Vast migrations of people -some voluntary, most not- have shaped the human condition. More of us flee from war, oppression and famine today than at a… - Carl Sagan

Under Communism, both religion and pseudoscience were systematically suppressed — except for the superstition of the state ideological religion. It was advertised as scientific, but fell as far short of this ideal as the most unselfcritical mystery cult.

...the hopeless sense of a civilization destroyed for nothing; the knowledge that we could have prevented it and did not.

Our perceptions may be distorted by training and prejudice or merely because of the limitations of our sense organs, which, of course, perceive directly but a small fraction of the phenomena of the world. Even so straightforward a question as whether in the absence of friction a pound of lead falls faster than a gram of fluff was answered incorrectly by Aristotle and almost everyone else before the time of Galileo. Science is based on experiment, on a willingness to challenge old dogma, on an openness to see the universe as it really is. Accordingly, science sometimes requires courage—at the very least the courage to question the conventional wisdom.