Science is a way to not fool ourselves.
Carl SaganRead
The illegality of cannabis is outrageous, an impediment to full utilization of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship so desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world.
Interpretation
The quote criticizes cannabis prohibition and highlights its benefits for fostering peace and connection.
Carl Sagan's quote reflects on the injustices of cannabis being illegal, arguing that this prohibition prevents society from accessing a substance that can promote tranquility, understanding, and community. In a world perceived as increasingly chaotic and perilous, Sagan emphasizes the importance of such qualities as serenity and fellowship, suggesting that cannabis could play a role in enhancing these attributes in individuals and society as a whole.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech advocating for cannabis legalization during a public forum.
Science is a way to not fool ourselves.
In more than one respect, the exploring of the Solar System and homesteading other worlds constitutes the beginning, much more than the end, of history.
How smart does a chimpanzee have to be before killing him constitutes murder?
The hole in the ozone layer is a kind of skywriting. At first it seemed to spell out our continuing complacency before a witch's brew of deadly perils. But perhaps it really tells of a newfound talent to work together to protect the global environment.
There is a reward structure in science that is very interesting: Our highest honors go to those who disprove the findings of the most revered among us. So Einstein is revered not just because he made so many fundamental contributions to science, but because he found an imperfection in the fundamental contribution of Isaac Newton.
The simplest thought, like the concept of the number one, has an elaborate logical underpinning.
Calmness is the living breath of God's immortality in you.
Every funeral may justly be considered as a summons to prepare for that state into which it shows us that we must some time enter; and the summons is more loud and piercing as the event of which it warns us is at less distance. To neglect at any time preparation for death is to sleep on our post at a siege; but to omit it in old age is to sleep at an attack.
It's said that when we die, the four elements - earth, air, fire and water - dissolve one by one, each into the other, and finally just dissolve into space. But while we're living, we share the energy that makes everything, from a blade of grass to an elephant, grow and live and then inevitably wear out and die. This energy, this life force, creates the whole world.
Negro blood is sure powerful, because just one drop of black blood makes a colored man. One drop--you are a Negro! . . . Black is powerful.
Free from gross passion or of mirth of anger constant spirit, not swerving with the blood, garnish'd and deck'd in modest compliment, not working with the eye without the ear, and but in purged judgement trusting neither? Such and so finely bolted didst thou seem.
Money is what fueled the industrial society. But in the informational society, the fuel, the power, is knowledge. One has now come to see a new class structure divided by those who have information and those who must function out of ignorance. This new class has its power not from money, not from land, but from knowledge.
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