Astraea > Astraea's Quotes

“I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us - then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls.

The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“Just remember - when you think all is lost, the future remains.”
― Robert H. Goddard

“I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.”
― Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

“We were born to move—not merely to be transported,”
― Charles Montgomery, Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design

“You are important—not because you’re rich, but because you are human.”
― Charles Montgomery, Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design

“It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not.”
― Andre Gide, Autumn Leaves

“It is better to remain silent at the risk of being thought a fool, than to talk and remove all doubt of it.”
― Maurice Switzer, Mrs. Goose, Her Book

“Love all, trust a few,
Do wrong to none: be able for thine enemy
Rather in power than use; and keep thy friend
Under thy own life's key: be check'd for silence,
But never tax'd for speech.”
― William Shakespeare, All's Well That Ends Well

“Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.

Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl. For a long time Cool Girl offended me. I used to see men – friends, coworkers, strangers – giddy over these awful pretender women, and I’d want to sit these men down and calmly say: You are not dating a woman, you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who’d like to believe that this kind of woman exists and might kiss them. I’d want to grab the poor guy by his lapels or messenger bag and say: The bitch doesn’t really love chili dogs that much – no one loves chili dogs that much! And the Cool Girls are even more pathetic: They’re not even pretending to be the woman they want to be, they’re pretending to be the woman a man wants them to be. Oh, and if you’re not a Cool Girl, I beg you not to believe that your man doesn’t want the Cool Girl. It may be a slightly different version – maybe he’s a vegetarian, so Cool Girl loves seitan and is great with dogs; or maybe he’s a hipster artist, so Cool Girl is a tattooed, bespectacled nerd who loves comics. There are variations to the window dressing, but believe me, he wants Cool Girl, who is basically the girl who likes every fucking thing he likes and doesn’t ever complain. (How do you know you’re not Cool Girl? Because he says things like: “I like strong women.” If he says that to you, he will at some point fuck someone else. Because “I like strong women” is code for “I hate strong women.”)”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“Tampon commercial, detergent commercial, maxi pad commercial, windex commercial - you'd think all women do is clean and bleed.”
― Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl

“Here’s an image that sticks: imagine a loaded Boeing 747 crashing every three days, killing everyone aboard. That’s how many people die on U.S. highways every year.”
― Charles Montgomery, Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design

“Partly because sprawl has forced Americans to drive farther and farther in the course of every day, per capita road death rates in the United States hover around forty thousand per year. That’s a third more people than are killed by guns. It’s more than ten times the number of people killed in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.”
― Charles Montgomery, Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design

“The conclusion: killer drivers are so common in sprawl that the carnage they create far exceeds the damage done by killers who use other weapons. In fact, someone who walks out her door on the edges of sprawl suburbia is much more likely to die at the hands of a stranger than someone moving through most American central cities or inner suburbs. The only difference is that most of suburbia’s killers didn’t mean it.”
― Charles Montgomery, Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design

“Globally, traffic injuries are the greatest killer of ten- to twenty-four-year-olds.* A rational actor would be terrified of suburban roads. A rational policy maker would wage war, not on other nations, but on traffic deaths.”
― Charles Montgomery, Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design

“Never shame your comrades by letting their death get you killed”
― Rachel Bach, Fortune's Pawn

“They weren’t even taking me seriously enough to bother removing my guns, which I took as a personal insult.”
― Rachel Bach, Honor's Knight

“But fair warning, being drunk doesn’t slow down my head shots.”
― Rachel Bach, Fortune's Pawn

“You couldn’t trust people who treated life cheaply, she’d said, because they were the ones who’d sell you out for nothing.”
― Rachel Bach, Honor's Knight

“Pride, lust, and whiskey are a potent combination.”
― Rachel Bach, Fortune's Pawn

“It is difficult to say what is impossible, for the dream of yesterday is the hope of today and the reality of tomorrow.”
― Robert H. Goddard

“The reason many people fail is not for lack of vision but for lack of resolve and resolve is born out of counting the cost.”
― Robert H. Goddard

“Non est ad astra mollis e terris via" - "There is no easy way from the earth to the stars”
― Seneca

“It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn't feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.”
― Neil Armstrong

“In all our searching, the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable is each other.”
― Carl Sagan

“Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“It pays to keep an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out.”
― Carl Sagan

“Your religion assumes that people are children and need a boogeyman so they'll behave. You want people to believe in God so they'll obey the law. That's the only means that occurs to you: a strict secular police force, and the threat of punishment by an all-seeing God for whatever the police overlook. You sell human beings short.”
― Carl Sagan, Contact

“We are star stuff which has taken its destiny into its own hands.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos