Quotes from Ann Druyan

If you have a beating heart, that's good enough.

In the 1970s, I think that there was probably a higher degree of respect for science, of hope about the future, and the future-oriented vision.

Carl took on the military-industrial complex. He campaigned around the world for an end to the production of weapons of mass destruction. To him it was a perversion of science.

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.

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

My knowledge of science came from being with Carl, not from formal academic training. Carl gave me a thrilling tutorial in science and math that lasted the 20 years we were together.

The greatest thing that science teaches you is the law of unintended consequences.

Science has the cold facts, but lacks religion's social organization and ability to inspire that moves people to act.

The only gratification that science denies to us is deception.

Carl took on the military-industrial complex. He campaigned around the world for an end to the production of weapons of mass destruction. To him it was a perversion of science.

My knowledge of science came from being with Carl, not from formal academic training. Carl gave me a thrilling tutorial in science and math that lasted the 20 years we were together.

I've been thinking about the distorted view of science that prevails in our culture. I've been wondering about this, because our civilization is completely dependent on science and high technology, yet most of us are alienated from science.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

The aspirations of democracy are based on the notion of an informed citizenry, capable of making wise decisions. The choices we are asked to make become increasingly complex. They require the longer-term thinking and greater tolerance for ambiguity that science fosters. The new economy is predicated on a continuous pipeline of scientific and technological innovation. It can not exist without workers and consumers who are mathematically and scientifically literate.

No single step in the persuit of enlightenment should ever be considered sacred; only the search was.

We batter this planet as if we had someplace else to go.

Our stars are not where we last admired them. Our homes crumble and we don't know which place to long for.

I'm just at the age when time speeds up in an odd way. Do you know what I mean? The winters come closer together and you learn to accept that you're not special anymore.

As I looked out at the glittering waters of the Pacific I was seeing for Carl. He knew that it's not for any one generation to see the completed picture. That's the point. The picture is never completed. There is always so much more that remains to be discovered.

Science has carried us to the gateway to the universe. And yet our conception of our surroundings remains the disproportionate view of the still-small child. We are spiritually and culturally paralyzed, unable to face the vastness, to embrace our lack of centrality and find out actual place in the fabric of nature.