Knowing a deep thing well, which is what science asks of its practitioners, is an empowerment that is very profound. It's a liberation.

Ten long trips around the sun since I last saw that smile, but only joy and thankfulness that on a tiny world in the vastness, for a couple of moments in the immensity of time, we were one.

A lot of people have this ego need that makes them want to believe that Earth is the center of the universe and humans are the most important species, the supreme expression of creation.

If you are searching for sacred knowledge and not just a palliative for your fears, then you will train yourself to be a good skeptic.

And what greater might do we possess as human beings than our capacity to question and to learn?

Carl did not want to believe. He wanted to know.

I guess I so desperately want to see us put this planet right. It's so horrifying to me that a fifth of us are starving every night, and that forty thousand children die every single day.

We smoked the way other American families would have wine with dinner. For us, it was our sacrament. It was something that made a great life sweeter in every possible way.

Interviewer: "Didn't [Sagan] want to believe?" Druyan: "He didn't want to believe. He wanted to know.

Science is nothing more than a neverending search for the truth.

Carl took on the military-industrial complex. He campaigned around the world for an end to the production of weapons of mass destruction. To him it was a perversion of science.

Do not believe in a god who is as silly, and meaner than you. For, that would surely be your higher-self, and your stupid alter-ego.

When you marooned me on that God forsaken spit of land, you forgot one very important thing mate. I'm Captain Jack Sparrow.

Sometimes fate just plays a strange scrabble.

Reading always calmed me down: filling my head with other - made up - people's problems and conflicts made my own seem less terrible, less real.

It doesn't matter what country or what political system you are from. Space brings you together.

Spring's greatest joy beyond a doubt is when it brings the children out.

It's better to say too much, than never to say what you need to say again.

It is this earth that, like a kind mother, receives us at our birth, and sustains us when born; it is this alone, of all the elements around us, that is never found an enemy of man.

Never have doubted it, even when the plane crash happened. I wasn't mad at God. I just knew that there was a reason that I didn't know about why it happened.

You could use artificial intelligence to build a system around postcodes and income, which could lead to racial profiling.