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"Perhaps the locale of the subjunctive mood willone day be found. Will Latins turn out to be extravagantly endowed and English-speaking peoples significantly short-changed in this minor piece of brain anatomy?"
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Exlpore more Language quotes
"Perhaps it is the language that chooses the writers it needs, making use of them so that each might express a tiny part of what it is."
"Certain things were deemed to be offensive. It was usually bad language."
"It is with words as with sunbeams - the more they are condensed, the deeper they burn."
"Come English Settlement, I had it in my head that I didn't want to tour."
"Language, when it finally comes, has the vigor of a felon pardoned after twenty-one years on hold. Sudden, raw, stripped to its underwear."
"Language commonly stresses only one side of any interaction."
"Drawing on my fine command of the English language, I said nothing."
"If you're a good numbers person, you're a bad language person."
"Perhaps then one reason why we have no great poet, novelist or critic writing today is that we refuse to allow words their liberty. We pin them down to one meaning, their useful meaning: the meaning which makes us catch the train, the meaning which makes us pass the examination."
Explore more quotes by Carl Sagan
"When we look up at night and view the stars, everything we see is shinning because of distant nuclear fusion."
"But if they called everything divine which they do not understand, why, there would be no end of divine beings."
"You could just as well say that an agnostic is a deeply religious person with at least a rudimentary knowledge of human fallibility."
"Major scientific insights are characteristically intuitive, and equally characteristically described in scientific papers by linear analytical arguments. There is no anomaly in this: it is, rather, just as it should be. The creative act has major right-hemisphere components. But arguments on thevalidity of the result are largely left-hemisphere functions."
"With rare exceptions (chiefly the social insects), mammals and birds are the only organisms to devote substantial attention to the care of their young; an evolutionary development that, through the long period of plasticity which it permits, takes advantage of the large information-processing capability of the mammalian and primate brains. Love seems to be an invention of the mammals."
"We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology."
"The time scale for evolutionary or genetic change is very long. A characteristic period for the emergence of one advanced species from another is perhaps a hundred thousand years; and very often the difference in behavior between closely relatedspecies-say, lions and tigers-do not seem very great... But today we do not have ten million years to wait for the next advance. We live in a time when our world is changing at an unprecedented rate. While the changes are largely of our own making, they cannot be ignored. We must adjust and adapt andcontrol, or we perish."
"In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion."
"The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff."
"The vast distances that separate the stars are providential. Beings and worlds are quarantined from one another. The quarantine is lifted only for those with sufficient self-knowledge and judgment to have safely traveled from star to star."
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