Ann Druyan Quotes

We all feel the chill our present casts on our future. Some part of us knows that we must awaken to action or doom our children to dangers and hardships we ourselves have never had to face. How do we rouse ourselves and keep from sleepwalking into a climate or a nuclear catastrophe that may not be reversed before it has destroyed our civilization and countless other species? How do we learn to value those things we cannot live without-air, water, the sustaining fabric of life on Earth, the future-more than we prize money and short-term convenience? Nothing less than a global spiritual awakening can transform us into who we must become.

Another thing we're doing is that "Cosmos" has a view of the future which I believe has the power to inspire. So much of what we see, and so much of what our kids and grandchildren see, is so dystopic and despairing. It's like … our punishment for all our sins is just around the corner, and humanity doesn't have a future, except the one that's choking and dying. And in "Cosmos" we imagine the future that we can still have.

When we fell in love, it was like discovering a new world. It was one that I had hoped was possible but had never been to before.

a great tree grew up, one with many branches, and six times it was almost felled. But still it grows and we are but one small branch, one that cannot live without its tree. And slowly, we learned to read the book of nature, to learn its laws, to nurture the tree. To find out where and when we are in the great ocean, to become a way for the cosmos to know itself and to return to the stars.

Science has nothing in common with fundamentalism or with superstition, but it has a lot in common with that desire to understand where we came from and who we are.

The vastness of the universe-and love, the thing that makes the vastness bearable-is out of reach to the arrogant.

To turn away from reality and to not listen to the scientists, couldn't be more dangerous. We've begun seeing the consequences of our disregard for the environment, they have started to accrue at a rapid pace. I don't want to yell at people and harangue them, but I would love to create a vision of a hopeful future--one that we can still have, based on the strength and courage of our ancestors and on the power of our technological and scientific reach. If we awaken from this crazy sleep.

We're a story-driven species.

above all, Albert Einstein was a true believer in the scientist's duty to communicate with the public...those attending heard not much more than the words that began his speech: "If science, like art, is to perform its mission truly and fully, its achievements must enter not only superficially but with their inner meaning into the consciousness of the people." This always has been and always will be, the dream of Cosmos. When I stumbled upon Einstein's rarely quoted words of that night during some random late-night wandering on YouTube, I found the credo for 40 years of my life's work. Einstein was urging us to tear down the walls around science that have excluded and intimidated so many of us-to translate scientific insights from the technical jargon of its priesthood into the spoken language shared by us all, so that we may take these insights to heart and be changed by a personal encounter with the wonders they reveal...We didn't know that particular Einstein quote when Carl and I began writing the original Cosmos in 1980 with astronomer Steven Soter. We just felt a kind of evangelical urgency to share the awesome power of science, to convey the spiritual uplift of the universe it reveals, and to amplify the alarms that Carl, Steve, and other scientists were sounding about our impact on the planet. Cosmos gave voice to those forebodings, but it was also suffused with hope, with a sense of human self-esteem derived, in part, from our successes in finding our way in the universe, and from the courage of those scientists who dared to uncover and express forbidden truths.