Famous Quotes & Sayings

Carl Sagan

This oak tree and me, we're made of the same stuff.

Carl Sagan

Accommodation to change, the thoughtful pursuit of alternative futures are keys to the survival of civilization and perhaps of the human species.

Carl Sagan

The words "question" and "quest" are cognates. Only through inquiry can we discover truth.

Carl Sagan

Books tap the wisdom of our species -- the greatest minds, the best teachers -- from all over the world and from all our history. And they're patient.

Carl Sagan

Science is a way of thinking that helps you not to fool yourself.

Carl Sagan

We are the first species to have taken our evolution into our own hands.

Carl Sagan

Science is more than a body of knowledge. It's a way of thinking: a way of skeptically interrogating the universe.

Carl Sagan

The vast distances that separate the stars are providential. Beings and worlds are quarantined from one another. The quarantine is lifted only for those with sufficient self-knowledge and judgment to have safely traveled from star to star.

Carl Sagan

You mustn't think of the Universe as a wilderness. It hasn't been that for billions of years," he said. "Think of it more as... ..cultivated.

Carl Sagan

The near side of a galaxy is tens of thousands of light-years closer to us than the far side; thus we see the front as it was tens of thousands of years before the back. But typical events in galactic dynamics occupy tens of millions of years, so the error in thinking of an image of a galaxy as frozen in one moment of time is small.

Carl Sagan

We are at a crossroads in human history. Never before has there been a moment so simultaneously perilous and promising. We are the first species to have taken evolution into our own hands.

Carl Sagan

First rule in government spending: Why build one, when you can have two at twice the price?

Bill Bryson

I turned to my own bunk and examined it with a kind of appalled fascination. If the mattress stains were anything to go by, a previous user had not so much suffered from incontinence as rejoiced in it. He had evidently included the pillow in his celebrations.

Bill Bryson

Physicists are atoms' way of thinking about atoms.

Bill Bryson

I love the feeling of being anonymous in a city I've never been before.

Bill Bryson

A third...candidate for Shakespearean authorship was Christopher Marlowe. He was the right age (just two months older than Shakespeare), had the requisite talent, and would certainly have had ample leisure after 1593, assuming he wasn't too dead to work.

Bill Bryson

Traveling makes you realize what an immeasurably nice place much of America could be if only people possessed the same instinct for preservation as they do in Europe.

Bill Bryson

Taking a scenic route in Southeast Iowa is like talking about a good Barry Manilow album. You have to make certain allowances.

Bill Bryson

Most scientists are without exception adorably quirky, and one of the ways of making it more accessible was to try to get readers interested in the person.

Bill Bryson

What is it about maps? I could look at them all day, earnestly studying the names of towns and villages I have never heard of and will never visit...

Bill Bryson

Christmas tree stands are the work of the devil and they want you dead.

Bill Bryson

There is always a little more toothpaste in the tube. Think about it.

Bill Bryson

I could spend my life arriving each evening in a new city.

Bill Bryson

Perhaps it's my natural pessimism, but it seems that an awfully large part of travel these days is to see things while you still can.

Beth Simone Noveck

In the 21st century, you have to use technology as one of the tools in the toolkit to bring about social change.

Beth Simone Noveck

Network technology has irrevocably changed campaigning and elections. It has the potential to transform governance and the workings of our democracy for the better.

Bethany Mota

I’m not too into the trends - I like to look at trends as suggestions, not as rules.

Bethany Mota

I think everyone is most confident when they are just being themselves and not trying to impress others.

Bethany McLean

I think synergies are a lot like UFOs: Lots of people claim to have seen them, but few can actually prove they exist.

Betsey Johnson

I'm not the type of person who dwells too much on bad things.

Bethenny Frankel

I always know that I am where I am supposed to be. I don't feel torn and I think that is really important.

Bethenny Frankel

I don't think it's good to constantly talk about your own weight and the fact that you look fat in jeans.

Bethenny Frankel

Taste everything, eat nothing.