Ann Druyan Quotes

There's no idea that can't be explained to a thoughtful 14-year-old. If the thoughtful 14-year-old doesn't get it, it is your fault, not the 14-year-old's.

What we have to do is put this in a coherent form for them at the end of the day, and on the big events, give them the kind of context that they deserve.

And I like to convey my feelings, my emotions, my experience, the information I have to public use, public opinion.

We're exposed to ideas everywhere. The world is full of ideas. I think that television is a pretty powerful medium in that regard.

No ideas and the ability to express them - that's a journalist.

What gunpowder did for war the printing press has done for the mind.

The telephone book is full of facts, but it doesn't contain a single idea.

My first published writings were trying to take scientific concepts and make them clear for a general audience.

If we want to enlighten people or give them new thoughts and ideas, we have to be willing to do the work of educating them.

Thus, in a dialogue each person does not attempt to make common certain ideas or items of information that are already known to him. Rather, it can be said that collectively they are making something in common

My normal lectures deal with the psychedelic experience as a generalized and historical phenomenon, but this effort at communication is slightly more personal in that it's an effort to impart [just] one idea that came out of an involvement with psychedelic substances.

As far as I'm concerned, if something is so complicated that you can't explain it in 10 seconds, then it's probably not worth knowing anyway.

And in Improvisation there is one hard and fast rule, and that rule is known as "Yes And." The term YES AND: to say yes, and not just yes, but to add information. In the adding of information you don't negate the other persons idea - but you build on it.

Science is the storytelling of our time.

I am fascinated by language in daily life: the way it can evoke an emotion, a visual image, a complex idea, or a simple truth.

To have no ideas and being able to express them is the essence of journalism.

But libraries are about freedom. Freedom to read, freedom of ideas, freedom of communication. They are about education (which is not a process that finishes the day we leave school or university), about entertainment, about making safe spaces, and about access to information.

anyone can understand anything. You just have to know how to present your information.

Writing, or at least good writing, is an outgrowth of that urge to use language to communicate complex ideas and experiences between people. And that's true whether you're reading Shakespeare or bad vampire fiction-reading is always an act of empathy. It's always an imagining of what it's like to be someone else.

Intellectuals say simple things in difficult ways. Artists say difficult things in simple ways.

If you look at how many thousands and thousands of pages, Web pages, are being added to the Internet every day, it's the fastest growing organism in human history for communications.

I will just say, appropriation is an intellectual idea until it happens to you. It's a philosophy, and it's got its own intellectual framework. Then there's what happens when it's your photograph. Then it's personal, and that's all I'll say.

You need to be able to SHARE IDEAS, INSPIRE and MOTIVATE

It is a good deal easier for most people to state an abstract idea than to describe and thus re-create some object they actually see.

People forget ideas; they don't forget the real presence.