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We are not smart enough to decide which pieces of knowledge are permissible and which are not.

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
Pieces
Knowledge
Enough
Permissible
Decide
Smart

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The Big Bang is our modern scientific creation myth. It comes from the same human need to solve the cosmological riddle [Where did the universe come from?]
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The illegality of cannabis is outrageous.
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The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.
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Except in pure mathematics, nothing is known for certain (although much is certainly false).
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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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The hole in the ozone layer is a kind of skywriting. At first it seemed to spell out our continuing complacency before a witch's brew of deadly perils. But perhaps it really tells of a newfound talent to work together to protect the global environment.
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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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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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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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The method of science is tried and true. It is not perfect, it's just the best we have. And to abandon it, with its skeptical protocols, is the pathway to a dark age.
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There is never only ONE of anything in nature.
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We humans look rather different from a tree. Without a doubt we perceive the world differently than a tree does. But down deep, at the molecular heart of life, the trees and we are essentially identical.
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Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.
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Humans are very good at dreaming, although you'd never know it from your television.
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What an astonishing thing a book is.
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To live in the hearts of others is to never die in those we leave behind.
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If the constellations had been named in the twentieth century, I suppose we would see bicycles and refrigerators in the sky.
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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.
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The Hindu religion is the only of the World's great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths.
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These days there seems to be nowhere left to explore, at least on the land area of the Earth. Victims of their very success, the explorers now pretty much stay home.
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