Scientists can routinely predict a solar eclipse, to the minute, a millennium in advance. You can go to the witch doctor to lift the spell that causes your pernicious anaemia, or you can take Vitamin B12. If you want to save your child from polio, you can pray or you can inoculate. If you're interested in the sex of your unborn child, you can consult plumb-bob danglers all you want . . . but they'll be right, on average, only one time in two. If you want real accuracy . . . try amniocentesis and sonograms. Try science.
Carl SaganThe fossil record implies trial and error, an inability to anticipate the future, features inconsistent with an efficient Great Designer (although not with a Designer of a more remote and indirect temperament)
Carl SaganThe total number of stars in the Universe is larger than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the planet Earth.
Carl SaganIt is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
Carl SaganI can find in my undergraduate classes, bright students who do not know that the stars rise and set at night, or even that the Sun is a star.
Carl SaganHe sought a way to preserve the past. John Hershel was one of the founders of a new form of time travel.... a means to capture light and memories. He actually coined a word for it... photography. When you think about it, photography is a form of time travel. This man is staring at us from across the centuries, a ghost preserved by light.
Carl Sagan