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May 21, 2013
in carl sagan carl sagan quote-a-day dumbing down of america keep questioning
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I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…

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

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~ Carl Sagan
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May 20, 2013
in carl sagan carl sagan quote-a-day lols
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"You are worth about 3 dollars worth in chemicals."

~ Carl Sagan
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May 17, 2013
in carl sagan carl sagan quote-a-day agnosticism
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"You could just as well say that an agnostic is a deeply religious person with at least a rudimentary knowledge of human fallibility."

~ Carl Sagan
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May 16, 2013
in carl sagan carl sagan quote-a-day real truths in science understanding is ecstasy
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"Understanding is a kind of ecstasy"

~ Carl Sagan
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May 14, 2013
in carl sagan carl sagan quote-a-day global warming
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"If we keep on with business as usual, the Earth will be warmed more every year; drought and floods will be endemic; many more cities, provinces, and whole nations will be submerged beneath the waves — unless heroic worldwide engineering countermeasures are taken. In the longer run, still more dire consequences may follow, including the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet, and the inundation of almost all the coastal cities on the planet."

~ Carl Sagan
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May 13, 2013
in carl sagan carl sagan quote-a-day lols billions and billions
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"I never said it. Honest. Oh, I said there are maybe 100 billion galaxies and 10 billion trillion stars. It’s hard to talk about the Cosmos without using big numbers. I said ‘billion’ many times on the Cosmos television series, which was seen by a great many people. But I never said ‘billions and billions.’ For one thing, it’s imprecise. How many billions are ‘billions and billions’? A few billion? Twenty billion? A hundred billion? ‘Billions and billions’ is pretty vague… For a while, out of childish pique, I wouldn’t utter the phrase, even when asked to. But I’ve gotten over that. So, for the record, here it goes: ‘Billions and billions."

~ Carl Sagan
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May 10, 2013
in carl sagan carl sagan quote-a-day sad state of politics politics
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"When we consider the founders of our nation: Jefferson, Washington, Samuel and John Adams, Madison and Monroe, Benjamin Franklin, Tom Paine and many others; we have before us a list of at least ten and maybe even dozens of great political leaders. They were well educated. Products of the European Enlightenment, they were students of history. They knew human fallibility and weakness and corruptibility. They were fluent in the English language. They wrote their own speeches. They were realistic and practical, and at the same time motivated by high principles. They were not checking the pollsters on what to think this week. They knew what to think. They were comfortable with long-term thinking, planning even further ahead than the next election. They were self-sufficient, not requiring careers as politicians or lobbyists to make a living. They were able to bring out the best in us. They were interested in and, at least two of them, fluent in science. They attempted to set a course for the United States into the far future — not so much by establishing laws as by setting limits on what kinds of laws could be passed. The Constitution and its Bill of Rights have done remarkably well, constituting, despite human weaknesses, a machine able, more often than not, to correct its own trajectory. At that time, there were only about two and a half million citizens of the United States. Today there are about a hundred times more. So if there were ten people of the caliber of Thomas Jefferson then, there ought to be 10 x 100 = 1,000 Thomas Jefferson’s today. Where are they?"

~ Carl Sagan
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May 9, 2013
in carl sagan carl sagan quote-a-day
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"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."

~ Carl Sagan
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May 8, 2013
in carl sagan carl sagan quote-a-day
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"The well-meaning contention that all ideas have equal merit seems to me little different from the disastrous contention that no ideas have any merit."

~ Carl Sagan
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May 7, 2013
in carl sagan carl sagan quote-a-day
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"Really, it’s okay to reserve judgment until the evidence is in"

~ Carl Sagan
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