That we can now think of no mechanism for astrology is relevant but unconvincing. No mechanism was known, for example, for continental drift when it was proposed by Wegener. Nevertheless, we see that Wegener was right, and those who objected on the grounds of unavailable mechanism were wrong.
Carl Sagan
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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.
Carl Sagan
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In many cultures it is customary to answer that God created the universe out of nothing. But this is mere temporizing. If we wish courageously to pursue the question, we must, of course ask next where God comes from? And if we decide this to be unanswerable, why not save a step and conclude that the universe has always existed?
Carl Sagan
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Virtually every major technological advance in the history of the human species - back to the invention of stone tools and the domestication of fire - has been ethically ambiguous.
Carl Sagan
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It took the Church until 1832 to remove Galileo 's work from its list of books which Catholics were forbidden to read at the risk of dire punishment of their immortal souls.
Carl Sagan
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We have heard the rationales offered by the nuclear superpowers. We know who speaks for the nations. But who speaks for the human species? Who speaks for Earth?
Carl Sagan
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Time spent with children is time well spent. Their little minds are not constrained by 'reality' or focused upon goals. Anything and everything is possible. Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.
Carl Sagan
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Our ancestors lived out of doors. They were as familiar with the night sky as most of us are with our favorite television programs.
Carl Sagan
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Advances in medicine and agriculture have saved vastly more lives than have been lost in all the wars in history.
Carl Sagan
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In the fabric of space and in the nature of matter, as in a great work of art, there is, written small, the artist's signature.
Carl Sagan
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Real patriots ask questions.
Carl Sagan
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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.
Carl Sagan
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The wind whips through the canyons of the American Southwest, and there is no one to hear it but us - a reminder of the 40,000 generations of thinking men and women who preceded us, about whom we know almost nothing, upon whom our civilization is based.
Carl Sagan
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He sought a way to preserve the past. John Hershel was one of the founders of a new form of time travel.... a means to capture light and memories. He actually coined a word for it... photography. When you think about it, photography is a form of time travel. This man is staring at us from across the centuries, a ghost preserved by light.
Carl Sagan
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The dumbing down of America is evident in the slow decay of substantive content, a kind of celebration of ignorance.
Carl Sagan
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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.
Carl Sagan
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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
Carl Sagan
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There is today-in a time when old beliefs are withering-a kind of philosophical hunger, a need to know who we are and how we got here. It is an on-going search, often unconscious, for a cosmic perspective for humanity
Carl Sagan
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The simplest thought, like the concept of the number one, has an elaborate logical underpinning.
Carl Sagan
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Otherwise we don't run the government the government runs us
Carl Sagan