50 quotes found
“Meanwhile the Cosmos is rich beyond measure: the total number of stars in the universe is greater than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the planet Earth.”
“For thousands of years humans were oppressed - as some of us still are - by the notion that the universe is a marionette whose strings are pulled by a god or gods, unseen and inscrutable.”
“Perhaps if one less dragonfly had drowned in the Carboniferous swamps, the intelligent organisms on our planet today would have feathers and teach their young in rookeries. The pattern of evolution...”
“The secrets of evolution, are time and death. There's an unbroken thread that stretches from those first cells to us.”
“Civilization is a product of the cerebral cortex.”
“We are the local embodiment of a Cosmos grown to self-awareness. We have begun to contemplate our origins: starstuff pondering the stars; organized assemblages of ten billion billion billion atoms ...”
“The old exhortations to nationalist fervor and jingoist pride have begun to lose their appeal. Perhaps because of rising standards of living, children are being treated better worldwide. In only a ...”
“The total amount of energy from outside the solar system ever received by all the radio telescopes on the planet Earth is less than the energy of a single snowflake striking the ground.”
“But if they called everything divine which they do not understand, why, there would be no end of divine beings.”
“We sometimes hear of things that can travel faster than light. Something called 'the speed of thought' is occasionally proffered. This is an exceptionally silly notion especially since the speed of...”