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A Book Is Made From A Tree. It Is An Assemblage Of Flat, Flexible Parts (still Called "leaves") Imprinted With Dark Pigmented Squiggles. One Glance At It And You Hear The Voice Of Another Person, Perhaps Someone Dead For Thousands Of Years. Across The Millennia, The Author Is Speaking, Clearly And Silently, Inside Your Head, Directly To You. Writing Is Perhaps The Greatest Of Human Inventions, Binding Together People, Citizens Of Distant Epochs, Who Never Knew One Another. Books Break The Shackles Of Time ― Proof That Humans Can Work Magic.

-Carl Sagan

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A Book Is Made

Carl Sagan

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A Book Is Made From A Tree. It Is An Assemblage Of Flat, Flexible Parts (still Called "leaves") Imprinted With Dark Pigmented Squiggles. One Glance At It And You Hear The Voice Of Another Person, Perhaps Someone Dead For Thousands Of Years. Across The Millennia, The Author Is Speaking, Clearly And Silently, Inside Your Head, Directly To You. Writing Is Perhaps The Greatest Of Human Inventions, Binding Together People, Citizens Of Distant Epochs, Who Never Knew One Another. Books Break The Shackles Of Time ― Proof That Humans Can Work Magic.

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The Library Connects Us With The Insight And Knowledge, Painfully Extracted From Nature, Of The Greatest Minds That Ever Were, With The Best Teachers, Drawn From The Entire Planet And From All Our History, To Instruct Us Without Tiring, And To Inspire Us To Make Our Own Contribution To The Collective Knowledge Of The Human Species.

Humans - Who Enslave, Castrate, Experiment On, And Fillet Other Animals - Have Had An Understandable Penchant For Pretending Animals Do Not Feel Pain.

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.

In More Than One Respect, The Exploring Of The Solar System And Homesteading Other Worlds Constitutes The Beginning, Much More Than The End, Of History.

Human Beings Have A Demonstrated Talent For Self-deception When Their Emotions Are Stirred.

I Believe That The Extraordinary Should Be Pursued. But Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence.

An Extraterrestrial Being, Newly Arrived On Earth - Scrutinizing What We Mainly Present To Our Children In Television, Radio, Movies, Newspapers, Magazines, The Comics, And Many Books - Might Easily Conclude That We Are Intent On Teaching Them Murder, Rape, Cruelty, Superstition, Credulity, And Consumerism. We Keep At It, And Through Constant Repetition Many Of Them Finally Get It.

Before We Invented Civilization Our Ancestors Lived Mainly In The Open Out Under The Sky. Before We Devised Artificial Lights And Atmospheric Pollution And Modern Forms Of Nocturnal Entertainment We Watched The Stars. There Were Practical Calendar Reasons Of Course But There Was More To It Than That. 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.

[one's] Inability To Invalidate Your Hypothesis Is Not At All The Same Thing As Proving It True.

Any Sufficiently Crisp Question Can Be Answered By A Single Binary Digit-0 Or 1, Yes Or No.

Science Is Not Perfect. It's Often Misused; It's Only A Tool, But It's The Best Tool We Have. Self-correcting , Ever Changing, Applicable To Everything: With This Tool, We Vanquish The Impossible.

In Italy, The Inquisition Was Condemning People To Death Until The End Of The Eighteenth Century, And Inquisitional Torture Was Not Abolished In The Catholic Church Until 1816. The Last Bastion Of Support For The Reality Of Witchcraft And The Necessity Of Punishment Has Been The Christian Churches.

If We Long To Believe That The Stars Rise And Set For Us, That We Are The Reason There Is A Universe, Does Science Do Us A Disservice In Deflating Our Conceits?

We Can Always Take But Never Give.

Books Are Like Seeds. They Can Lie Dormant For Centuries And Then Flower In The Most Unpromising Soil.

Books Are Key To Understanding The World And Participating In A Democratic Society.

We Are A Way Of The Universe Knowing Itself.

In Science It Often Happens That Scientists Say, 'you Know That's A Really Good Argument; My Position Is Mistaken,' And Then They Would Actually Change Their Minds And You Never Hear That Old View From Them Again. They Really Do It. It Doesn't Happen As Often As It Should, Because Scientists Are Human And Change Is Sometimes Painful. But It Happens Every Day. I Cannot Recall The Last Time Something Like That Happened In Politics Or Religion.

The Hindu Religion Is The Only One 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. It Is The Only Religion In Which The Time Scales Correspond, No Doubt By Accident, To Those Of Modern Scientific Cosmology. Its Cycles Run From Our Ordinary Day And Night To A Day And Night Of Brahma, 8.64 Billion Years Long, Longer Than The Age Of The Earth Or The Sun And About Half The Time Since The Big Bang.

The Politicians And The Religious Leaders And The Weapons Scientists Have Been At It For A Long Time And They've Made A Thorough Mess Of It. I Mean, We're In Deep Trouble.

Many Statements About God Are Confidently Made By Theologians On Grounds That Today At Least Sound Specious. Thomas Aquinas Claimed To Prove That God Cannot Make Another God, Or Commit Suicide, Or Make A Man Without A Soul, Or Even Make A Triangle Whose Interior Angles Do Not Equal 180 Degrees. But Bolyai And Lobachevsky Were Able To Accomplish This Last Feat (on A Curved Surface) In The Nineteenth Century, And They Were Not Even Approximately Gods.

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.

Science Is A Way Of Thinking Much More Than It Is A Body Of Knowledge. Its Goal Is To Find Out How The World Works, To Seek What Regularities There May Be, To Penetrate To The Connections Of Things-from Subatomic Particles, Which May Be The Constituents Of All Matter, To Living Organisms, The Human Social Community, And Thence To The Cosmos As A Whole.

A Proclivity For Science Is Embedded Deeply Within Us, In All Times, Places, And Cultures. It Has Been The Means For Our Survival. It Is Our Birthright. When, Through Indifference, Inattention, Incompetence, Or Fear Of Skepticism, We Discourage Children From Science, We Are Disenfranchisin G Them, Taking From Them The Tools Needed To Manage Their Future.

We Are, In The Most Profound Sense, Children Of The Cosmos.

What Is Called For Is An Exquisite Balance Between Two Conflicting Needs: The Most Skeptical Scrutiny Of All Hypotheses That Are Served Up To Us And At The Same Time A Great Openness To New Ideas. If You Are Only Skeptical, Then No New Ideas Make It Through To You. On The Other Hand, If You Are Open To The Point Of Gullibility And Have Not An Ounce Of Skeptical Sense In You, Then You Cannot Distinguish Useful Ideas From The Worthless Ones.

What A Marvelous Cooperative Arrangement - Plants And Animals Each Inhaling Each Other's Exhalations, A Kind Of Planet-wide Mutual Mouth-to-stoma Resuscitation, The Entire Elegant Cycle Powered By A Star 150 Million Kilometers Away.

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

Cutting Off Fundamental, Curiosity-driven Science Is Like Eating The Seed Corn. We May Have A Little More To Eat Next Winter But What Will We Plant So We And Our Children Will Have Enough To Get Through The Winters To Come?

Science Is Merely An Extremely Powerful Method Of Winnowing What's True From What Feels Good.

The Neurochemistry Of The Brain Is Astonishingly Busy, The Circuitry Of A Machine More Wonderful Than Any Devised By Humans. But There Is No Evidence That Its Functioning Is Due To Anything More Than The 10(14) Neural Connections That Build An Elegant Architecture Of Consciousness.

We Have Entered, Almost Without Noticing, An Age Of Exploration And Discovery Unparalleled Since The Renaissance.

Demon Mean Knowledge In Greek, Especially About The Material World. Science Means Knowledge In Latin. A Jurisdictional Dispute Is Exposed, Even If We Look No Further

The Fact That Some Geniuses Were Laughed At Does Not Imply That All Who Are Laughed At Are Geniuses.

We Humans Appear On The Cosmic Calendar So Recently That Our Recorded History Occupies Only The Last Few Seconds Of The Last Minute Of December 31st.

For A Long Time The Human Instinct To Understand Was Thwarted By Facile Religious Explanations.

It Is The Responsibility Of Scientists Never To Suppress Knowledge, No Matter How Awkward That Knowledge Is, No Matter How It May Bother Those In Power; We Are Not Smart Enough To Decide Which Pieces Of Knowledge Are Permissible, And Which Are Not.

Is It Fair To Be Suspicious Of An Entire Profession Because Of A Few Bad Apples? There Are At Least Two Important Differences, It Seems To Me. First, No One Doubts That Science Actually Works, Whatever Mistaken And Fraudulent Claim May From Time To Time Be Offered. But Whether There Are Any Miraculous Cures From Faith-healing, Beyond The Body's Own Ability To Cure Itself, Is Very Much At Issue. Secondly, The Expose' Of Fraud And Error In Science Is Made Almost Exclusively By Science. But The Exposure Of Fraud And Error In Faith-healing Is Almost Never Done By Other Faith-healers.

In Science It Often Happens That Scientists Say, "you Know That's A Really Good Argument; My Position Is Mistaken..."

Theoretical Physics

How Lucky We Are To Live In This Time / The First Moment In Human History / When We Are In Fact Visiting Other Worlds

Anything Else You're Interested In Is Not Going To Happen If You Can't Breathe The Air And Drink The Water. Don't Sit This One Out. Do Something. You Are By Accident Of Fate Alive At An Absolutely Critical Moment In The History Of Our Planet.

Chlorine Is A Deadly Poison Gas Employed On European Battlefields In World War I. Sodium Is A Corrosive Metal Which Burns Upon Contact With Water. Together They Make A Placid And Unpoisonous Material, Table Salt. Why Each Of These Substances Has The Properties It Does Is A Subject Called Chemistry.

If Intelligence Is Our Only Edge, We Must Learn To Use It Better, To Shape It, To Understand Its Limitations And Deficiencies -- To Use It As Cats Use Stealth, As Katydids Use Camouflage -- To Make It The Tool Of Our Survival.

Has There Ever Been A Religion With The Prophetic Accuracy And Reliability Of Science? . . . No Other Human Institution Comes Close.

All Colours Are Arbitrary.

If We Ruin The Earth, There Is No Place Else To Go

It Is Of Interest To Note That While Some Dolphins Are Reported To Have Learned English - Up To Fifty Words Used In Correct Context - No Human Being Has Been Reported To Have Learned Dolphinese.

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.

If You Are Only Skeptical, Then No New Ideas Make It Through To You. You Become A Crotchety Old Person Convinced That Nonsense Is Ruling The World. (there Is, Of Course, Much Data To Support You.) But Every Now And Then, A New Idea Turns Out To Be On The Mark, Valid And Wonderful. If You Are Too Much In The Habit Of Being Skeptical About Everything, You Are Going To Miss Or Resent It, And Either Way You Will Be Standing In The Way Of Understanding And Progress.

The Earth Is A Very Small Stage In A Vast Cosmic Arena.

Imagine We Could Accelerate Continuously At 1 G-what We're Comfortable With On Good Old Terra Firma-to The Midpoint Of Our Voyage, And Decelerate Continuously At 1 G Until We Arrive At Our Destination. It Would Take A Day To Get To Mars, A Week And A Half To Pluto, A Year To The Oort Cloud, And A Few Years To The Nearest Stars.

What's The Harm Of A Little Mystification? It Sure Beats Boring Statistical Analyses.

The Earth Is A Place. It Is By No Means The Only Place. It Is Not Even A Typical Place.

Not All Birds Can Fly. What Separates The Flyers From The Walkers Is The Ability To Take Off.

The Simplest Thought, Like The Concept Of The Number One, Has An Elaborate Logical Underpinning.

We Are At A Crossroads In Human History. Never Before Has There Been A Moment So Simultaneously Perilous And Promising. We Are The First Species To Have Taken Evolution Into Our Own Hands.

Science Is Not Only Compatible With Spirituality; It Is A Profound Source Of Spirituality.

If We Offer Too Much Silent Assent About Mysticism And Superstition - Even When It Seems To Be Doing A Little Good - We Abet A General Climate In Which Scepticism Is Considered Impolite, Science Tiresome, And Rigorous Thinking Somehow Stuffy And Inappropriate.

I Believe That Even A Smattering Of Such Findings In Modern Science And Mathematics Is Far More Compelling And Exciting Than Most Of The Doctrines Of Pseudoscience, Whose Practitioners Were Condemned As Early As The Fifth Century B.c. By The Ionian Philosopher Heraclitus As “nigh -walkers, Magicians, Priests Of Bacchus, Priestesses Of The Wine-vat, Mystery-mongers.” But Science Is More Intricate And Subtle, Reveals A Much Richer Imiverse, And Powerfully Evokes Our Sense Of Wonder.

We Live On A Hunk Of Rock And Metal That Circles A Humdrum Star That Is One Of 400 Billion Other Stars That Make Up The Milky Way Galaxy Which Is One Of Billions Of Other Galaxies Which Make Up A Universe Which May Be One Of A Very Large Number, Perhaps An Infinite Number, Of Other Universes. That Is A Perspective On Human Life And Our Culture That Is Well Worth Pondering.

The Prediction I Can Make With The Highest Confidence Is That The Most Amazing Discoveries Will Be The Ones We Are Not Today Wise Enough To Foresee.

Extraordinary Claim Requires Extraordinary Proof.

Science Is Based On Experiment, On A Willingness To Challenge Old Dogma, On An Openness To See The Universe As It Really Is. Accordingly, Science Sometimes Requires Courage - At The Very Least The Courage To Question The Conventional Wisdom.

Every Cell Is A Triumph Of Natural Selection, And We’re Made Of Trillions Of Cells. Within Us, Is A Little Universe.

Quickly Capping 363 Oil Well Fires In A War Zone Is Impossible. The Fires Would Burn Out Of Control Until They Put Themselves Out... The Resulting Soot Might Well Stretch Over All Of South Asia... It Could Be Carried Around The World... [and] The Consequences Could Be Dire. Beneath Such A Pall Sunlight Would Be Dimmed, Temperatures Lowered And Droughts More Frequent. Spring And Summer Frosts May Be Expected... This Endangerment Of The Food Supplies... Appears To Be Likely Enough That It Should Affect The War Plans.

Our Intelligence Is Imperfect, Surely, And Newly Arisen; The Ease With Which It Can Be Sweet-talked, Overwhelmed, Or Subverted By Other Hardwired Propensities - Sometimes Themselves Disguised As The Cool Light Of Reason - Is Worrisome.

Where We Have Strong Emotions, We're Liable To Fool Ourselves.

[kepler] Preferred The Hard Truth To His Dearest Illusions, And That Is The Heart Of Science.

You Can Get Into A Habit Of Thought In Which You Enjoy Making Fun Of All Those Other People Who Don't See Things As Clearly As You Do. We Have To Guard Carefully Against It.

We Can Make A Similar Examination, But With Greater Uncertainty, Of The Extraterrestrial Hypothesis That Holds That A Wide Range Of Ufos Viewed On The Planet Earth Are Space Vehicles From Planets Of Other Stars.

Nothing Disturbs Me More Than The Glorification Of Stupidity.

Which Aspects Of Our Nature Will Prevail Is Uncertain, Particularly When Our Visions And Prospects Are Bound To One Small Part Of The Small Planet Earth. But Up There In The Cosmos An Inescapable Perspective Awaits.

But Down Deep, At The Molecular Heart Of Life We're Essentially Identical To Trees.

Our Children Long For Realistic Maps Of The Future That They Can Be Proud Of. Where Are The Cartographers Of Human Purpose?

We Seem, These Days, Much More Willing To Recognize The Perils Before Us Than We Were Even A Decade Ago. The Newly Recognized Dangers Threaten All Of Us, Equally. No One Can Say How It Will Turn Out Down Here. But This Is Also, We May Note, The First Time That A Species Has Become Able To Journey To The Planets And The Stars. Sailors On A Becalmed Sea, We Sense A Stirring Of The Breeze.

Ufos: The Reliable Cases Are Uninteresting And In The Interesting Cases Are Unreliable.

[science] Is Not Perfect. It Can Be Misused. It Is Only A Tool. But It Is By Far The Best Tool We Have, Self-correcting, Ongoing, Applicable To Everything. It Has Two Rules. First: There Are No Sacred Truths; All Assumptions Must Be Critically Examined; Arguments From Authority Are Worthless. Second: Whatever Is Inconsistent With The Facts Must Be Discarded Or Revised. ... The Obvious Is Sometimes False; The Unexpected Is Sometimes True.

The Immense Distances To The Stars And The Galaxies Mean That We See Everything Ins Pace Int He Past, Some As They Were Before The Earth Came To Be. Telescopes Are Time Machines.

After The Earth Dies, Some 5 Billion Years From Now, After It's Burned To A Crisp, Or Even Swallowed By The Sun, There Will Be Other Worlds And Stars And Galaxies Coming Into Being - And They Will Know Nothing Of A Place Once Called Earth.

We Should Be Teaching Our Children The Scientific Method And The Reasons For A Bill Of Rights. With It Comes A Certain Decency, Humility And Community Spirit.

She Had Studied The Universe All Her Life, But Had Overlooked Its Clearest Message: For Small Creatures Such As We The Vastness Is Bearable Only Through Love.

Small Creatures

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. But If The Citizens Are Educated And Form Their Own Opinions, Then Those In Power Work For Us. In Every Country, We Should Be Teaching Our Children The Scientific Method And The Reasons For A Bill Of Rights. With It Comes A Certain Decency, Humility And Community Spirit. In The Demon-haunted World That We Inhabit By Virtue Of Being Human, This May Be All That Stands Between Us And The Enveloping Darkness.

Nevertheless, (jefferson) Believed That The Habit Of Skepticism Is An Essential Prerequisite For Responsible Citizenship. He Argued That The Cost Of Education Is Trivial Compared To The Cost Of Ignorance, Of Leaving Government To The Wolves. He Taught That The Country Is Safe Only When The People Rule.

An Atheist Has To Know A Lot More Than I Know. An Atheist Is Someone Who Knows There Is No God. By Some Definitions Atheism Is Very Stupid.

There Is No God

That Kind Of Skeptical, Questioning, "don't Accept What Authority Tells You" Attitude Of Science - Is Also Nearly Identical To The Attitude Of Mind Necessary For A Functioning Democracy. Science And Democracy Have Very Consonant Values And Approaches, And I Don't Think You Can Have One Without The Other.

Democracies Have

Nobody Listens To Mathematicians.

In Mozambique, The Story Goes, Monkeys Do Not Talk, Because They Know If They Utter Even A Single Word Some Man Will Come And Put Them To Work.

We Are Star Stuff Which Has Taken Its Destiny Into Its Own Hands.

Science Is Far From A Perfect Instrument Of Knowledge. It's Just The Best We Have.

Except For Children (who Don't Know Enough Not To Ask The Important Questions), Few Of Us Spendtime Wondering Why Nature Is The Way It Is . . .

National Boundaries Are Not Evident When We View The Earth From Space. Fanatical Ethnic Or Religious Or National Chauvinisms Are A Little Difficult To Maintain When We See Our Planet As A Fragile Blue Crescent Fading To Become An Inconspicuous Point Of Light Against The Bastion And Citadel Of The Stars.

The Nuclear Arms Race Is Like Two Sworn Enemies Standing Waist Deep In Gasoline, One With Three Matches, The Other With Five.

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.

Billions And Billions.

We've Begun At Last To Wonder About Our Origins, Star Stuff Contemplating The Stars, Organized Collections Of Ten Billion Billion Billion Atoms Contemplating The Evolution Of Matter, Tracing That Long Path By Which It Arrived At Consciousness Here On The Planet Earth And Perhaps Throughout The Cosmos. Our Obligation To Survive And Flourish Is Owed Not Just To Ourselves But Also To That Cosmos, Ancient And Vast, From Which We Spring.

We Wish To Find The Truth, No Matter Where It Lies. But To Find The Truth We Need Imagination And Skepticism Both. We Will Not Be Afraid To Speculate, But We Will Be Careful To Distinguish Speculation From Fact.

Goddard Represented A Unique Combination Of Visionary Dedication And Technological Brilliance. He Studied Physics Because He Needed Physics To Get To Mars. In Reading The Notebooks Of Robert Goddard, I Am Struck By How Powerful His Exploratory And Scientific Motivations Were - And How Influental Speculative Ideas, Even Erroneous Ones, Can Be On The Shaping Of The Future.

The Universe Forces Those Who Live In It To Understand It.

Ask Courageous Questions. Do Not Be Satisfied With Superficial Answers. Be Open To Wonder And At The Same Time Subject All Claims To Knowledge, Without Exception, To Intense Skeptical Scrutiny. Be Aware Of Human Fallibility. Cherish Your Species And Your Planet.

Otherwise We Don't Run The Government The Government Runs Us

I Promise To Question Everything My Leaders Tell Me. I Promise To Use My Critical Faculties. I Promise To Develop My Independence Of Thought. I Promise To Educate Myself So I Can Make My Own Judgments.

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.

We Need To Reduce Military Budgets; Raise Living Standards; Engender Respect For Learning; Support Science, Scholarship, Invention, And Industry; Promote Free Inquiry; Reduce Domestic Coercion; Involve The Workers More In Managerial Decisions; And Promote Genuine Respect And Understanding Derived From An Acknowledgement Of Our Common Humanity And Our Common Jeopardy.

Common Humanity

Perhaps The Depth Of Love Can Be Calibrated By The Number Of Different Selves That Are Actively Involved In A Given Relationship.

What Does It Mean For A Civilisation To Be A Million Years Old? We Have Had Radio Telescopes And Spaceships For A Few Decades; Our Technical Civilisation Is A Few Hundred Years Old ... An Advanced Civilisation Millions Of Years Old Is As Much Beyond Us As We Are Beyond A Bushbaby Or A Macaque

Who Are We, If Not Measured By Our Impact On Others? That’s Who We Are! We’re Not Who We Say We Are, We’re Not Who We Want To Be - We Are The Sum Of The Influence And Impact That We Have, In Our Lives, On Others.

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. . . .

I Went To The Librarian And Asked For A Book About Stars.... And The Answer Was Stunning. It Was That The Sun Was A Star But Really Close. The Stars Were Suns, But So Far Away They Were Just Little Points Of Light.... The Scale Of The Universe Suddenly Opened Up To Me. It Was A Kind Of Religious Experience. There Was A Magnificence To It, A Grandeur, A Scale Which Has Never Left Me. Never Ever Left Me.

Religions Are Tough. Either They Make No Contentions Which Are Subject To Disproof Or They Quickly Redesign Doctrine After Disproof. ... Near The Core Of The Religious Experience Is Something Remarkably Resistant To Rational Inquiry.

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.

Imagination Will Often Carry Us To Worlds That Never Were. But Without It We Go Nowhere.

We Are All Star Stuff.

Our Species Needs, And Deserves, A Citizenry With Minds Wide Awake And A Basic Understanding Of How The World Works.

But The Fact That Some Geniuses Were Laughed At Does Not Imply That All Who Are Laughed At Are Geniuses. They Laughed At Columbus, They Laughed At Fulton, They Laughed At The Wright Brothers. But They Also Laughed At Bozo The Clown.

But Nature Is Always More Subtle, More Intricate, More Elegant Than What We Are Able To Imagine.

We Are Prodding, Challenging, Seeking Contradictions Or Small, Persistent Residual Errors, Proposing Alternative Explanations, Encouraging Heresy. We Give Our Highest Rewards To Those Who Convincingly Disprove Established Beliefs.

A Celibate Clergy Is An Especially Good Idea, Because It Tends To Suppress Any Hereditary Propensity Toward Fanaticism.

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.

Philosophers And Scientists Confidently Offer Up Traits Said To Be Uniquely Human, And The Monkeys And Apes Casually Knock Them Down -- Toppling The Pretension That Humans Constitute Some Sort Of Biological Aristocracy Among The Beings On Earth.

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.

Humans Are Very Good At Dreaming, Although You'd Never Know It From Your Television.

Science Is A Collaborative Enterprise, Spanning The Generations. When It Permits Us To See The Far Side Of Some New Horizon, We Remember Those Who Prepared The Way - Seeing For Them Also.

Science Is A Way To Not Fool Ourselves.

All Inquiries Carry With Them Some Element Of Risk.

Our Concern For The Future Can Be Tested By How Well We Support Our Libraries.

I Don?t Feel Rejected By The Sky. I?m A Part Of It- Tiny, To Be Sure, But Everything Is Tiny Compared To That Overwhelming Immensity.

We Live At A Moment When Our Relationships To Each Other, And To All Other Beings With Whom We Share This Planet, Are Up For Grabs.

Our Relationship

The Very Act Of Understanding Is A Celebration Of Joining, Merging, Even If On A Very Modest Scale, With The Magnificence Of The Cosmos.

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.

The Size And Age Of The Cosmos Are Beyond Ordinary Human Understanding. Lost Somewhere Between Immensity And Eternity Is Our Tiny Planetary Home.

There Is A Lurking Fear That Some Things Are Not “meant" To Be Known, That Some Inquiries Are Too Dangerous For Human Beings To Make.

Keeping Secrets

Some Things Are Meant To Be

Humans — Who Enslave, Castrate, Experiment On, And Fillet Other Animals — Have Had An Understandable Penchant For Pretending Animals Do Not Feel Pain. A Sharp Distinction Between Humans And 'animals' Is Essential If We Are To Bend Them To Our Will, Make Them Work For Us, Wear Them, Eat Them — Without Any Disquieting Tinges Of Guilt Or Regret. It Is Unseemly Of Us, Who Often Behave So Unfeelingly Toward Other Animals, To Contend That Only Humans Can Suffer. The Behavior Of Other Animals Renders Such Pretensions Specious. They Are Just Too Much Like Us.

Observation: I Can't See A Thing. Conclusion: Dinosaurs.

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.

We Are Star Stuff Harvesting Sunlight.

Our Ancestors Worshipped The Sun, And They Were Not That Foolish. It Makes Sense To Revere The Sun And The Stars, For We Are Their Children.

Man Is A Transitional Animal. He Is Not The Climax Of Creation

At A Few Hundred Kilometers Altitude, The Earth Fills Half Your Sky, And The Band Of Blue That Stretches From Mindanao To Bombay, Which Your Eye Encompasses In A Single Glance, Can Break Your Heart With Its Beauty. Home You Think. Home. This Is My World. This Is Where I Come From. Everyone I Know, Everyone I Ever Heard Of, Grew Up Down There, Under That Relentless And Exquisite Blue.

The Fact That Someone Says Something Doesn't Mean It's True. Doesn't Mean They're Lying, But It Doesn't Mean It's True.

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.

Man Is The Matter Of The Cosmos, Contemplating Itself.

Extraordinary Claims Demand Extraordinary Evidence

If We Do Not Speak For Earth, Who Will? If We Are Not Committed To Our Own Survival, Who Will Be?

Books Permit Us To Voyage Through Time, To Tap The Wisdom Of Our Ancestors.

Perhaps, In Retrospect, There Would Be Little Motivation Even For Malevolent Extraterrestrials To Attack The Earth; Perhaps, After A Preliminary Survey, They Might Decide It Is More Expedient Just To Be Patient For A Little While And Wait For Us To Self-destruct.

The Apollo Pictures Of The Whole Earth Conveyed To Multitudes Something Well Known To Astronomers: On The Scale Of The Worlds - To Say Nothing Of Stars Or Galaxies - Humans Are Inconsequential, A Thin Film Of Life On An Obscure And Solitary Lump Of Rock And Metal

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.

The Cure For A Fallacious Argument Is A Better Argument, Not The Suppression Of Ideas.

What An Astonishing Thing A Book Is. It’s A Flat Object Made From A Tree With Flexible Parts On Which Are Imprinted Lots Of Funny Dark Squiggles. But One Glance At It And You’re Inside The Mind Of Another Person, Maybe Somebody Dead For Thousands Of Years. ... Books Break The Shackles Of Time. A Book Is Proof That Humans Are Capable Of Working Magic.

Except For Fools And Madmen, Everyone Knows That Nuclear War Would He An Unprecedented Human Catastrophe.

You Mean Am I For It Or Against It? You Think This Is A Key Question I'm Going To Be Asked On Vega, And You Want To Make Sure I Give The Right Answer? Okay. Overpopulation Is Why I'm In Favor Of Homosexuality And A Celibate Clergy. A Celibate Clergy Is An Especially Good Idea, Because It Tends To Suppress Any Hereditary Propensity Toward Fanaticism.

Our Loyalties Are To The Species And The Planet. We Speak For Earth.

Nature Does Not Always Conform To Our Predispositions And Preferences, To What We Deem Comfortable And Easy To Understand.

Stars Are Phoenixes, Rising From Their Own Ashes.

The Price We Pay For Anticipation Of The Future Is Anxiety About It

The Vast Distances That Separate The Stars Are Providential. Beings And Worlds Are Quarantined From One Another. The Quarantine Is Lifted Only For Those With Sufficient Self-knowledge And Judgment To Have Safely Traveled From Star To Star.

Science Is More Than A Body Of Knowledge. It's A Way Of Thinking: A Way Of Skeptically Interrogating The Universe.

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.

Maxwell's Equations Have Had A Greater Impact On Human History Than Any Ten Presidents.

Science Is A Way Of Thinking Much More Than It Is A Body Of Knowledge.

This Oak Tree And Me, We're Made Of The Same Stuff.

I Consider It An Extremely Dangerous Doctrine, Because The More Likely We Are To Assume That The Solution Comes From The Outside, The Less Likely We Are To Solve Our Problems Ourselves.

I Don't Know The Answer. Maybe No One Knows. Maybe When You Grow Up, You'll Be The First To Find Out.

For Myself, I Like A Universe That, Includes Much That Is Unknown And, At The Same Time, Much That Is Knowable. A Universe In Which Everything Is Known Would Be Static And Dull, As Boring As The Heaven Of Some Weak-minded Theologians. A Universe That Is Unknowable Is No Fit Place For A Thinking Being. The Ideal Universe For Us Is One Very Much Like The Universe We Inhabit. And I Would Guess That This Is Not Really Much Of A Coincidence.

Not Explaining Science Seems To Me Perverse. When You're In Love, You Want To Tell The World.

Accommodation To Change, The Thoughtful Pursuit Of Alternative Futures Are Keys To The Survival Of Civilization And Perhaps Of The Human Species.

There Are No Forbidden Questions In Science, No Matters Too Sensitive Or Delicate To Be Probed, No Sacred Truths.

When You Make The Finding Yourself - Even If You're The Last Person On Earth To See The Light - You'll Never Forget It.

The Old Appeals To Racial, Sexual And Religious Chauvinism To Rabid Nationalist Fervor, Are Beginning Not To Work.

We Are An Intelligent Species And The Use Of Our Intelligence Quite Properly Gives Us Pleasure. In This Respect The Brain Is Like A Muscle. When We Think Well, We Feel Good. Understanding Is A Kind Of Ecstasy.

Any Faith That Admires Truth, That Strives To Know God, Must Be Brave Enough To Accommodate The Universe.

Our Planet Is A Lonely Speck In The Great Enveloping Cosmic Dark. In Our Obscurity, In All This Vastness, There Is No Hint That Help Will Come From Elsewhere To Save Us From Ourselves.

We Can't Help It. Life Looks For Life.

Each Of Us Is A Tiny Being, Permitted To Ride On The Outermost Skin Of One Of The Smaller Planets For A Few Dozen Trips Around The Local Star.

You Mustn't Think Of The Universe As A Wilderness. It Hasn't Been That For Billions Of Years," He Said. "think Of It More As... ..cultivated.

I Would Love To Believe That When I Die I Will Live Again, That Some Thinking, Feeling, Remembering Part Of Me Will Continue.

It Is Clear That The Nations Of The World Now Can Only Rise And Fall Together. It Is Not A Question Of One Nation Winning At The Expense Of Another. We Must All Help One Another Or All Perish Together.

The Impediment To Scientific Thinking Is Not, I Think, The Difficulty Of The Subject. Complex Intellectual Feats Have Been Mainstays Even Of Oppressed Cultures. Shamans, Magicians And Theologians Are Highly Skilled In Their Intricate And Arcane Arts. No, The Impediment Is Political And Hierarchical.

There Are Lots Of Ways To Communicate What We Know, But Few Ways To Communicate What We Feel. Music Is One Way To Communicate Emotions.

We Are, In A Way, Temporary Ambulatory Repositories For Our Nucleic Acids. This Does Not Deny Our Humanity; It Does Not Prevent Us From Pursuing The Good, The True And The Beautiful. But It Would Be A Great Mistake To Ignore Where We Have Come From In Our Attempt To Determine Where We Are Going.

My Fundamental Premise About The Brain Is That Its Workings - What We Sometimes Call "mind" - Are A Consequence Of Its Anatomy And Physiology, And Nothing More.

Anatomy And Physiology

We Live In A Vast And Awesome Universe In Which, Daily, Suns Are Made And Worlds Destroyed, Where Humanity Clings To An Obscure Clod Of Rock.

By Exploring Other Worlds We Safeguard This One. By Itself, I Think This Fact More Than Justifies The Money Our Species Has Spent In Sending Ships To Other Worlds. It Is Our Fate To Live During One Of The Most Perilous And, At The Same Time, One Of The Most Hopeful Chapters In Human History.

When You Look More Generally At Life On Earth, You Find That It Is All The Same Kind Of Life. There Are Not Many Different Kinds; There's Only One Kind. It Uses About Fifty Fundamental Biological Building Blocks, Organic Molecules.

It Seems Madness To Say, 'we're Worried That They're Going To Become Addicted To Marijuana' -- There's No Evidence Whatever That It's An Addictive Drug, But Even If It Were, These People Are Dying, What Are We Saving Them From?

There Is Every Reason To Think That In The Coming Years Mars And Its Mysteries Will Become Increasingly Familiar To The Inhabitants Of The Planet Earth.

In College, In The Early 1950s, I Began To Learn A Little About How Science Works, The Secrets Of Its Great Success, How Rigorous The Standards Of Evidence Must Be If We Are Really To Know Something Is True, How Many False Starts And Dead Ends Have Plagued Human Thinking, How Our Biases Can Colour Our Interpretation Of Evidence, And How Often Belief Systems Widely Held And Supported By The Political, Religious And Academic Hierarchies Turn Out To Be Not Just Slightly In Error, But Grotesquely Wrong.

All Of The Rocky And Metallic Material We Stand On, The Iron In Our Blood, The Calcium In Our Teeth, The Carbon In Our Genes Were Produced Billions Of Years Ago In The Interior Of A Red Giant Star. We Are Made Of Star Stuff.

Science Arouses A Soaring Sense Of Wonder. But So Does Pseudoscience. Sparse And Poor Popularizations Of Science Abandon Ecological Niches That Pseudoscience Promptly Fills. If It Were Widely Understood That Claims To Knowledge Require Adequate Evidence Before They Can Be Accepted, There Would Be No Room For Pseudoscience.

We Are The Universe Experiencing Itself.

The Cosmos Is All That Is Or Ever Was Or Ever Will Be.

We Are Star Stuff Which Has Taken Its Destiny Into Its Own Hands. The Loom Of Time And Space Works The Most Astonishing Transformations Of Matter.

All Of The Books In The World Contain No More Information Than Is Broadcast As Video In A Single Large American City In A Single Year. Not All Bits Have Equal Value.

At The Heart Of Science Is An Essential Balance Between Two Seemingly Contradictory Attitudes-an Openness To New Ideas, No Matter How Bizarre Or Counterintuitive They May Be, And The Most Ruthless Skeptical Scrutiny Of All Ideas, Old And New. This Is How Deep Truths Are Winnowed From Deep Nonsense.

I Am Not An Atheist. An Atheist Is Someone Who Has Compelling Evidence That There Is No Judeo-christian-islamic God. I Am Not That Wise, But Neither Do I Consider There To Be Anything Approaching Adequate Evidence For Such A God. Why Are You In Such A Hurry To Make Up Your Mind? Why Not Simply Wait Until There Is Compelling Evidence?

I Also Wish That The Pledge Of Allegiance Were Directed At The Constitution And The Bill Of Rights, As It Is When The President Takes His Oath Of Office, Rather Than To The Flag And The Nation

You Are Worth About 3 Dollars Worth In Chemicals.

One Glance At A Book And You Hear The Voice Of Another Person, Perhaps Someone Dead For 1,000 Years. To Read Is To Voyage Through Time.

Human History Can Be Viewed As A Slowly Dawning Awareness That We Are Members Of A Larger Group Groups Of People From Divergent Ethnic And Cultural Backgrounds Working In Some Sense Together [is] Surely A Humanizing And Character Building Experience. If We Are To Survive, Our Loyalties Must Be Broadened Further, To Include The Whole Human Community, The Entire Planet Earth.

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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