Quotes from Ann Druyan

A world that tiny cannot possibly be the center of a cosmos of all that is, let alone the sole focus of its creator. The pale blue dot is a silent rebuke to the fundamentalist, the nationalist, the militarist, the polluter—to anyone who does not put above all other things the protection of our little planet and the life that it sustains in the vast cold darkness.

This is one of the things I love about science. When the evidence for a slightly older universe was discovered, there were no scientists who sought to suppress it. As soon as the new data were verified, this revision in our understanding was embraced by the whole scientific community. That permanently revolutionary attitude, that openness to change, at the heart of science is what makes it so effective.

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.

What I love about science is that it demands of us a tolerance for ambiguity. It requires us to live with humility regarding our ignorance, withholding judgment until the evidence comes in. That needn't prevent us from using the little we do know to search for and decrypt new languages of reality.

To know what is real, one must subject one's ideas to the rigorous, error-correcting mechanism of science, seeking verification that can be expressed mathematically.

Ramona wasn't at home anywhere. She felt like a spy in life and the ending of every great book and each orgasm, and the sight of every homeless shopping bag lady infected her with a titanic yearning for the world to make an unscheduled stop.

the future depends on seeing reality clearly. But for some reason, we are easily manipulated and deceived.

However, he never understood why anyone would want to separate science, which is just a way of searching for what is true, from what we hold sacred, which are those truths that inspire love and awe.

What good is it to know of a danger if you don't do anything about it? Maybe it's better not to know. Knowing can be a curse.

All of science to me, everything that we have learned, is important to the extent that it brings us to our senses.

We smoked the way other American families would have wine with dinner. For us, it was our sacrament. It was something that made a great life sweeter in every possible way.

Lethal heat waves, droughts, and runaway wildfires of unprecedented magnitude, check. The scientists warned us. The corporations with vested interests in the fossil fuel industry and the governments they supported acted just like the tobacco companies. They pretended the science was unsettled and stalled for precious years.

What distant star had to explode to seed our world with inspiration?

This is the essence of emergence: tiny units of matter operating collectively to become something much more than themselves, to enable the cosmos to know itself.

People think that if you are a scientist you have to give up that joy of discovery, that passion, that sense of the great romance of life. I say thats completely opposite of the truth.

Is DNA destiny?

Over the next 400 million years, the cyanobacteria—taking in carbon dioxide and giving back oxygen—turned the sky from

a person bound to the facts can never hope to best the rabble-rouser in the arena.

Oh mighty King, you, who are so powerful you can take hundreds of thousands of lives at your whim. Show me how powerful you really are-give back just one life you've taken. Asoka (pg 82).

It matters what's true. - Ann Druyan

If the series of pilgrimages toward understanding our actual circumstances in the universe, the origin of life, and the laws of nature are not spiritual quests, then I don't know what could be. I

If God is the author of natural law, should not God be best apprehended in those laws?

I think of us humans as a family of amnesia victims who kept making up stories about our past until we found a means to reconstruct it—the sciences.

Sombras de antepasados olvidados, trad. de Miguel Muntaner Pascual y María del Mar Moya Tasis, Barcelona, Planeta, 1993.]