american-documentary-tv-shows

"I think it's important just to distinguish between Islamism and Islam, a religion. What I mean by Islamism is the desire to impose any version of islam over society. Although ideology was sold to me as if it was the religion of Islam and that's what I adopted. I grew up facing a very, very severe form of violent racism, domestically within the UK. I'm talking hammer attacks, machete attacks by Neo-Nazi skinheads, thugs. On many occasions I had to watch as my friends were stabbed before my eyes as a 15 year old. I began seeing myself as separate from the rest of society and an islamist recruiter found me in that state as a young, angry teenager and it was very easy for that recruiter. I joined a group called Hizb ut-Tahrir and that's the group I spent 13 years of my leadership on. … It's the first islamist organization that was responsible for popularizing the notion of resurrecting a modern day theocratic caliphate, as we now see that ISIS has laid claim to. But, my former group, they were the first ones to popularize that term. I ended up in Egypt where I continued to recruit people to this cause. … I am still a Muslim, but I am now liberal. Now, when I was in prison and I was living with the Who's Who of the jihadist terrorist movements and islamist movements, we had a leader of the Muslim brotherhood. When I saw him I thought, "my God, if these guys ever came to power and declared a caliphate, it would be Hell on Earth." Of course, when ISIS eventually did declare the caliphate, that utopian dream that we all used to share has become that dystopic nightmare that we see now."

"There were a lot prophecies that most muslims share in common with each other. The difference is what ISIS has done is it's manipulated those prophecies to serve its own political and ideological ends."

"<!-- Back in 1983, off the California coast there was a storm, about 25 to 30-foot seas, and so we started heading in. And all of a sudden, we fell off a 30-footer... and we just slid right off. And I looked up and there was the next one, and it came right down on top of us. I was in the bow, it catapulted me into the sea, and I was just tumbled and tossed like a rag doll."

"I have seen a light; not in a near-death experience — I was just passing out. And what I perceived was the tiniest beam of light — that to me was … the final form of life. It just occurred to me, holy cow, there it is. There is the light that everybody talks about. But it's a common theme among people who say they have had a near-death experience or an out-of-body experience. What they see is a light. Some people have seen Jesus in, in this light; other people just see a bright light."

"For the ancient Egyptians, the afterlife of the pharaoh was vital. It ensured the sun would rise each morning. Their enormous monuments didn't just ensure the pharaohs would survive beyond death. Their afterlife provided essential power to sustain the living."

"For Christians a graveyard is not just a place of memory, it's a place of hope for life beyond death, hope that began in a moment of extreme anguish 2,000 years ago … when a man named Jesus was arrested by the Romans in Jerusalem and sent to die on the cross. It's a story most of us in the West know, or think we know."

"For Christians, Jesus' blood sacrifice was the last that needed to be made. From then onward, all you had to sacrifice for eternal life were your selfish desires. In this way, the death of Jesus was transformed for Christians into the ultimate victory over death."

"The only existence which is eternal ... Is God."

"We know that actually for thousands of years people who've come close to death for any reason have had these very profound, deep, in some ways, mystical experiences. People feel an immense sense of peace and comfort and joy when they go through death. They may describe a sensation of actually meeting deceased relatives, friends, or others that they don't really know, but who are almost like welcoming them. So I think what we're beginning to understand is that we have very much a universal experience of death that most of us will probably experience when we go through death."

"Whether you're a Christian following the example of Jesus, a Hindu hoping for liberation from the endless cycles of reincarnation, or you're simply trying to leave the world a better place than you found it, our desire to go beyond death has changed the world. Whatever we may find on the other side, no matter what our faith … we can all become eternal, like the stars."

"We've been predicting the end of the world for thousands of years. From Nostradamus all the way back to the book of revelation. Something about the drama of annihilation seems to grip us. Is it just human nature to worry and wonder about the end of days? Or is it really coming? I'm setting off on a journey to find out why so many religions predict an apocalypse. … My first destination is Jerusalem. The spiritual set of the Jews, christians and muslims. All three of those faiths predicted Jerusalem will play a role in the end of the world. It has long been a flash point for religious tensions."

"I set out to understand what the apocalypse means to people of many different faiths. I had always thought of it as a all destroying doomsday. But I've discovered that some people yearn for the apocalypse. They want to be free of injustice. They want to escape suffering. They want a better world. Apocalypse. It's a Greek word meaning "lifting the veil." It's not about war, it's about enlightenment. It's not about death. It's a state of mind and heart that helps us see the truth. Not some far off day of judgment. It's here. It's now."

"We all go through this, of course. Everybody grieves, but some people have a certainty that helps them cope with grief. They're certain they will see their loved ones again in heaven. For some of us it's not quite that simple. In fact, it's the greatest question we ask ourselves: What happens when we die?"

"Now I'm embarking on an epic adventure to discover what we believe lies beyond death — and why. Is there any scientific support for the soul? I'll learn the true purpose of the afterlife for ancient Egyptians. … Why the story of one man's rebirth was so powerful it swept the globe. … How the Hindu faith erased the fear of death. … And I'll explore how science is trying to capture the soul. … To bring eternal life to this life."

"There seems to be a mysterious force in the universe, one that overwhelms gravity on the grandest scale to push the cosmos apart. . . . We call it "dark energy," but that name, like "dark matter," is merely a code word for our ignorance. It's okay not to know all the answers. It's better to admit our ignorance than to believe answers that might be wrong. Pretending to know everything closes the door to finding out what's really there."

"The difference between seeing nothing but a pebble and reading the history of the cosmos inscribed inside it is science. (Discussing a slow-growing manganese nodule from the ocean floor which shows that a star near the Earth went supernova within the last two million years or so.)"

"There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve and cherish the Pale Blue Dot, the only home we've ever known. (Recording of Carl Sagan's voice over a re-imagining of the "Pale Blue Dot" image of Earth taken by Voyager 1.)"

"How did we escape from the prison [of ignorance]? It was the work of generations of searchers who took five simple rules to heart. (1) Question authority. No idea is true just because someone says so, including me. Think for yourself. Question yourself. (2) Don't believe anything just because you want to. Believing something doesn't make it so. (3) Test ideas by the evidence gained from observation and experiment. If a favorite idea fails a well-designed test, it's wrong! Get over it. (4) Follow the evidence, wherever it leads. If you have no evidence, reserve judgment. And perhaps the most important rule of all: (5) Remember, you could be wrong."

"Open your eyes, and open your imagination. The next great discovery could be yours. - U.S. President Barack Obama, introducing the series premiere."

"What Cosmos has, at its heart, is hope. It's about the future we could have if we get our act together. - Ann Druyan, writer for both the 1980 Cosmos and the 2014 Cosmos, as well as an executive producer and director for the 2014 Cosmos."

"Civilization {should know} how to preserve itself. That's a good measure of intelligence, isn't it? Seeing what you're doing that's bad, and fixing that problem. - Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, series presenter / host."

"The important thing is not to suppress ideas. Freedom of thought is the life blood of science. That’s why {Giordano} Bruno’s story is important. - Astrophysicist Steven Soter, writer for both the 1980 Cosmos and the 2014 Cosmos."

"We've reached a point in time where we've gotten a little lax with our enthusiasm about science and our thirst for knowledge. . . . I hope that this Cosmos can instigate a reawakening of the same enthusiasm for science that the original Cosmos brought. - Seth MacFarlane, series executive producer."

"My greatest hope for this new Cosmos is that it has the same impact on someone, somewhere that the original had on me. Because it inspired in me a great interest in science, and in my case, science fiction. - Brannon Braga, series executive producer."

"[The scientific method is so] powerful that it has carried our robotic emissaries to the edge of the solar system and beyond. It has doubled our lifespan, made the lost worlds of the past come alive. Science has enabled us to predict events in the distant future and to communicate with each other at the speed of light, as I am with you, right at this moment."

"Show me the spectrum of anything, whether here on Earth or from a distant star, and I'll tell you what it's made of. Fraunhofer's lines are the atomic signatures of the elements writ large across the cosmos. As with every other major revelation in the history of science, it opened the way to newer and deeper mysteries."

"You never know where the next genius will come from. How many of them do we leave in the rubble? The prince and his kingdom were immeasurably enriched by that act of kindness to a poor orphan."

"Confining our perception of nature to visible light is like listening to music in only one octave."

"There are more atoms in your eye than there are stars in all the galaxies in the known universe."

"The chloroplast is a three billion year-old solar energy collector. This sub-microscopic solar battery is what drives all the forests, and the fields, and the plankton of the seas, and the animals, including us."

"Thales kindled a flame that still burns to this day: the very idea of cosmos out of chaos, a universe governed by the order of natural laws that we can actually figure out. This is the epic adventure that began in the mind of Thales."

"The nucleus is very small compared to the rest of the atom. If an atom were the size of this cathedral, its nucleus would be the size of that mote of dust."

"[The Super-Kamioka Neutrino Detector] is a trap designed to catch neutrinos only. Other particles, such as cosmic rays . . . cannot get through all that rock above us. But matter poses no obstacle to a neutrino. A neutrino could pass through a hundred light years of steel without even slowing down."

"Are there any mementos from when the Earth was born, objects that could possibly tell us its true age? I know a place where the unused bricks and mortar left over from the creation of our solar system can be found. It lies between the orbits of Jupiter and Mars."

"What better way to find the true age of the Earth than with the uranium atom? If you knew what fraction of the uranium in a rock had turned into lead, you could calculate how much time had passed since the rock was formed."

"Now at last, Patterson was ready to tackle the iron meteorite, to find the true age of the Earth. [He discovered that the] world is four and a half billion years old. . . . His reward for this discovery? A world of trouble."

"[[w:Tetraethyllead | [T]etraethyl lead]] could be marketed as an anti-knock additive to gasoline [but a] half a cup of it on your skin could kill you. . . . What was needed was a man of science to calm the public's fears and improve lead's image. . . . This was one of the first times that the authority of science was used to cloak a threat to public health and the environment."

"No matter where he searched on Earth, no matter how far he traveled back in time, the . . . naturally occurring [lead] levels in the air and water in the past were far lower. . . . [[w:Clair Cameron Patterson#Campaign against lead poisoning | Patterson fought the industry for [more than] 20 years]] before lead was finally banned in US [gasoline and other] consumer products."

"Today, scientists sound the alarm on other environmental dangers. Vested interests still hire their own scientists to confuse the issue. But in the end, nature will not be fooled."

"For thousands of generations we watched the stars as if our lives depended on it, because they did. . . . [O]ur ancestors noticed that the motions of the stars across the nights of the year foretold changes on Earth that threatened or enhanced our chances for survival."

"[The Harvard Observatory Computers included] Annie Jump Cannon, the leader of the team [who eventually] catalogued a quarter of a million stars, [and] Henrietta Swan Leavitt [who] discovered the law that astronomers still use more than a century later to measure the distances to the stars. . . . [Cannon provided classification data to Cecilia Payne, whose] "Stellar Atmospheres" is widely regarded as the most brilliant PhD thesis ever written in astronomy."

"There are many kinds of stars. Some are bright like the Sun. Some are dim. The greatest stars are ten million times larger than the smallest ones. Some stars are old beyond imagining, more than ten billion years of age. Others are being born right now. When atoms fuse in the hearts of stars, they make starlight. Stars are born in litters, formed from the gas and dust of interstellar clouds."

"[Currently] our Sun is poised in a stable equilibrium between gravity and nuclear fire. . . . [F]our or five billion years from now . . . it will become bloated [and] will envelop and devour the planets Mercury and Venus and possibly the Earth. [Finally it will shrink] a hundredfold to the size of the Earth [and will be] a white dwarf star."

"The psychedelic death shrouds of ordinary stars are fleeting, lasting only tens of thousands of years. . . . The stars in a binary star system . . . [like] Sirius [and its companion] white dwarf [will create numerous novae as the system ages]. . . . A star about 15 times as massive as the Sun - one like Rigel - [will ignite] a more powerful nuclear reaction, a supernova [which will result in a pulsar]. . . . [F]or a star more than 30 times as massive as the Sun - a star like Alnilam, in Orion's Belt - [its supernova will create] a black hole. . . . [Finally, when a supermassive star like the largest in the Eta Carinae system] goes, it won't become a mere nova or supernova. It will become something far more catastrophic - a hypernova. And it could happen in our lifetime. . . . Earth will be just fine. . . . But still, Eta Carinae in its death throes will . . . light up the night of the southern hemisphere with the brightness of a second Moon."

"[D]uring the Carboniferous Period, the atmosphere had almost twice the oxygen as today. Insects could then grow much bigger and still get enough oxygen in their bodies. That's why the dragonflies here are as big as eagles and the millipedes the size of alligators."

"Two-thirds of the Earth lies beneath more than 1,000 feet of water. It's a vast and largely unexplored frontier. . . . This is the longest submarine mountain range in the world, the Atlantic Mid-Ocean Ridge. It wraps around our globe like the seam on a baseball. The past is another planet, but most of us don't really know this one."

"Few animals larger than a hundred pounds survived the catastrophes of the late Cretaceous. The dust cloud brought night and cold to the surface for months. The dinosaurs froze and starved to death. But there were small creatures who took shelter in the Earth. And when they emerged they found that the monsters who had hunted and terrorized them were gone. The Earth was becoming the Planet of the Mammals. And the Earth continued its ceaseless changing."

"The way the planets tug at each other, the way the skin of the Earth moves, the way those motions affect climate and the evolution of life and intelligence - they all combined to give us the means to turn the mud of those river deltas into the first civilizations."

"Congratulations. You're alive. There's an unbroken thread that stretches across more than three billion years that connects us to the first life that ever touched this world. Think of how tough, resourceful and lucky all of our countless ancestors must have been to survive long enough to pass on the message of life to the next and the next and the next generation, hundreds of millions of times before it came to us. . . . Each of us is a runner in the longest and most dangerous relay race there ever was, and at this moment, we hold the baton in our hands."

"I could be thousands of miles away, and yet, when you turn on whatever device is bringing my image and voice to you, I'm there. Instantaneously. How is that possible? . . . It all began in the mind of one person. . . . This is the story of how we learned to make electrons do our bidding."