“It's a most distressing affliction to have a sentimental heart and a skeptical mind.”

—Naguib Mahfouz, Sugar Street

How to make Carl Sagan (and most importantly yourself) proud:

— Train yourself with the art of baloney detection aka work that skepticism.

— That way you know what to put in your brain and what is useless to it.

— Reading books now becomes 100X more useful than if you were taking in just any kind of information.

— Feed your brain valuable data, arm your mind with the right tools to battle the tricksters.

Warning: This may cause a disruption in the status quo as well as constant refusals to obey authority when authority does not make sense.

P.S. Doesn’t matter in what form or media you acquire said valuable information so long as you know the difference between useless and usefulness.

“The people had to be educated and they had to practice their education and their skepticism, otherwise we don't run the government, the government runs us.”

—Carl Sagan paraphrasing Thomas Jefferson in his last interview, 1996.

“At the heart of science is an essential tension between two seemingly contradictory attitudes—an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive they may be, and the most ruthless skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new.”

—Carl Sagan (1987)

#quackery

“Some believers accuse skeptics of having nothing left but a dull, cold, scientific world. I am left with only art, music, literature, theatre, the magnificence of nature, mathematics, the human spirit, sex, the cosmos, friendship, history, science, imagination, dreams, oceans, mountains, love, and the wonder of birth. That'll do for me.”

—Lynne Kelly

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Follow the world’s creators.

“It's a most distressing affliction to have a sentimental heart and a skeptical mind.”

“The people had to be educated and they had to practice their education and their skepticism, otherwise we don't run the government, the government runs us.”

“At the heart of science is an essential tension between two seemingly contradictory attitudes—an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive they may be, and the most ruthless skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new.”