"For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring."
— Carl Sagan

"There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point… The truly adult view, by contrast, is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it."
— Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion)

"We are all atheists about most of the gods that societies have ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further."
— Richard Dawkins

"One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time."
— Carl Sagan

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
— Carl Sagan

"The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity -- in all this vastness -- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It's been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.""
— Carl Sagan

"But I could be wrong."
— Carl Sagan

"I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don't know the answer"
— Douglas Adams

"Let's think the unthinkable, let's do the undoable, let's prepare to grapple with the ineffable itself, and see if we may not eff it after all."
— Douglas Adams

"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?"
— Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

"He felt that his whole life was some kind of dream and he sometimes wondered whose it was and whether they were enjoying it. "
— Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy 1)

"I'd take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day."
— Douglas Adams

"It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there must be a finite number of inhabited worlds. Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any people you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination."
— Douglas Adams (The Restaurant at the End of the Universe)

"'Just believe everything I tell you, and it will all be very, very simple.'

'Ah, well, I'm not sure I believe that.'"
— Douglas Adams (Life, the Universe and Everything)

"If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now."
— Douglas Adams (The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy)

"First we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII — and we thought it was a typewriter. Then we discovered graphics, and we thought it was a television. With the World Wide Web, we've realized it's a brochure."
— Douglas Adams

"There are few things more dangerous than inbred religious certainty."
— Bart D. Ehrman

"The way I see it, being dead is not terribly far off from being on a cruise ship. Most of your time is spent lying on your back. The brain has shut down. The flesh begins to soften. Nothing much new happens, and nothing is expected of you. "
— Mary Roach (Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers)

"Death. It doesn't have to be boring."
— Mary Roach (Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers)