Nick Sagan Quotes

I believe that part of what propels science is the thirst for wonder. It's a very powerful emotion. All children feel it. In a first grade classroom everybody feels it; in a twelfth grade classroom almost nobody feels it, or at least acknowledges it. Something happens between first and twelfth grade, and it's not just puberty. Not only do the schools and the media not teach much skepticism, there is also little encouragement of this stirring sense of wonder. Science and pseudoscience both arouse that feeling. Poor popularizations of science establish an ecological niche for pseudoscience.

As an undergraduate, I did maths and physics. That doesn't make me a scientist. So I try to read and understand and talk to scientists.

When I was in high school, I fell under the spell of that crazy idea that if you're interested in the arts, you can't be interested in science.

And my interest in history was, and remains, very strong: what I wanted was to understand certain things better by understanding them psychoanalytically.

Without philosophy, history is always for me dead and dumb.

The historian must have some conception of how men who are not historians behave. Otherwise he will move in a world of the dead. He can only gain that conception through personal experience, and he can only use his personal experiences when he is a genius.

Honestly, I didn't have the patience for biology or history in an academic sense, but I always liked the kind of big questions.

Scientists need to be prepared to engage, and the best people to engage with are students, ideally from primary school because there's no question that their capacity to work out complex things is extremely good.

Our understanding of the thought of the past is liable to be the more adequate, the less the historian is convinced of the superiority of his own point of view, or the more he is prepared to admit the possibility that he may have to learn something, not merely about the thinkers of the past, but from them.

Other kids would be playing with their Action Man, and I was questioning life and society.

I was genuinely lucky to have the professors I did, many of whom took a very humanist approach in teaching history that went beyond memorizing dates and battles and all of that - basically, looking at the life of individuals throughout history, aided by fascinating primary sources.

I studied psychology, history, and religion. I was a heady girl, but frankly, I'm glad I studied those subjects because a lot of that has really helped me as an actress.

A scientist is no more a collector and classifier of facts than a historian is a man who complies and classifies a chronology of the dates of great battles and major discoveries.

He that never thinks can never be wise.

Doubt is clearly a value in science. It is important to doubt and that the doubt is not a fearful thing, but a thing of great value.

It is impossible for someone to dispel his fears about the most important matters if he doesn't know the nature of the universe but still gives some credence to myths. So without the study of nature there is no enjoyment of pure pleasure.

What is desperately needed... is the skepticism and the sense of history that a liberal arts education provides.

The scientist, by the very nature of his commitment, creates more and more questions, never fewer. Indeed the measure of our intellectual maturity, one philosopher suggests, is our capacity to feel less and less satisfied with our answers to better problems.

I have a great affection for people who are intellectually engaged with the world, and who don't treat everything superficially. And I think, when people talk about nerdiness, what they're really talking about is smart people who who are trying to think hard about the world. And I don't think that's an insult, I think that's a great thing.

Communication of science as subject-matter has so far outrun in education the construction of a scientific habit of mind that to some extent the natural common sense of mankind has been interfered with to its detriment.

... we may remember what the Romansthought a cultivated person ought to be: one who knows how to choose his company among men, among things, among thoughts, in the present as well as in the past.

The history of science knows scores of instances where an investigator was in the possession of all the important facts for a new theory but simply failed to ask the right questions.

I re-read The History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter. It's a book every one should read, particularly Americans, as the USA is her primary focus. Her book demonstrates that white is not universal, that white is not neutral, that it has a history, which she eloquently delineates. It's not often you finish a book understanding how the world operates better than before you read it.

I think that if Essien Udom had something he didn't take it back far enough in history to get at the proper understanding of it.

Those of us who write and study history are accustomed to its approximations and ambiguities. This is why we do not take literally the tenth-hand reports of frightened and illiterate peasants who claim to have seen miracles or to have had encounters with messiahs and prophets and redeemers who were, like them, mere humans. And this is also why we will never submit to dictation from those who display a fanatical belief in certainty and revelation.