How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, โThis is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant?
Carl SaganIf chimpanzees have consciousness, if they are capable of abstractions, do they not have what until now has been described as 'human rights'? How smart does a chimp have to be before killing him constitutes murder?
Carl SaganI believe that even a smattering of such findings in modern science and mathematics is far more compelling and exciting than most of the doctrines of pseudoscience, whose practitioners were condemned as early as the fifth century B.C. by the Ionian philosopher Heraclitus as โnigh -walkers, magicians, priests of Bacchus, priestesses of the wine-vat, mystery-mongers.โ But science is more intricate and subtle, reveals a much richer imiverse, and powerfully evokes our sense of wonder.
Carl SaganWe are the product of 4.5 billion years of fortuitous, slow biological evolution. There is no reason to think that the evolutionary process has stopped. Man is a transitional animal. He is not the climax of creation.
Carl SaganEven Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel, and Albert Einstein made serious mistakes. But the scientific enterprise arranges things so that teamwork prevails: What one of us, even the most brilliant among us, misses, another of us, even someone much less celebrated and capable, may detect and rectify.
Carl Sagan