Cosmos Quotes
Himself - Host: What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.
Movie: Cosmos
Carl Sagan: A galaxy is composed of gas and dust and stars - billions upon billions of stars.
TV Show: Cosmos
Carl Sagan: Alexandria was the greatest city the Western world had ever seen. People of all nations came here to live, to trade, to learn. On any given day, its harbors were thronged with merchants, scholars, and tourists. This was a city where Greeks, Egyptians, Arabs, Syrians, Hebrews, Persians, Nubians, Phoenicians, Italians, Gauls, and Iberians exchanged merchandise and ideas. It is probably here that the word 'cosmopolitan' realized its true meaning - citizen, not just of a nation, but of the Cosmos. To be a citizen of the Cosmos...
TV Show: Cosmos
Carl Sagan: Human history can be viewed as a slowly dawning awareness that we are members of a larger group. Initially our loyalties were to ourselves and our immediate family, next, to bands of wandering hunter-gatherers, then to tribes, small settlements, city-states, nations. We have broadened the circle of those we love. We have now organized what are modestly described as super-powers, which include groups of people from divergent ethnic and cultural backgrounds working in some sense together - surely a humanizing and character building experience. If we are to survive, our loyalties must be broadened further, to include the whole human community, the entire planet Earth. Many of those who run the nations will find this idea unpleasant. They will fear the loss of power. We will hear much about treason and disloyalty. Rich nation-states will have to share their wealth with poor ones. But the choice, as H. G. Wells once said in a different context, is clearly the universe or nothing.
TV Show: Cosmos
Carl Sagan: Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth. Our obligation to survive is owed not just to ourselves but also to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring.
TV Show: Cosmos
Carl Sagan: The cosmos is interesting rather than perfect, and everything is not part of some greater plan, nor is all necessarily under control.
TV Show: Cosmos
Carl Sagan: There are some hundred billion galaxies, each with, on the average, a hundred billion stars, 1011 x 1011 = 1022, ten billion trillion. In the face of such overpowering numbers, what is the likelihood that only one ordinary star, the Sun, is accompanied by an inhabited planet? Why should we, tucked away in some forgotten corner of the Cosmos, be so fortunate? To me, it seems far more likely that the universe is brimming over with life. But we humans do not yet know. We are just beginning our explorations. From eight billion light-years away we are hard pressed to find even the cluster in which our Milky Way Galaxy is embedded, much less the Sun or the Earth. The only planet we are sure is inhabited is a tiny speck of rock and metal, shining feebly by reflected sunlight, and at this distance utterly lost.
TV Show: Cosmos
Carl Sagan: Up there in the immensity of the Cosmos, an inescapable perception awaits us. National boundaries are not evident when we view the Earth from space. Fanatical ethnic, religious or national chauvinisms are a little difficult to maintain when we see our planet as a fragile blue crescent fading to become an inconspicuous point of light against the bastion and citadel of the stars.
TV Show: Cosmos
Witold: I'm afraid of the dark. All the dark cavities. This toad is all about its slippery moisture.
Fuchs: A crooked mouth and a dark cavity encroaked with the sparrow in a sphere of toady-sparrowy-Catherettery.
Witold: I'm shocked!
Fuchs: A few more days with you and I'll win the Nobel Prize in thrillerettery.
Fuchs: A crooked mouth and a dark cavity encroaked with the sparrow in a sphere of toady-sparrowy-Catherettery.
Witold: I'm shocked!
Fuchs: A few more days with you and I'll win the Nobel Prize in thrillerettery.
Movie: Cosmos
Fuchs: You're getting deep, like Sartre or Stendahl...
Witold: Anything relating to her can only be loving.
Fuchs: That happens when a writer hangs a cat?
Witold: And even if she can't guess who did it, she'll still be ashamed of the cat, which is her cat... our cat. That wasn't the real murder! How could this beauty, so perfect and out of reach, unite with me through lying?
Witold: Anything relating to her can only be loving.
Fuchs: That happens when a writer hangs a cat?
Witold: And even if she can't guess who did it, she'll still be ashamed of the cat, which is her cat... our cat. That wasn't the real murder! How could this beauty, so perfect and out of reach, unite with me through lying?
Movie: Cosmos
LÚon: The phenomenality of grass blades, of smallest flowers; a sort of streaming in purest poetry.
Movie: Cosmos