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After I Give Lectures-on Almost Any Subject-i Am Often Asked, "do You Believe In Ufos?" I'm Always Struck By How The Question Is Phrased, The Suggestion That This Is A Matter Of Belief And Not Evidence. I'm Almost Never Asked, "how Good Is The Evidence That Ufos Are Alien Spaceships?"

-Carl Sagan

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After I Give Lectures-on

Carl Sagan

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After I Give Lectures-on Almost Any Subject-i Am Often Asked, "do You Believe In Ufos?" I'm Always Struck By How The Question Is Phrased, The Suggestion That This Is A Matter Of Belief And Not Evidence. I'm Almost Never Asked, "how Good Is The Evidence That Ufos Are Alien Spaceships?"

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Some 5 Billion Years From Now, There Will Be A Last Perfect Day On Earth... Then The Sun Will Begin To Die, Life Will Be Extinguished, The Oceans Will Boil And Evaporate Away.

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.

Human History Can Be Viewed As A Slowly Dawning Awareness That We Are Members Of A Larger Group.

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

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

How Is It That Hardly Any Major Religion Has Looked At Science And Concluded, “this Is Better Than We Thought! The Universe Is Much Bigger Than Our Prophets Said, Grander, More Subtle, More Elegant?

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

We've Arranged A Civilization In Which Most Crucial Elements Profoundly Depend On Science And Technology.

A Book Is Proof That Humans Are Capable Of Working Magic.

Since, In The Long Run, Every Planetary Society Will Be Endangered By Impacts From Space, Every Surviving Civilization Is Obliged To Become Spacefaring — Not Because Of Exploratory Or Romantic Zeal, But For The Most Practical Reason Imaginable: Staying Alive.

All Colours Are Arbitrary.

A Millennium Before Europeans Were Willing To Divest Themselves Of The Biblical Idea That The World Was A Few Thousand Years Old, The Mayans Were Thinking Of Millions And The Hindus Billions.

And After We Returned To The Savannahs And Abandoned The Trees, Did We Long For Those Great Graceful Leaps And Ecstatic Moments Of Weightlessness In The Shafts Of Sunlight Of The Forest Roof?

Whatever The Reason You're On Mars, I'm Glad You're There, And I Wish I Was With You.

Cosmos Is A Greek Word For The Order Of The Universe. It Is, In A Way, The Opposite Of Chaos. It Implies The Deep Interconnectedness Of All Things. It Conveys Awe For The Intricate And Subtle Way In Which The Universe Is Put Together.

My Parents Were Not Scientists. They Knew Almost Nothing About Science. But In Introducing Me Simultaneously To Skepticism And To Wonder, They Taught Me The Two Uneasily Cohabiting Modes Of Thought That Are Central To The Scientific Method.

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.

A New Consciousness Is Developing Which Sees The Earth As A Single Organism And Recognizes That An Organism At War With Itself Is Doomed. We Are One Planet. One Of The Great Revelations Of The Age Of Space Exploration Is The Image Of The Earth Finite And Lonely, Somehow Vulnerable, Bearing The Entire Human Species Through The Oceans Of Space And Time.

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

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.

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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?

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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?

Ours Is The First Generation That Has Grown Up With Science-fiction Ideas.

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I Find Science So Much More Fascinating Than Science Fiction. It Also Has The Advantage Of Being True.

If You Want To Make A [rhubarb] Pie From Scratch, First You Have To Create The Universe.

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

The Understanding Of The Intent Of The Artist Which I Can Achieve When High Sometimes Carries Over To When I’m Down. This Is One Of Many Human Frontiers Which Cannabis Has Helped Me Traverse.

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Self Questioning

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

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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.

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.

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Scientists Make Mistakes. Accordingly, It Is The Job Of The Scientist To Recognize Our Weakness, To Examine The Widest Range Of Opinions, To Be Ruthlessly Self-critical. Science Is A Collective Enterprise With The Error-correction Machinery Often Running Smoothly.

I Hold That Popularization Of Science Is Successful If, At First, It Does No More Than Spark The Sense Of Wonder.

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Finding The Occasional Straw Of Truth Awash In A Great Ocean Of Confusion And Bamboozle Requires Intelligence, Vigilance, Dedication, And Courage. But If We Don't Practice These Tough Habits Of Thought, We Cannot Hope To Solve The Truly Serious Problems That Face Us --- And We Risk Becoming A Nation Of Suckers, Up For Grabs By The Next Charlatan Who Comes Along.

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.

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.

Who Is More Humble? The Scientist Who Looks At The Universe With An Open Mind And Accepts Whatever The Universe Has To Teach Us, Or Somebody Who Says Everything In This Book Must Be Considered The Literal Truth And Never Mind The Fallibility Of All The Human Beings Involved?

Life Is But A Momentary Glimpse Of The Wonder Of This Astonishing Universe, And It Is Sad To See So Many Dreaming It Away On Spiritual Fantasy.

If You Wish To Make An Apple Pie From Scratch, You Must First Invent The Universe.

The Suppression Of Uncomfortable Ideas May Be Common In Religion Or In Politics, But It Is Not The Path To Knowledge, And There's No Place For It In The Endeavor Of Science. We Do Not Know Beforehand Where Fundamental Insights Will Arise From About Our Mysterious And Lovely Solar System. The History Of Our Study Of Our Solar System Shows Us Clearly That Accepted And Conventional Ideas Are Often Wrong, And That Fundamental Insights Can Arise From The Most Unexpected Sources.

There Are Wonders Enough Out There Without Our Inventing Any.

If You Want To Save Your Child From Polio, You Can Pray Or You Can Inoculate....try Science.

One Of The Great Commandments Of Science Is, 'mistrust Arguments From Authority'. (scientists, Being Primates, And Thus Given To Dominance Hierarchies, Of Course Do Not Always Follow This Commandment.)

In The Deepest Sense The Search For Extraterrestrial Intelligence Is A Search For Ourselves.

Extraterrestrial

Don't Judge Everyone Else By Your Own Limited Experience.

We Are Rare And Precious Because We Are Alive, Because We Can Think As Well As We Can. We Are Privileged To Influence And Perhaps Control Our Future. I Believe We Have An Obligation To Fight For Life On Earth - Not Just For Ourselves, But For All Those, Humans And Others, Who Came Before Us, And To Whom We Are Beholden, And For All Those Who, If We Are Wise Enough, Will Come After.

The Bill Of Rights Decoupled Religion From The State, In Part Because So Many Religions Were Steeped In An Absolutist Frame Of Mind - Each Convinced That It Alone Had A Monopoly On The Truth And Therefore Eager For The State To Impose This Truth On Others.

When You Buy A Used Car, You Kick The Tires, You Look At The Odometer, You Open Up The Hood. If You Do Not Feel Yourself An Expert In Automobile Engines, You Bring A Friend Who Is. And You Do This With Something As Unimportant As An Automobile. But On The Issues Of The Transcendent, Of Ethics, Of Morals, Of The Origins Of The World, Of The Nature Of Human Beings, On Those Issues Should We Not Insist Upon At Least Equally Skeptical Scrutiny?

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.

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

The Romans Called The Christians Atheists. Why? Well, The Christians Had A God Of Sorts, But It Wasn't A Real God. They Didn't Believe In The Divinity Of Apotheosized Emperors Or Olympian Gods. They Had A Peculiar, Different Kind Of God. So It Was Very Easy To Call People Who Believed In A Different Kind Of God Atheists. And That General Sense That An Atheist Is Anybody Who Doesn't Believe Exactly As I Do Prevails In Our Own Time.

One Of The Saddest Lessons Of History Is This: If We’ve Been Bamboozled Long Enough, We Tend To Reject Any Evidence Of The Bamboozle. We’re No Longer Interested In Finding Out The Truth. The Bamboozle Has Captured Us. It’s Simply Too Painful To Acknowledge, Even To Ourselves, That We’ve Been Taken. Once You Give A Charlatan Power Over You, You Almost Never Get It Back.

Valid Criticism Does You A Favor.

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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.

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

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Extraordinary Claim Requires Extraordinary Proof.

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.

The Cosmic Calendar Compresses The Local History Of The Universe Into A Single Year. If The Universe Began On January 1st It Was Not Until May That The Milky Way Formed. Other Planetary Systems May Have Appeared In June, July And August, But Our Sun And Earth Not Until Mid-september. Life Arose Soon After. 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.

We Live In A Society Exquisitely Dependent On Science And Technology, In Which Hardly Anyone Knows Anything About Science And Technology.

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.

Those Afraid Of The Universe As It Really Is, Those Who Pretend To Nonexistent Knowledge And Envision A Cosmos Centered On Human Beings Will Prefer The Fleeting Comforts Of Superstition.

We Invest Far Off Places With A Certain Romance... Long Summers, Mild Winters, Rich Harvests, Plentiful Game; None Of Them Lasts For Ever. Your Own Life, Or Your Bands, Or Even Your Species - Might Be Owed To A Restless Few, Drawn By A Craving They Can Hardly Articulate Or Understand, To Undiscovered Lands, And New Worlds.

Science Is A Way To Not Fool Ourselves.

When Permitted To Listen To Alternative Opinions And Engage In Substantive Debate, People Have Been Known To Change Their Minds. It Can Happen.

For Years I've Been Stressing With Regard To Ufos That Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence.

Even Through Your Hardest Days, Remember We Are All Made Of Stardust.

Writing Is Perhaps The Greatest Of Human Inventions, Binding Together People Who Never Knew Each Other, Citizens Of Distant Epochs. Books Break The Shackles Of Time. A Book Is Proof That Humans Are Capable Of Magic.

History Is Full Of People Who Out Of Fear, Or Ignorance, Or Lust For Power Has Destroyed Knowledge Of Immeasurable Value Which Truly Belongs To Us All. We Must Not Let It Happen Again.

As The Ancient Myth Makers Knew, We Are Children Equally Of The Earth And The Sky.

The Suppression Of Uncomfortable Ideas May Be Common In Religion Or In Politics, But It Is Not The Path To Knowledge; It Has No In The Endeavor Of Science. We Do Not Know In Advance Who Will Discover Fundamental Insights.

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

The Passion To Explore Is At The Heart Of Being Human.

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.

At The Extremes It Is Difficult To Distinguish Pseudoscience From Rigid, Doctrinaire Religion.

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

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

Every Star May Be A Sun To Someone.

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.

If There Is Life, Then I Believe We Should Do Nothing To Disturb That Life. Mars Then, Belongs To The Martians, Even If They Are Microbes.

It's Hard To Kill A Creature Once It Lets You See Its Consciousness.

Who Are We, If Not Measured By Our Impact On Others?

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

...the Idea Of A Spiritual Part Of Our Nature That Survives Death, The Notion Of An Afterlife, Ought To Be Easy For Religions And Nations To Sell. This Is Not An Issue Of Which We Might Anticipate Widespread Skepticism. People Will Want To Believe It, Even If The Evidence Is Meager To Nil... Compelling Testimony ... Provides That Our Personality, Character, Memory ... Resides In The Matter Of The Brain, It Is Easy Not To Focus On It, To Find Ways To Evade The Weight Of The Evidence.

The Chief Deficiency I See In The Skeptical Movement Is Its Polarization: Us Vs. Them - The Sense That We Have A Monopoly On The Truth; That Those Other People Who Believe In All These Stupid Doctrines Are Morons; That If You're Sensible, You'll Listen To Us; And If Not, To Hell With You. This Is Nonconstructive. It Does Not Get Our Message Across. It Condemns Us To Permanent Minority Status.

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.

Scientific Method

The Cosmos Is Full Beyond Measure Of Elegant Truths; Of Exquisite Interrelationships; Of The Awesome Machinery Of Nature.

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.

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

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

The Fossil Record Implies Trial And Error, An Inability To Anticipate The Future, Features Inconsistent With An Efficient Great Designer (although Not With A Designer Of A More Remote And Indirect Temperament)

Trial And Error

Where Did God Come From? If We Decide This Is An Unanswerable Question Why Not Save A Step And Conclude That The Origin Of The Universe Is An Unanswerable Question.

We Can Always Take But Never Give.

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

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.

What An Astonishing Thing A Book Is.

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

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

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

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.

The Cosmos Is Within Us. We Are Made Of Star Stuff

What Counts Is Not What Sounds Plausible, Not What We Would Like To Believe, Not What One Or Two Witnesses Claim, But Only What Is Supported By Hard Evidence Rigorously And Skeptically Examined. Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence.

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

We Have Also Arranged Things So That Almost No One Understands Science And Technology. This Is A Prescription For Disaster. We Might Get Away With It For A While, But Sooner Or Later This Combustible Mixture Of Ignorance And Power Is Going To Blow Up In Our Faces.

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.

Science Is A Way Of Thinking That Helps You Not To Fool Yourself.

You're An Interesting Species, An Interesting Mix. You're Capable Of Such Beautiful Dreams And Such Horrible Nightmares. You Feel So Lost, So Cut Off, So Alone, Only You're Not. See, In All Our Searching, The Only Thing We've Found That Makes The Emptiness Bearable Is Each Other.

The Brain Is Like A Muscle. When It Is In Use We Feel Very Good. Understanding Is Joyous.

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.

Your God Is Too Small For My Universe.

In The Way That Scepticism Is Sometimes Applied To Issues Of Public Concern, There Is A Tendency To Belittle, To Condescend, To Ignore The Fact That, Deluded Or Not, Supporters Of Superstition And Pseudoscience Are Human Beings With Real Feelings, Who, Like The Sceptics, Are Trying To Figure Out How The World Works And What Our Role In It Might Be. Their Motives Are In Many Cases Consonant With Science. If Their Culture Has Not Given Them All The Tools They Need To Pursue This Great Quest, Let Us Temper Our Criticism With Kindness. None Of Us Comes Fully Equipped.

To Live In The Hearts Of Others Is To Never Die In Those We Leave Behind.

In The Vastness Of The Cosmos There Must Be Other Civilizations Far Older And More Advanced Than Ours.

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.

Be Grateful Everyday For The Brief But Magnificent Opportunity That Life Provides.

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.

A Single Message From Space Will Show That It Is Possible To Live Through Technological Adolescence. . . . It Is Possible That The Future Of Human Civilization Depends On The Receipt Of Interstellar Messages.

And You Are Made Of A Hundred Trillion Cells. We Are, Each Of Us, A Multitude.

There Is A Reward Structure In Science That Is Very Interesting: Our Highest Honors Go To Those Who Disprove The Findings Of The Most Revered Among Us. So Einstein Is Revered Not Just Because He Made So Many Fundamental Contributions To Science, But Because He Found An Imperfection In The Fundamental Contribution Of Isaac Newton.

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.

My Wonder Button Is Being Pushed All The Time.

In The Long Run, The Aggressive Civilizations Destroy Themselves, Almost Always. It's Their Nature. They Can't Help It.

Societies Will, Of Course, Wish To Exercise Prudence In Deciding Which Technologies That Is, Which Applications Of Science Are To Be Pursued And Which Not. But Without Funding Basic Research, Without Supporting The Acquisition Of Knowledge For Its Own Sake, Our Options Become Dangerously Limited.

After I Give Lectures-on Almost Any Subject-i Am Often Asked, "do You Believe In Ufos?" I'm Always Struck By How The Question Is Phrased, The Suggestion That This Is A Matter Of Belief And Not Evidence. I'm Almost Never Asked, "how Good Is The Evidence That Ufos Are Alien Spaceships?"

The Open Road Still Softly Calls, Like A Nearly Forgotten Song Of Childhood

We Began As Wanderers, And We Are Wanderers Still.

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

If We Are To Survive, Our Loyalties Must Be Broadened Further, To Include The Whole Human Community, The Entire Planet Earth.

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

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

Somewhere, Something Incredible Is Waiting To Be Known.

The Cosmos Is All That Is Or Was Or Ever Will Be. Our Feeblest Contemplations Of The Cosmos Stir Us -- There Is A Tingling In The Spine, A Catch In The Voice, A Faint Sensation, As If A Distant Memory, Of Falling From A Height. We Know We Are Approaching The Greatest Of Mysteries.

There Are Many Hypotheses In Physics Of Almost Comparable Brillance And Elegance That Have Been Rejected Because They Did Not Survive Such A Confrontation With Experiment. In My View, The Human Condition Would Be Greatly Improved If Such Confrontations And Willingness To Reject Hypotheses Were A Regular Part Of Our Social, Political, Economic, Religious And Cultural Lives.

Human Beings Grew Up In Forests; We Have A Natural Affinity For Them. How Lovely A Tree Is, Straining Toward The Sky.

The Surface Of The Earth Is The Shore Of The Cosmic Ocean. On This Shore, We've Learned Most Of What We Know. Recently, We've Waded A Little Way Out, Maybe Ankle-deep, And The Water Seems Inviting. Some Part Of Our Being Knows This Is Where We Came From. We Long To Return, And We Can, Because The Cosmos Is Also Within Us. We're Made Of Star Stuff. We Are A Way For The Cosmos To Know Itself.

The Visions We Offer Our Children Shape The Future. It _matters_ What Those Visions Are. Often They Become Self-fulfilling Prophecies. Dreams Are Maps.

[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.

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

All Inquires Carry With Them Some Element Of Risk. There Is No Guarantee That The Universe Will Conform To Our Predispositions.

Guarantees That

You Are Worth About 3 Dollars Worth In Chemicals.

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.

The Secrets Of Evolution Are Death And Time-the Deaths Of Enormous Numbers Of Lifeforms That Were Imperfectly Adapted To The Environment; And Time For A Long Succession Of Small Mutations.

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.

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?

Better The Hard Truth, I Say, Than The Comforting Fantasy. And In The Final Tolling It Often Turns Out That The Facts Are More Comforting Than The Fantasy.

The Open Road Still Softly Calls.

Some Racists Still Reject The Plain Testimony Written In The Dna That All The Races Are Not Only Human But Nearly Indistinguishable. . . .

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