Widespread intellectual and moral docility may be convenient for leaders in the short term, but it is suicidal for nations in the long term. One of t… - Carl Sagan

Widespread intellectual and moral docility may be convenient for leaders in the short term, but it is suicidal for nations in the long term.

We can judge our progress by the courage of our questions and our willingness to embrace what's true rather than what feels good.

Spaceflight, therefore, is subversive. If they are fortunate enough to find themselves in orbit, most people, after a little meditation, have similar thoughts. The nations that had instituted spaceflight had done so largely for nationalistic reasons; it was a small irony that almost everyone who entered space received a startling glimpse of a transnational perspective, of the Earth as one world.

The search for extraterrestrial intelligence is the search for a generally acceptable cosmic context for the human species. In the deepest sense, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is a search for ourselves.