5 Quotes by Dorion Sagan

The difference between science and philosophy is that the scientist learns more and more about less and less until she knows everything about nothing, whereas a philosopher learns less and less about more and more until he knows nothing about everything. There is truth in this clever crack, but, as Niels Bohr impressed, while the opposite of a trivial truth is false, the opposite of a great truth is another great truth.

Nature no more obeys the territorial divisions of scientific academic disciplines than do continents appear from space to be colored to reflect the national divisions of their human inhabitants.

What we call life is really a form of water, activated and animated not by a divine principle but the energetic cosmos around it.

A televangelist or president blessing troops in the name of God somehow is reminiscent of a neo-Darwinist laying the blame for genocides on irrational religion, smugly sure of being inured from the same while claiming a kind of amoral immortality for the gene, that veritable Platonic abstraction, that chemical instantiation of eternal life going on indefinitely as the real world of life, which it produces, dies around it.

Life displays mad hospitality. The Korean biologist Kwang Jeon of the University of Tennessee received in the 1970s a batch of amoebas infected with a deadly bacterial strain. Most died. In a set of careful experiments after culturing the survivor amoebas for several generations, he found that the survivors, with fewer bacteria per cell, could no longer live without their infection.