28 quotes
In the vastness of the Cosmos there must be other civilizations far older and more advanced than ours.
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1990)
Every thinking person fears nuclear war and every technological nation plans for it. Everyone knows it's madness, and every country has an excuse.
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1990)
We wish to pursue the truth no matter where it leads — but to find the truth, we need imagination and skepticism both.
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1990)
The sky calls to us. If we do not destroy ourselves, we will one day venture to the stars.
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1990)
Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you.
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1990)
Those worlds in space are as countless as all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the earth.
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1990)
The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together.
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1990)
All that brave Athenian talk about democracy applied only to a privileged few.
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1990)
There can be an infinite number of polygons, but only five regular solids.
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1990)
We are star stuff, which has taken its destiny into its own hands.
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1990)
What distinguishes our species is thought.
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1990)
History is full of people who out of fear or ignorance or the lust for power have destroyed treasures of immeasurable value which truly belong to all of us. We must not let it happen again.
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1990)
Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1990)
The nature of life on earth and the quest for life elsewhere are the two sides of the same question: the search for who we are.
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1990)
Exactly the same technology can be used for good and for evil. It is as if there were a God who said to us, “I set before you two ways: You can use your technology to destroy yourselves or to carry you to the planets and the stars. It's up to you.”
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1990)
Perhaps we have, after all, decided to choose life. But we still have light years to go to ensure that choice.
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1990)
The desire to be connected with the cosmos reflects a profound reality for we are connected. Not in the trivial ways that the pseudo-science of astrology promises but in the deepest ways.
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1990)
We on Earth have just awakened to the great oceans of space and time from which we have emerged.
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1990)
The mercantile tradition that had led to Ionian science also led to a slave economy. You could get richer if you owned a lot of slaves.
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1990)
As a boy Kepler had been captured by a vision of cosmic splendour, a harmony of the worlds which he sought so tirelessly all his life.
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1990)