Carl Sagan citáty

strana 11

„Jako děti se bojíme tmy. Neznámé nás děsí. Tam venku může být cokoliv. Paradoxně je to náš osud žít ve tmě. Vyrazte ze Země, kterýmkoliv směrem si vyberete a po počátečním záblesku modré, jste obklopeni černotou, přerušovanou pouze světlem mdlých hvězd. Dokonce i poté, co dospějeme, si temnota uchovává svou moc nás děsit. A proto jsou zde tací, kdož hovoří, že bychom se neměli příliš tázat, kdo další může žít v té temnotě.“

„Nepřítomnost důkazu není důkazem neexistence.“

„Je dobré mít otevřenou mysl, ale ne tak aby nám vypadl mozek z hlavy.“

„Nechci věřit, já chci pochopit.“

„Fantazie nás někdy zanese do světů, které neexistují. Ale bez fantazie se nedostaneme vůbec nikam.“

„Vesmír není povinen být v dokonalé harmonii s lidskou ctižádostí.“

„Ptám se. Kdo má větší pokoru? Vědec, který se dívá na vesmír s otevřenou myslí a přijímá cokoliv, co nás vesmír učí? Anebo někdo, kdo říká, že všechno v této knize musí být vykládáno jako čistá pravda a nikdy se nemáme starat o omylnost lidských bytostí, které tuto knihu psali?“

„Věda je více než jen soubor poznatků. Je to způsob myšlení. Způsob skeptického vyslýchání vesmíru s jemným porozuměním lidské omylnosti.“

„Je mnohem lepší brát vesmír takový, jaký doopravdy je, než setrvávat v bludu jakkoliv uspokojujícím a uklidňujícím.“

„Nemáme-li žádnou výjimečnou polohu, rychlost či zrychlení, ani odlišný původ než jiné rostliny a živočichové, pak bychom alespoň mohli být nejchytřejšími bytostmi celého vesmíru. V tom je naše jedinečnost.“

„Žijeme ve společnosti, naprosto závislé na vědě a technologii, a přesto skoro nikdo vědě a technologii nerozumí. To je jasný recept na katastrofu.“

„Mozek je jako sval. Když je používán cítíme se velmi dobře. Chápání je radostné.“

„Nemůžete přesvědčit věřící o čemkoli, protože jejich víra není založená na důkazech, ale je založena na hlubokém základě potřeby věřit.“

„Zánik je pravidlem. Přežití je výjimkou.“

„Mimořádná tvrzení vyžadují mimořádné důkazy.“

„Jedinou svatou pravdou je, že žádné svaté pravdy neexistují.“

“They (i. e., the Pythagoreans) did not advocate the free confrontation of conflicting points of view. Instead, like all orthodox religions, they practised a rigidity that prevented them from correcting their errors.”

“If there's nothing in here but atoms, does that make us less or does that make matter more?”

“The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion and politics, but it is not the path to knowledge; it has no place in the endeavor of science.”

“Evolving before our eyes has been a God of the Gaps; that is, whatever it is we cannot explain lately is attributed to God.”

“For a long time the human instinct to understand was thwarted by facile religious explanations.”

“Since, in the long run, every planetary society will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring — not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive.”

“The major religions on the Earth contradict each other left and right. You can’t all be correct. And what if all of you are wrong? It’s a possibility, you know. You must care about the truth, right? Well, the way to winnow through all the differing contentions is to be skeptical. I’m not any more skeptical about your religious beliefs than I am about every new scientific idea I hear about. But in my line of work, they’re called hypotheses, not inspiration and not revelation.”

“She too had found the experience transforming. How could she not? A demon had been exorcised. Several. And just when she felt more capable of love than she had ever been, she found herself alone.”

“The old man made himself look hard at the Raven and saw that it was not a great bird from the sky but the work of men like himself. This first encounter turned out to be peaceful. The men of the La Pérouse expedition were under strict orders to treat with respect any people they might discover, an exceptional policy for its time and after.”

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

“If we seek… nature, then love can be informed by truth instead of being based on ignorance or self-deception.”

“If you take a look at science in its everyday function, of course you find that scientists run the gamut of human emotions and personalities and character and so on. But there’s one thing that is really striking to the outsider, and that is the gauntlet of criticism that is considered acceptable or even desirable. The poor graduate student at his or her Ph. D. oral exam is subjected to a withering crossfire of questions that sometimes seem hostile or contemptuous; this from the professors who have the candidate’s future in their grasp. The students naturally are nervous; who wouldn’t be? True, they’ve prepared for it for years. But they understand that at that critical moment they really have to be able to answer questions. So in preparing to defend their theses, they must anticipate questions; they have to think, “Where in my thesis is there a weakness that someone else might find — because I sure better find it before they do, because if they find it and I'm not prepared, I'm in deep trouble."”

“There is in the lovely Martian landscape not a footprint, not an artifact, not even an old beer can, not a blade of grass, not a kangaroo rat, not even, so far as we can tell, a microbe. Mars and the Moon and Venus… the only planets that we've landed on—are utterly lifeless. …in our solar system we may discover that there is life only on this world. This says that life is not guaranteed, that life requires something special, something improbable.”

“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 lying naked in bed reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica to each other, and arguing about whether the Andromeda Galaxy is more ‘numinous’ than the Resurrection. Do they know how to have a good time or don’t they?”

“I stress that the universe is made mostly of nothing, that something is the exception.”

“Once upon a time, the best minds of the human species believed that the planets were attached to crystal spheres. …Both in classic and in medieval times, it was prominently speculated that gods or angels propelled them, gave them a twirl every now and then. The Newtonian gravitational superstructure replaced angels with GMm/r2… as science advances, there seems to be less and less for God to do.”

“Carbonaceous meteorites that fall to the Earth… have several percent to as much as 10 percent of complex organic matter in them.”

“This is Phobos… Its mean density is known, and it is consistent with organic matter. Deimos… same story.”

“In some respects, science has far surpassed religion in delivering awe. How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, "This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant. God must be even greater than we dreamed"? Instead they say, "No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way."”

“If I were to propose to you that my arm could be in this position or in that position but it would be forbidden by the laws of nature to be in some intermediate position, that would likely strike you as absurd, as contrary to experience. And yet on the subatomic level, there is a quantization of energy and position and momentum. The reason that it seems counterintuitive is that is that we are not ordinarily down at the level of the very small, where quantum effects dominate.”

“War is murder writ large.”

“Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth. Our obligation to survive and flourish is owed not just to ourselves, but also to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring.”

“What counts is not what sounds plausible, not what we would like to believe, not what one or two witnesses claim, but only what is supported by hard evidence rigorously and skeptically examined. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”

“For as long as there been humans we have searched for our place in the cosmos. Where are we? Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a hum-drum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people. This perspective is a courageous continuation of our penchant for constructing and testing mental models of the skies; the Sun as a red-hot stone, the stars as a celestial flame, the Galaxy as the backbone of night.”

“We are set irrevocably, I believe, on a path that will take us to the stars—unless in some monstrous capitulation to stupidity and greed, we destroy ourselves first.”

“In any case, we do not advance the human cause by refusing to consider ideas that make us frightened.”

“It is a good idea not to make up our minds prematurely on this issue. It is probably best not to let our personal preferences influence the decision. Rather, in the long tradition of successful science, we should permit nature to reveal the truth to us.”

“Proponents of doctrinal religions—ones in which a particular body of belief is prized and infidels scorned—will be threatened by the courageous pursuit of knowledge. We hear from such people that it may be dangerous to probe too deeply. Many people have inherited their religion like their eye color: they consider it not a thing to think very deeply about, and in any case beyond our control. But those with a set of beliefs they profess to feel deeply about, which they have selected without an unbiased sifting through the facts and the alternatives, will feel uncomfortably challenged by searching questions. Anger at queries about our beliefs is the body’s warning signal: here lies unexamined and probably dangerous doctrinal baggage.”

“The way to find out about our place in the universe is by examining the universe and by examining ourselves—without preconceptions, with as unbiased a mind as we can muster. We cannot begin with an entirely clean slate, since we arrive at this problem with predispositions of hereditary and environmental origin; but, after understanding such built-in biases, is it not possible to pry insights from nature?”