Quotations from "The Demon-Haunted World " by Carl Sagan

It is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness.
ADAGE


All our science, measured against reality,
is primitive and childlike - and yet it is
the most precious thing we have.
ALBERT EINSTEIN (1879-1955)


We also know how cruel the truth often is,
and we wonder whether delusion is not more consoling.
HENRI POINCARE (1854-1912)


May God keep us from single vision and Newton's sleep.
WILLIAM BLAKE (1802)


As children tremble and fear everything
in the blind darkness, so we in the light
sometimes fear what it is no more to be
feared than the things children in the dark
hold in terror...
De Rerum Natura (ca. 60 BC)
LUCRETIUS


Fear of things invisible is the natural
seed of that which every one in himself
calleth religion
Leviathan (1651)
THOMAS HOBBES


It is a capital mistake to theorize before
one has data. Insensibly one begins to
twist facts to suit theories, instead of
theories to suit facts.
SHERLOCK HOLMES
A Scandal in Bohemia (1891)
Arthur Conan Doyle


True memories seemed like phantoms,
while false memories were so convincing
that they replaced reality.
Strange Pilgrims (1992)
GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ


Magic, it must be remembered, is an art
which demands collaboration between
the artist and his public.
The Myth of the Magus (1948)
E.M. BUTLER


... how alien, alas, are the streets
of the city of grief.
"The Tenth Elegy" (1923)
RAINER MARIA RILKE


Two men came to a hole in the sky.
One asked the other to lift him up...
But so beautiful was it in heaven that
the man who looked in over the edge
forgot everything, forgot his companion
whom he had promised to help up
and simply ran off into all the
splendor of heaven.
(from an Igluik Inuit prose poem)
KNUD RASMUSSEN


Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than
does knowledge: it is those who know little, and not those
who know much, who so positively assert that
this or that problem will never be solved by science.
CHARLES DARWIN (1871)


Nothing is too wonderful to be true.
MICHAEL FARADAY


Insight, untested and unsupported, is an
insufficient guarantee of truth.
BERTRAND RUSSELL (1929)


So we keep asking, over and over,
Until a handful of earth
Stop our mouths --
But is that an answer?
HEINRICH HEINE (1854)


We must not believe the many, who say that
only free people ought to be educated, but we
should rather believe the philosophers who say
that only the educated are free.
EPICTETUS


Why should we subsidize intellectual curiosity?
RONALD REAGAN (1980)


There is nothing which can better deserve
our patronage than the promotion of science
and literature. Knowledge is in every country
the surest basis of public happiness.
GEORGE WASHINGTON (1790)


Ubi dubium ibi libertas.
Where there is doubt, there is freedom.
LATIN PROVERB


It is not the function of our government to keep
the citizen from falling into error, it is the function
of the citizen to keep the government from falling
into error.
ROBERT JACKSON (1950)