“What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tr...” — Carl Sagan Quote

“What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”

“You see, the religious people — most of them — really think this planet is an experiment. That's what their beliefs come down to. Some god or other is always fixing and poking, messing around with tradesmen's wives, giving tablets on mountains, commanding you to mutilate your children, telling people what words they can say and what words they can't say, making people feel guilty about enjoying themselves, and like that. Why can't the gods leave well enough alone? All this intervention speaks of incompetence. If God didn't want Lot's wife to look back, why didn't he make her obedient, so she'd do what her husband told her? Or if he hadn't made Lot such a shithead, maybe she would've listened to him more. If God is omnipotent and omniscient, why didn't he start the universe out in the first place so it would come out the way he wants? Why's he constantly repairing and complaining? No, there's one thing the Bible makes clear: The biblical God is a sloppy manufacturer. He's not good at design, he's not good at execution. He'd be out of business if there was any competition.”

“The fossil record implies trial and error, the inability to anticipate the future, features inconsistent with a Great Designer (though not a Designer of a more remote and indirect temperament.)”

“Put it this way. If you or I were to build a machine, we'd go about it logically, with the fewest necessary parts moving in clean, efficient ways. But living nature doesn't work that way at all. It builds via the most fantastic redundancies and curlicues, millions of little variations around a theme, so that if three-quarters go haywire, life survives. The results are Rube Goldberg devices, but sturdy Rube Goldberg devices, unimaginably weird and densely layered Rube Goldberg devices, literally unimaginable in that our brains aren't adequate to comprehend the sort of microscopic megacities hidden within the tiniest cell. I thought that was neat.”

“The advancement of science and the diffusion of information [is] the best aliment to true liberty.”

“It is important to view knowledge as sort of a semantic tree -- make sure you understand the fundamental principles, ie the trunk and big branches, before you get into the leaves/details or there is nothing for them to hang on to.”

“When I was little, I had this science book. There was a section on 'What would happen to the world if there was no friction?' Answer: 'Everything on earth would fly into space from the centrifugal force of revolution.' That was my mood.”

“Science does not just drive space travel - space travel also drives science.”