Druyan Sagan Quotes & Sayings

Ann Druyan suggests an experiment: Look back again at the pale blue dot of the preceding chapter. Take a good long look at it. Stare at the dot for any length of time and then try to convince yourself that God created the whole Universe for one of the 10 million or so species of life that inhabit that speck of dust. Now take it a step further: Imagine that everything was made just for a single shade of that species, or gender, or ethnic or religious subdivision. If this doesn't strike you as unlikely, pick another dot. Imagine it to be inhabited by a different form of intelligent life. They, too, cherish the notion of a God who has created everything for their benefit. How seriously do you take their claim? — Carl Sagan

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. — Ann Druyan

Gathering news in Russia was like mining coal with a hat pin. — Mary Heaton Vorse

Interviewer: Didn't Sagan want to believe?
Druyan: he didn't want to believe. he wanted to know. — Ann Druyan

I remember that one time Carl Sagan was giving a talk, and he spelled out, in a kind of withering succession, these great theories of demotion that science has dealt us, all of the ways in which science is telling us we are not who we would like to believe we are. At the end of it, a young man came up to him and he said: "What do you give us in return? Now that you've taken everything from us? What meaning is left, if everything that I've been taught since I was a child turns out to be untrue?" Carl looked at him and said, Do something meaningful. — Ann Druyan

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. — Ann Druyan

The trick is not to learn to trust your gut feelings, but rather to discipline yourself to ignore them. Stand by your stocks as long as the fundamental story of the company hasn't changed. — Peter Lynch

It takes a fearless, unflinching love and deep humility to accept the universe as it is. The most effective way he knew to accomplish that, the most powerful tool at his disposal, was the scientific method, which over time winnows out deception. It can't give you absolute truth because science is a permanent revolution, always subject to revision, but it can give you successive approximations of reality. — Ann Druyan

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

Bob Saget is the dirtiest comic who's ever lived. Nobody touches him. — Penn Jillette

Carl Sagan always used to say that when he was trying to explain something to someone, he would go back to that time when he didn't understand it, and then he would retrace his thought steps so that he could make it absolutely clear, and that's one of the infinite number of things I learned from him. — Ann Druyan

In the vastness of space and the immensity of time, it is my joy to share a planet and an epoch with Annie.
[Dedication to Sagan's wife, Ann Druyan, in Cosmos] — Carl Sagan

I missed quite a lot of school because I was working from the age of 11. — Natalia Vodianova

Love can be seen as the answer, but nobody bleeds for the dancer — Ronnie James Dio