The world is so exquisite, with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there's litt… - Carl Sagan

I want to know what you think of us,” she said shortly, “what you really think.” He did not hesitate for a moment. “All right. I think it’s amazing that you’ve done as well as you have. You’ve got hardly any theory of social organization, astonishingly backward economic systems, no grasp of the machinery of historical prediction, and very little knowledge about yourselves. Considering how fast your world is changing, it’s amazing you haven’t blown yourselves to bits by now. That’s why we don’t want to write you off just yet. You humans have a certain talent for adaptability — at least in the short term.

All of us cherish our beliefs. They are, to a degree, self-defining. When someone comes along who challenges our belief system as insufficiently well-based – or who, like Socrates, merely asks embarrassing questions that we haven’t thought of, or demonstrates that we’ve swept key underlying assumptions under the rug – it becomes much more than a search for knowledge. It feels like a personal assault.

This hostility to science, in the face of its obvious triumphs and benefits, is … evidence that it is something outside the mainstream of human development, perhaps a fluke.