Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science As A Candle In The Dark Quotes
Advances in medicine and agriculture have saved vastly more lives than have been lost in all the wars in history.
But I try not to think with my gut. If I'm serious about understanding the world, thinking with anything besides my brain, as tempting as that might be, is likely to get me into trouble.
Avoidable human misery is more often caused not so much by stupidity as by ignorance, particularly our ignorance about ourselves.
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?
Science is a way to call the bluff of those who only pretend to knowledge. It is a bulwark against mysticism, against superstition, against religion misapplied to where it has no business being.
It is morally as bad not to care whether a thing is true or not, so long as it makes you feel good, as it is not to care how you got your money as long as you have got it.
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value the may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder.
Liberation from superstition is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for science.
All science asks is to employ the same levels of skepticism we use in buying a used car or in judging the quality of analgesics or beer from their television commercials.
If you want to save your child from polio, you can pray or you can inoculate. ... Choose 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.
Science gropes and staggers toward improved understanding.
We are all flawed and creatures of our times. Is it fair to judge us by the unknown standards of the future?
The same few dozen organic molecules are used over and over again in biology for the widest variety of functions.