More Reflections By Carl Sagan

 

Bust of Carl Sagan

Not long ago, I posted some quotes from Carl Sagan which seemed to me thought-provoking.

Below are some more which seemed worth sharing here.

Enjoy:

“History is full of people who out of fear or ignorance or the lust for power have destroyed treasures of immeasurable value which truly belong to all of us. We must not let it happen again.” 

― Carl Sagan

“Those who are ignorant and fearful of science create a new generation of people ignorant and fearful of science  

― Carl Sagan

"There is much that science doesn't understand, many mysteries still to be resolved. In a Universe tens of billions of light years across and some ten or fifteen billion years old, this may be the case forever. We are constantly stumbling on surprises. Yet some New Age and religious writers assert that scientists believe that 'what they find is all there is'. Scientists may reject mystic revelations for which there is no evidence except somebody's say-so, but they hardly believe their knowledge of Nature to be complete. Science is far from a perfect instrument of knowledge. It's just the best we have. In this respect, as in many others, it's like democracy. Science by itself cannot advocate courses of human action, but it can certainly illuminate the possible consequences of alternative courses of action." 

~ Carl Sagan ; The Demon-Haunted World "An Instrument of Knowledge" 

"In exchange for freedom of inquiry, scientists are obliged to explain their work. If science is considered too difficult for the average person to understand, the dangers of abuse are greater. But if science is a topic of general interest and concern if both its delights and its social consequences are discussed regularly and competently in the schools, the press, and at the dinner table we have greatly improved our prospects for learning how the world really is and for improving both it and us." 

~ Carl Sagan ; Broca's Brain

“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 that were by accident adaptive, time for the slow accumulation of patterns of favorable mutations.  Part of the resistance to Darwin and Wallace derives from our difficulty in imagining the passage of the millennia, much less the aeons. What does seventy million years mean to beings who live only one-millionth as long? We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.” 

~Carl Sagan ; Cosmos 

"It's disheartening to discover government corruption and incompetence, for example; but is it better not to know about it? Whose interest does ignorance serve? If we humans bear, say, hereditary propensities toward the hatred of strangers, isn't self-knowledge the only antidote? 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?" 

~ Carl Sagan "Does Truth Matter?" (March/April 1996 Skeptical Inquirer) 

"We are set irrevocably, I believe, on a path that will take us to the star sunless in some monstrous capitulation to stupidity and greed, we destroy ourselves first. And out there in the depths of space, it seems very likely that, sooner or later, we will find other intelligent beings. Some of them will be less advanced than we; some, probably most, will be more. Will all the spacefaring beings, I wonder, be creatures whose births are painful? The beings more advanced than we will have capabilities far beyond our understanding. In some very real sense they will appear to us as godlike.  There will be a great deal of growing up required of the infant human species. Perhaps our descendants in those remote times will look back on us, on the long and wandering journey the human race will have taken from its dimly remembered origins on the distant planet Earth, and recollect our personal and collective histories, our romance with science and religion, with clarity and understanding and love." 

~ Carl Sagan ; Broca's Brain : Reflections on the Romance of Science