The fact is that far more crime and child abuse has been committed by zealots in the name of God, Jesus and Mohammed than has ever been committed in … - Carl Sagan

If we are willing to contemplate nuclear war and the wholesale destruction of our emerging global society, should we not also be willing to contemplate a wholesale restructuring of our societies? From an extraterrestrial perspective, our global civilization is clearly on the edge of failure in the most important task it faces: to preserve the lives and well-being of the citizens of the planet. Should we not then be willing to explore vigorously, in every nation, major changes in the traditional ways of doing things, a fundamental redesign of economic, political, social and religious institutions?
Faced with so disquieting an alternative, we are always tempted to minimize the seriousness of the problem, to argue that those who worry about doomsday’s are alarmists; to hold that fundamental changes in our institutions are impractical or contrary to ‘human nature’, as if nuclear war were practical, or as if there were only one human nature. Full-scale nuclear war has never happened. Somehow this is taken to imply that it never will. But we can experience it only once. But then it will be too late to reformulate the statistics.

— Аз търся, Елеанор. След всичките тези години, вярвай ми, познавам истината, когато я видя. Всяка вяра, която изпитва възхита пред истината, която се стреми да опознае Бог, трябва да е достатъчно смела, за да приеме вселената. Искам да кажа, истинската вселена. Всичките тези светлинни години. Всички тези светове. Мисля си за мащабите на твоята вселена, за възможностите, които тя предлага на Създателя, и дъхът ми секва. Така е много по-добре, отколкото да го приковеш към един малък свят. Никога не ми е допадала представата за Земята като за зелена възглавничка за краката на Бога. Тя е прекалено успокоителна, като детска приказка, като… транквилизатор. Но твоята вселена има достатъчно място и достатъчно време за Бог, какъвто аз си го представям.

If we no longer insist on our notions of how Nature ought to behave, but instead stand before Nature with an open and receptive mind, we find that common sense often doesn't work. Why not? Because our notions, both hereditary and learned, of how Nature works were forged in the millions of years our ancestors were hunters and gatherers. In this case common sense is a faithless guide because no hunter-gatherer's life ever depended on understanding time-variable electric and magnetic fields. There were no evolutionary penalties for ignorance of Maxwell's equations. In our time it's different.