Ann Druyan Quotes

#1. However, he never understood why anyone would want to separate science, which is just a way of searching for what is true, from what we hold sacred, which are those truths that inspire love and awe.

Ann Druyan

#2. The Universe revealed by science is one of far more awesome grandeur than any religion has ever posited.

Ann Druyan

#3. Science reserves the highest reward for those of you who disprove our most cherished beliefs. At any moment someone from any walk of life could come forward and be responsible for a complete revision of our view of everything.

Ann Druyan

#4. In 1974, I first met Carl. I was 25 years old. I am 51 now.

Ann Druyan

#5. Well, I actually grew up in the sixties. I feel very lucky, actually, that that was my slice of time that I was dealt. Let's remember that the real motivation in the sixties, and even in the fifties, was the Cold War.

Ann Druyan

#6. For most of the history of our species we were helpless to understand how nature works. We took every storm, drought, illness and comet personally. We created myths and spirits in an attempt to explain the patterns of nature.

Ann Druyan

#7. Carl took on the military-industrial complex. He campaigned around the world for an end to the production of weapons of mass destruction. To him it was a perversion of science.

Ann Druyan

#8. All of science to me, everything that we have learned, is important to the extent that it brings us to our senses.

Ann Druyan

#9. No single step in the persuit of enlightenment should ever be considered sacred; only the search was.

Ann Druyan

#10. If you are searching for sacred knowledge and not just a palliative for your fears, then you will train yourself to be a good skeptic.

Ann Druyan

#11. I guess I so desperately want to see us put this planet right. It's so horrifying to me that a fifth of us are starving every night, and that forty thousand children die every single day.

Ann Druyan

#12. My knowledge of science came from being with Carl, not from formal academic training. Carl gave me a thrilling tutorial in science and math that lasted the 20 years we were together.

Ann Druyan

#13. Carl did not want to believe. He wanted to know.

Ann Druyan

#14. We batter this planet as if we had someplace else to go.

Ann Druyan

#15. Ten long trips around the sun since I last saw that smile, but only joy and thankfulness that on a tiny world in the vastness, for a couple of moments in the immensity of time, we were one.

Ann Druyan

#16. I don't have any faith, but I have a lot of hope, and I have a lot of dreams of what we could do with our intelligence if we had the will and the leadership and the understanding of how we could take all of our intelligence and our resources and create a world for our kids that is hopeful.

Ann Druyan

#17. I've been thinking about the distorted view of science that prevails in our culture. I've been wondering about this, because our civilization is completely dependent on science and high technology, yet most of us are alienated from science.

Ann Druyan

#18. It is a great tragedy that science, this wonderful process for finding out what is true, has ceded the spiritual uplift of its central revelations: the vastness of the universe, the immensity of time, the relatedness of all life, and life's preciousness on our tiny planet.

Ann Druyan

#19. Science is nothing more than a neverending search for the truth.

Ann Druyan

#20. I'm just at the age when time speeds up in an odd way. Do you know what I mean? The winters come closer together and you learn to accept that you're not special anymore.

Ann Druyan

#21. Interviewer: Didn't Sagan want to believe?
Druyan: he didn't want to believe. he wanted to know.

Ann Druyan

#22. We may be living at that moment, on the cusp, when we go from being a species that feels a kind of loneliness in the cosmos to actually one sometime in the not too distant future being able to confirm the existence of other intelligent life.

Ann Druyan

#23. Knowing a deep thing well, which is what science asks of its practitioners, is an empowerment that is very profound. It's a liberation.

Ann Druyan

#24. Our stars are not where we last admired them. Our homes crumble and we don't know which place to long for.

Ann Druyan

#25. And what greater might do we possess as human beings than our capacity to question and to learn?

Ann Druyan

#26. By disobeying god, we escape from his totalitarian prison where you cannot ask any questions, where you must never question authority. We become our human selves,

Ann Druyan

#27. Ramona wasn't at home anywhere. She felt like a spy in life and the ending of every great book and each orgasm, and the sight of every homeless shopping bag lady infected her with a titanic yearning for the world to make an unscheduled stop.

Ann Druyan

#28. People think that if you are a scientist you have to give up that joy of discovery, that passion, that sense of the great romance of life. I say that's completely opposite of the truth.

Ann Druyan

#29. The way he treated me & the way I treated him, the way we took care of each other & our family, while he lived. That is so much more important than the idea I will see him someday.

Ann Druyan

#30. As I looked out at the glittering waters of the Pacific I was seeing for Carl. He knew that it's not for any one generation to see the completed picture. That's the point. The picture is never completed. There is always so much more that remains to be discovered.

Ann Druyan

#31. This planet seems to be in such sorry shape. And I can't ever think about the rest of the universe without coming back home and thinking what the implications for life here would be if we were to really have some definitive proof of extraterrestrial life.

Ann Druyan

#32. The only gratification that science denies to us is deception.

Ann Druyan

#33. A lot of people have this ego need that makes them want to believe that Earth is the center of the universe and humans are the most important species, the supreme expression of creation.

Ann Druyan

#34. Science has the cold facts, but lacks religion's social organization and ability to inspire that moves people to act.

Ann Druyan

#35. If you have a beating heart, that's good enough.

Ann Druyan

#36. In the 1970s, I think that there was probably a higher degree of respect for science, of hope about the future, and the future-oriented vision.

Ann Druyan

#37. We smoked the way other American families would have wine with dinner. For us, it was our sacrament. It was something that made a great life sweeter in every possible way,

Ann Druyan

#38. As a species, we tend to lie quite a bit - to ourselves and to each other. It's a primate thing. So, a reason to go into a career in science and technology, or to learn more about these subjects, is to become a more powerful person.

Ann Druyan