I … had ambition not only to go farther than anyone had done before,” wrote Captain James Cook, the eighteenth-century explorer of the Pacific, “but … - Carl Sagan

I … had ambition not only to go farther than anyone had done before,” wrote Captain James Cook, the eighteenth-century explorer of the Pacific, “but as far as it was possible for man to go.

"What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic."

[Cosmos, Part 11: The Persistence of Memory (1980)]

Un asombroso declive de la expectativa de vida, el aumento de la mortalidad infantil, las violentas epidemias de enfermedades, las condiciones sanitarias por debajo del mínimo y la ignorancia de la medicina preventiva se unen para elevar el umbral a partir del cual se dispara el escepticismo de una población cada vez más desesperada

Freedom of belief is pernicious,” Bellarmine wrote on another occasion. “It is nothing but the freedom to be wrong.