Carl Sagan Quotes
You mean am I for it or against it? You think this is a key question I'm going to be asked on Vega, and you want to make sure I give the right answer? Okay. Overpopulation is why I'm in favor of homosexuality and a celibate clergy. A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.
Sagan, Carl. Contact. Simon & Schuster, 1985, p. 165.
In Burundi, family land is divided among the male children of a family. The average Burundian woman has 6.3 children, nearly triple the international fertility rate. With this fertility rate, the plots of land for each person inevitably get smaller and smaller over time. At 10,745 square miles, Burundi is slightly smaller than the U.S. state of Maryland, but it holds nearly twice as many people: about 10 million. The small plots of land are inefficient to farm and provide subsistence. So the nation was in a crises as there was little industrialization and land was essential for existence for most Burundians. See {35808} and {35809}.
At the time, condoms and other forms of contraceptives were illegal to buy, sell, possess or own. As late as 1963 a Connecticut druggist was sentenced to jail for filling a doctor’s prescription for condoms and selling them to a married couple even thought the woman might die if she again became pregnant. The Supreme Court (Griswald v. Connecticut) established that a woman had a right to control her own reproductive cycle and the government had no business interfering with a privacy right possessed by a couple. Roe v. Wade established the right to an abortion. The same moral compunctions used with abortion were, and still are used by some to oppose any form of artificial birth control. They argued: preventing a life was as serious a moral failure as taking one. Many Catholics, many evangelical and fundamentalist protestants, and some orthodox Muslims are today morally opposed to birth control and believe that the government should ban birth control as it once was in the United States.
Carl Edward Sagan was an American astronomer, planetary scientist, cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist, author, and science communicator. His best known scientific contribution is research on extraterrestrial life, including experimental demonstration of the production of amino acids from basic chemicals by radiation. Sagan assembled the first physical messages sent into space: the Pioneer plaque and the Voyager Golden Record, universal messages intended to be understood by any extraterrestrial intelligence that might find them.
