Billions & Billions¶
Metadata¶
- Author: Carl Sagan
- ASIN: B004W0HZU2
- ISBN: 0345379187
- Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B004W0HZU2
- Kindle link
Highlights¶
Being afraid of quantification is tantamount to disenfranchising yourself, giving up on one of the most potent prospects for understanding and changing the world. — location: 410 ^ref-9775
Eventually, we invented phonetic writing so we could put our sounds down on paper and, by glancing at a page, hear someone speaking in our head—an invention that became so widespread in the last few thousand years that we hardly ever stop to consider how astonishing it is. — location: 605 ^ref-31280
This wave-particle dualism is another reminder of a central humbling fact: Nature does not always conform to our predispositions and preferences, to what we deem comfortable and easy to understand. — location: 657 ^ref-27047
It seems to be only a coincidence that the transparency of matter and the luminosity of stars both prefer the same narrow range of frequencies. — location: 710 ^ref-39436
The difference between black and white is not a matter of color, but of how much light they reflect. The terms are relative, not absolute. — location: 718 ^ref-47613
Black and white are fundamentally the same thing; the difference is only in the relative amounts of light reflected, not in their color. — location: 721 ^ref-57831
Over most of the spectrum, all humans are black.* — location: 734 ^ref-8599
Our purportedly advanced civilization may be changing the delicate ecological balance that has tortuously evolved over the 4-billion-year period of life on Earth. — location: 1071 ^ref-27296
Birds—whose intelligence we tend to malign—know not to foul the nest. — location: 1090 ^ref-38698
we’ve been here for only about a million years, we, the first species that has devised means for its self-destruction. We are rare and precious because we are alive, because we can think as well as we can. We are privileged to influence and perhaps control our future. I believe we have an obligation to fight for life on Earth—not just for ourselves, but for all those, humans and others, who came before us, and to whom we are beholden, and for all those who, if we are wise enough, will come after. — location: 1198 ^ref-60740
The trick, if you can pull it off, is to pick the right anxieties. Somewhere between cheerful dolts and nervous worrywarts there’s a state of mind we ought to embrace. — location: 1207 ^ref-29138
“Everything I worried about never happened. All the bad things came out of nowhere,” one acquaintance told my wife, Annie, and me. — location: 1217 ^ref-20293
British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who, trained in chemistry, understood the issue. — location: 1489 ^ref-17899
The CFC ban provides what in mathematics is known as an existence theorem—a demonstration that something that might, for all you know, be impossible can actually be accomplished. — location: 1527 ^ref-42683
In the real and palpable world, as revealed by what we do and not what we say, many humans seemingly aspire to be lords of Creation—with an occasional token bow, as required by social convention, to whatever gods may lately be fashionable. — location: 2202 ^ref-27090
Islam, by contrast, is disinclined to declare Nature an enemy. — location: 2208 ^ref-55980
Grand Mufti of Syria stressing, to the surprise and delight of many, the importance in Islam of “birth control for the global welfare, without exploiting it at the expense of one nationality over another.” — location: 2253 ^ref-2125
Despite many claims to the contrary, life does not begin at conception: It is an unbroken chain that stretches back nearly to the origin of the Earth, 4.6 billion years ago. — location: 2684 ^ref-39003
Neither St. Augustine nor St. Thomas Aquinas considered early-term abortion to be homicide (the latter on the grounds that the embryo doesn’t look human). This view was embraced by the Church in the Council of Vienne in 1312, and has never been repudiated. — location: 2728 ^ref-23352
In part through this misinterpretation of scientific data, in 1869 abortion at any time for any reason became grounds for excommunication. It is surprising to most Catholics and others to discover that the date was not much earlier. — location: 2734 ^ref-13236
“The problem in defense spending is to figure out how far you should go without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without.” — location: 3191 ^ref-42300
We know that “going grand” can be the most temporary and illusory state. So it was with us. — location: 3486 ^ref-20590
When too much cynicism threatens to engulf us, it is buoying to remember how pervasive goodness is. — location: 3574 ^ref-51185