{"author":"Carl Sagan","author_id":"Carl+Sagan","total_quotes":336,"quotes":[{"text":"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.","author":"Carl Sagan","tags":["morality","religion"],"id":254,"author_id":"Carl+Sagan"},{"text":"Billions of years from now our sun, then a distended red giant star, will have reduced Earth to a charred cinder. But the Voyager record will still be largely intact, in some other remote region of the Milky Way galaxy, preserving a murmur of an ancient civilization that once flourished — perhaps before moving on to greater deeds and other worlds — on the distant planet Earth.","author":"Carl Sagan","tags":["carl-sagan","golden-records","satellite","space","voyager"],"id":1029,"author_id":"Carl+Sagan"},{"text":"Science gropes and staggers toward improved understanding.","author":"Carl Sagan","tags":["science","understanding"],"id":3056,"author_id":"Carl+Sagan"},{"text":"This looks very much as if the integration of the day's experience into our memory, the forging of new neural links, is either an easier or a more urgent task. As the night wears on and this function is completed, the more affecting dreams, the more bizarrematerial, the fears and lusts and other powerful emotions of thedream material emerge.","author":"Carl Sagan","tags":["dreams","human-brain","sleep"],"id":4368,"author_id":"Carl+Sagan"},{"text":"From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here, that's home, that's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar,' every 'supreme leader,' every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. 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. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.","author":"Carl Sagan","tags":["philosophy","science","space-and-cosmos"],"id":15820,"author_id":"Carl+Sagan"},{"text":"The total amount of energy from outside the solar system ever received by all the radio telescopes on the planet Earth is less than the energy of a single snowflake striking the ground.","author":"Carl Sagan","tags":["cosmology","cosmos","radio-telescopes","space"],"id":19710,"author_id":"Carl+Sagan"},{"text":"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?” Instead they say, “No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.” A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.","author":"Carl Sagan","tags":["awe","cosmology","epistemology","god","organized-religion","religion","science"],"id":21404,"author_id":"Carl+Sagan"},{"text":"Once we lose our fear of being tiny, we find ourselves on the threshold of a vast and awesome Universe which dwarfs -- in time, in space, and in potential -- the tidy anthropocentric proscenium of our ancestors.","author":"Carl Sagan","tags":["exploration","science","the-universe"],"id":21823,"author_id":"Carl+Sagan"},{"text":"There were many women in the Soviet scientific community, proportionately more so than in the United States. But they tended to occupy menial middle-level positions, and male Soviet scientists, like their American counterparts, were puzzled about a pretty woman with evident scientific competence who forcefully expressed her views.","author":"Carl Sagan","tags":["female","scientist","woman"],"id":21959,"author_id":"Carl+Sagan"},{"text":"Thus, an inhibition center developed below what in humans is the temporal lobe, to turn off much of the functioning of the reptilian brain; and an activation center evolved in the pons to turn on the R-complex, but harmlessly, during sleep.","author":"Carl Sagan","tags":["dreams","human-brain","sleep"],"id":23516,"author_id":"Carl+Sagan"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":336,"pages":34,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}