“The universe is a pretty big place. If it's just us, seems like an awful waste of space.”
― Contact
― Contact
“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."
[Cosmos, Part 11: The Persistence of Memory (1980)]”
― Cosmos
[Cosmos, Part 11: The Persistence of Memory (1980)]”
― Cosmos
“Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors.”
― Cosmos
― Cosmos
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
― The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
― The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
“Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.”
― Cosmos
― Cosmos
Alastair’s 2023 Year in Books
Take a look at Alastair’s Year in Books. The good, the bad, the long, the short—it’s all here.
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