Cosmos

“Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.”

“Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors. The library connects us with the insight and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds tha...”

“The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together.”

“The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.”

“In the vastness of space and the immensity of time, it is my joy to share a planet and an epoch with Annie. [Dedication to Sagan's wife, Ann Druyan, in Cosmos]”

“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”

“The fossil record implies trial and error, the inability to anticipate the future, features inconsistent with a Great Designer (though not a Designer of a more remote and indirect temperamen...”

“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 powe...”

“One glance at (a book) and you hear the voice of another person - perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millenia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your...”

“If we long for our planet to be important, there is something we can do about it. We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers.”

“The secrets of evolution, are time and death. There's an unbroken thread that stretches from those first cells to us.”

“When we look up at night and view the stars, everything we see is shinning because of distant nuclear fusion.”

“It is said that men may not be the dreams of the god, but rather that the gods are the dreams of men.”

“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 fr...”

“The near side of a galaxy is tens of thousands of light-years closer to us than the far side; thus we see the front as it was tens of thousands of years before the back. But typical events i...”

“The cerebral cortex is a liberation. We need no longer be trapped in the genetically inherited behavior patterns of lizards and baboons. We are, each of us, largely responsible for what gets...”

“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 co-ordinated and used. Still, the amount of...”

“The cosmos was discovered only yesterday. For a million years it was clear to everyone that there were no other places than the earth. Then in the last tenth of a percent of the lifetime of...”

“By looking far out into space we are also looking far back into time, back toward the horizon of the universe, back toward the epoch of the Big Bang.”

“We are star stuff which has taken its destiny into its own hands.”

“Books are like seeds. They can lie dormant for centuries and then flower in the most unpromising soil.”

“And you are made of a hundred trillion cells. We are, each of us, a multitude.”

“The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home. In a cosmic perspective, most human concerns...”

“Many hypotheses proposed by scientists as well as by non scientists turn out to be wrong. But science is a self correcting enterprise. To be accepted, all new ideas must survive rigorous sta...”