LunaCSunshine > LunaCSunshine's Quotes

“It takes just as much energy to be an asshole as it does to be kind.”
― LeVar Burton

“The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“You need to create space for your creative process to thrive rather than expect it to operate in the cracks of your frenetic schedule.”
― Todd Henry, The Accidental Creative: How to Be Brilliant at a Moment's Notice

“But what is equally important, and sobering, is how often we fool ourselves. And we fool ourselves not only individually but en masse. The tendency of a group of human beings to quickly come to believe something that its individual members will later see as obviously false is truly amazing. Some of the worst tragedies of the last century happened because well-meaning people fell for easy solutions proposed by bad leaders.”
― Lee Smolin, The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science and What Comes Next

“We are just an advanced breed of monkeys on a minor planet of a very average star. But we can understand the Universe. That makes us something very special.”
― Stephen Hawking

“I know that I am mortal by nature, and ephemeral; but when I trace at my pleasure the windings to and fro of the heavenly bodies I no longer touch the earth with my feet: I stand in the presence of Zeus himself and take my fill of ambrosia”
― Ptolemy, Ptolemy's Almagest

“The good thing about science is that it's true whether or not you believe in it.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson

“People cited violation of the First Amendment when a New Jersey schoolteacher asserted that evolution and the Big Bang are not scientific and that Noah's ark carried dinosaurs. This case is not about the need to separate church and state; it's about the need to separate ignorant, scientifically illiterate people from the ranks of teachers.”
― Neil deGrasse Tyson

“Intelligence is the ability to adapt to change. ”
― Stephen Hawking

“The role played by time at the beginning of the universe is, I believe, the final key to removing the need for a Grand Designer, and revealing how the universe created itself. … Time itself must come to a stop. You can’t get to a time before the big bang, because there was no time before the big bang. We have finally found something that does not have a cause because there was no time for a cause to exist in. For me this means there is no possibility of a creator because there is no time for a creator to have existed. Since time itself began at the moment of the Big Bang, it was an event that could not have been caused or created by anyone or anything. … So when people ask me if a god created the universe, I tell them the question itself makes no sense. Time didn’t exist before the Big Bang, so there is no time for God to make the universe in. It’s like asking for directions to the edge of the Earth. The Earth is a sphere. It does not have an edge, so looking for it is a futile exercise.”
― Stephen W. Hawking

“People generally see what they look for, and hear what they listen for.”
― Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird

“People forget that stereotypes aren’t bad because they are always untrue. Stereotypes are bad because they are not always true. If we allow ourselves to judge another based on a stereotype, we have allowed a gross generalization to replace our own thinking.”
― George Takei, Oh Myyy! (There Goes the Internet): Life, the Internet and Everything

“Science is not about what’s true. It’s about what people with originally diverse viewpoints can be forced to believe by way of public evidence.”
― Lee Smolin

“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

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.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. 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 with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”
― Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

“Science doesn't make it impossible to believe in God, it just makes it possible not to believe in God”
― Steven Weinberg

“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.”
― Voltaire

“Dream or nightmare, we have to live our experience as it is, and we have to live it awake. We live in a world which is penetrated through and through by science and which is both whole and real. We cannot turn it into a game simple by taking sides.”
― Jacob Bronowski

“I would rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned.”
― Richard Feynman

“Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are
presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new
evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is
extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it
is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize,
ignore and even deny anything that doesn't fit in with the core belief.”
― Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

“There are absolutely no high-maintenance items in my house of any kind. Plants, pets or husbands.”
― Carolyn Porco

“Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. I have read and heard many attempts at a systematic account of it, from materialism and theosophy to the Christian system or that of Kant, and I have always felt that they were much too simple. I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth that are dreamed of, or can be dreamed of, in any philosophy. That is the reason why I have no philosophy myself, and must be my excuse for dreaming.”
― J. B. S. Haldane, Possible Worlds

“Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.”
― Flannery O'Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose

“Beauty is only skin deep, but ugly goes clean to the bone.”
― Dorothy Parker

“The worst part of success is trying to find someone who is happy for you.”
― Bette Midler

“Often those that criticise others reveal what he himself lacks.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“Hope is an emotional state in the absence of information.”
― John Iadarola

“It is a well known fact that reality has liberal bias.”
― Stephen Colbert

“A bore is someone who deprives you of solitude without providing you with company.”
― Oscar Wilde

“You can only be jealous of someone who has something you think you ought to have yourself.”
― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

“Always be a first rate version of yourself and not a second rate version of someone else.”
― Judy Garland