Leonardo da Vinci vs. Carl Sagan

"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."

"In Mozambique, the story goes, monkeys do not talk, because they know if they utter even a single word some man will come and put them to work."

"We find a set of data that strongly implies the presence of complex organic molecules in the outer solar system."

"Where skeptical observation and discussion are suppressed, the truth is hidden. The proponents of such borderline beliefs, when criticized, often point to ge…"

"The enterprise of knowledge is consistent surely with science; it should be with religion, and it is essential for the welfare of the human species."

"There is a place with four suns in the sky — red, white, blue, and yellow; two of them are so close together that they touch, and star-stuff flows between th…"

"Imagine we could accelerate continuously at 1 g — what we're comfortable with on good old terra firma — to the midpoint of our voyage, and decelerate continu…"

"“Let’s see if I’ve got this straight,” he returned. It was a phrase of hers that he had adopted “It’s a lazy Saturday afternoon, and there’s this couple lyin…"

"Whether we believe in God depends very much on what we mean by God."

"The price we pay for the anticipation of our future is anxiety about it. Foretelling disaster is probably not much fun; Pollyanna was much happier than Cassa…"

"We wish to pursue the truth no matter where it leads — but to find the truth, we need imagination and skepticism both. We will not be afraid to speculate, bu…"

"Science is, at least in part, informed worship."

"If you know a thing only qualitatively, you know it no more than vaguely. If you know it quantitatively—grasping some numerical measure that distinguishes it…"

"The sky calls to us. If we do not destroy ourselves, we will one day venture to the stars."

"A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism."

"Humans are good, she knew, at discerning subtle patterns that are really there, but equally so at imagining them when they are altogether absent."

"For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring."

"The search for extraterrestrial intelligence is the search for a generally acceptable cosmic context for the human species. In the deepest sense, the search …"

"Astronomically, the U. S. S. R. and the United States are the same place."

"But our openness to the dazzling possibilities presented by modern science must be tempered by some hard-nosed skepticism. Many interesting possibilities sim…"