First Quote Added
April 10, 2026
Latest Quote Added
"In the logic of science there is a principle as important as that of parsimony: it is that of sufficient reason. The former directs us to look for simplest causes, the later cautions us not to simplify so far that the explanation is inadequate to the facts to be explained....Parsimony is not itself a simple criterion of a good methodology; we cannot simply count the factors of explanation and say that the theory containing the smallest number is the best. The ideal of parsimony cannot be expressed without the proviso that the conditions for which it is a norm shall themselves be adequate."
"For it is only in the Critique that all the various strands of Kant's thought are woven together into the pattern of his practical philosophy. This pattern, in turn, can be understood only in the entire fabric of the critical philosophy, and that rich design can be clear only to those who have understood each of its three principal parts, which are the three Critiques and not shorter and more popular works like the Prolegomena and the Foundations."
"If you believe that you are not a machine, but that I am (then) I do not know why you are reading this book"."
"But somewhat like people who object to spending money needed in the ghettoes on exploring the moon, I think the best hope for our survival is to be based on understanding human predicaments here on earth, not expecting a saving message from super-human beings in the sky...Thinking about and even hoping to find extraterrestrial civilizations, however, sharpen our search for and appreciation of the peculiar virtues and vices of the only form of life we know."
"Myth, religion and now science-fiction with their tales of benevolent and malevolent extraterrestrial beings are commentaries on the human condition. I believe even responsible scientific speculation and expensive technology of space exploration in search for other life are the peculiarly modern equivalent of angeology and Utopia or of demonology and apocalypse."
"[T]he only species on earth which prides itself on its intelligence is the only one with the intelligence necessary, and possibly sufficient, to render itself extinct tomorrow."
"The quest for other, and better, forms of life, society, technology, ethics, and law may not reveal that they are actually elsewhere; but it may in the long run help us to make some of them actual on earth."
"It is not my place to tell you whether there is indefeasible ignorance of ultimate reality. I am ignorant of whether there is or is not. But you should think of these things because there are no things more important, though there are no questions more difficult or less answerable. But one's whole life may be changed if one changes his mind about these questions."
"A Man that is of Copernicus’s Opinion, that this Earth of ours is a Planet, carry’d round and enlighten’d by the Sun, like the rest of the Planets, cannot but sometimes think that it’s not improbable that the rest of the Planets have their Dress and Furniture, and perhaps their Inhabitants too as well as this Earth of ours."
"But who shall dwell in these worlds if they be inhabited? … Are we or they Lords of the World? … And how are all things made for man?"
"Recently, the press has been filled with reports of sightings of flying saucers. While we need not give credence to these stories, they allow our imagination to speculate on how visitors from outer space would judge us. I am afraid they would be stupefied at our conduct. They would observe that for death planning we spend billions to create engines and strategies for war. They would also observe that we spend millions to prevent death by disease and other causes. Finally, they would observe that we spend paltry sums for population planning, even though its spontaneous growth is an urgent threat to life on our planet. Our visitors from outer space could be forgiven if they reported home that our planet is inhabited by a race of insane men whose future is bleak and uncertain."
"I don’t believe in any of Earth’s monotheistic religions, but I do believe that one can construct an intriguing scientific definition of God, once you accept the fact that there are approximately 100 billion stars in our galaxy alone, that each star is a life-giving sun and that there are approximately 100 billion galaxies in just the visible universe. Given a planet in a stable orbit, not too hot and not too cold, and given a few billion years of chance chemical reactions created by the interaction of a sun’s energy on the planet’s chemicals, it’s fairly certain that life in one form or another will eventually emerge. It’s reasonable to assume that there must be, in fact, countless billions of such planets where biological life has arisen, and the odds of some proportion of such life developing intelligence are high."
"Some contend that encountering a highly advanced civilization - even one whose technology is essentially comprehensible to us - would produce a traumatic cultural shock effect on man by divesting him of his smug ethnocentrism and shattering the delusion that he is the center of the universe. Carl Jung summed up this position when he wrote of contact with advanced extra terrestrial life that the "reins would be torn from our hands and we would, as a tearful old medicine man once said to me, find ourselves 'without dreams'...we would find out intellectual and spiritual aspirations so outmoded as to leave us completely paralyzed. I personally don't accept this position, but it's one that's widely held and can't be summarily dismissed."
"Why would a vastly superior race bother to harm or destroy us? If an intelligent ant suddenly traced a message in the sand at my feet reading, "I am sentient,; let's talk things over," I doubt very much that I would rush to grind him under my heel. Even if they weren't super intelligent, though, but merely more advanced than mankind, I would tend to lean more toward benevolence, or at least indifference, theory. Since it's most unlikely that we would be visited from within our own solar system, any society capable of transversing light-years of space would have to have an extremely high degree of control over matter and energy. Therefore, what possible motivation for hostility would they have? To steal our gold or oil or coal? It's hard to think of any nasty intention that would justify the long and arduous journey from another star."
"Anything we can imagine about such other life forms is possible, or course. You could have psychotic civilizations, or decadent civilizations that have elevated pain to an aesthetic and might covet humans as gladiators or torture objects, or civilizations that might want us for zoos or scientific experimentation, or slaves or even food. While I am appreciably more optimistic, we just can't be sure what their motivations will be."
"As all regions below are replenished with living creatures... so may the heavens above be replenished with beings whose nature we do not understand. He that shall well consider the strange and wonderful nature of life and the frame of the Animals, will think nothing beyond the possibility of nature, nothing too hard for the omnipotent power of God. And as the Planets remain in their orbs, so may any other bodies subsist at any distance from the earth, and much more may beings, who have sufficient power of self motion, move whether they will, and continue in any regions of the heavens whatever, there to enjoy the society of one another, and by their messengers or Angels to rule the earth and convers with the remotest regions. Thus may the whole heavens or any part thereof whatever be the habitation of the Blessed, and at the same time the earth be subject to their dominion. And to have thus the liberty and dominion of the whole heavens and the choice of the happiest places for abode seems a greater happiness than to be confined to any one place whatever."
"I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world. And yet, I ask you, is not an alien force already among us? What could be more alien to the universal aspirations of our peoples than war and the threat of war?"
"Fermi was somewhat skeptical about the possibility of an extraterrestrial civilization so technologically advanced that it could freely move between the stars. One of his favorite arguments was that such a civilization would be able to colonize the entire Galaxy in less than 300 million years, a short time compared to its age of about 15 billion years. That civilization should have already reached Earth, leaving appreciable traces. But since these traces were not found, Fermi came to the conclusion that the hypothetical civilization does not exist."
"Star Trek offers an almost infinite number of exciting Science Fiction stories, thoroughly practical for television? How? Astronomers put it this way:"
"Since, in the long run, every planetary society will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring — not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive."
"I would vote for Bach, all of Bach, streamed out into space, over and over again. We would be bragging of course."
"I believe we are the only sentient beings in the universe, and I believe that 500 years from now, we will still be the only sentient beings around."
"There are infinite worlds both like and unlike this world of ours... we must believe that in all worlds there are living creatures and plants and other things we see in this world."
"Do there exist many worlds, or is there but a single world? This is one of the most noble and exalted questions in the study of Nature."
"No one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment."
"Across an immense ethereal gulf, minds that are to our minds as ours are to the beasts of the jungle - intellects vast, cool and unsympathetic - regard this Earth with envious eyes and slowly and surely draw their plans against us..."
"Space, the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its 5-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before."
"Man knows at last that he is alone in the indifferent immensity of the universe, whence which he has emerged by chance."
"Vina: They found me in the wreckage, dying. A lump of flesh. They rebuilt me. Everything works. But they had never seen a human. They had no guide for putting me back together."
"And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space... ...'cos there's bugger-all down here on Earth"
"They stared at each other, man and alien, or more correctly alien and alien—for this is what they were to each other. Alien meaning different, alien meaning unknown."
"People have been willing to accept that the government is lying to us, but [are now also] more willing to accept the concept of aliens and other life forms. There's just a slew of stuff out there right now. It's been people's closet belief system, and now it's coming out of the closet."
"If it is just us, seems like an awful waste of space."
"Science fiction aliens are both metaphors and real possibilities. One can probe the nature of humanity with aliens that by contrast illustrate and comment upon human nature. Still, as evidenced by widespread belief in alien visitors and efforts to detect extraterrestrial radio signals, humans also crave companionship in a vast, cold universe and aliens may represent hopeful, compensatory images of the strange friends we have been unable to find. Thus, aliens will likely remain a central theme in science fiction until we actually encounter them."
"To be sure, we do not have no absolute proof that Mars is inhabited [...] Personally, I have my faith on the feeble planetary electrical disturbances which I discovered in the summer of 1899, and which according to my investigations, could not have originated from the Sun, the Moon, or Venus. Further study since has satisfied me they must have emanated from Mars."
"During my experiments here [Colorodo Springs 1899] Mars was at a relatively small distance from us, and in that dry and rarified air, Venus appeared as large and bright that it might have been mistaken for one of those military signaling lights...I came to the conclusion that Mars was sufficient to exert a noticeable influence on a delicate receiver of the kind I was perfecting...my ear barely caught signals coming in regular succession which could not have been produced on earth, caused by any solar or lunar action or by the influence of Venus, and the possibility that they might have come from Mars flashed upon my mind."
"I think the surest sign that there is intelligent life out there in the universe is that none of it has tried to contact us."
"Our sun is one of 100 billion stars in our galaxy. Our galaxy is one of billions of galaxies populating the universe. It would be the height of presumption to think that we are the only living things in that enormous immensity."
"Two possibilities exist: Either we are alone in the Universe or we are not. Both are equally terrifying."
"The only thing that scares me more than space aliens is the idea that there aren't any space aliens. We can't be the best that creation has to offer. I pray we're not all there is. If so, we're in big trouble."
"Any entity – no matter how many tentacles it has – has a soul."
"If, for example, tomorrow an expedition of Martians came to us here and one said ‘I want to be baptised!’, what would happen? Martians, right? Green, with long noses and big ears, like in children’s drawings? When the Lord shows us the way, who are we to say, ‘No, Lord, it is not prudent! No, let's do it this way’. Who are we to close doors?"
"If a visitor from outer space were to come to know human beings on this earth .... at work and play, and without knowledge of human history or international affairs, what would he conclude? No doubt that virtually everyone values friendship, peace and happiness; ...If having observed all this the visitor were then told that a scheme had been proposed ... which for the present would require that people pour their wealth into the production of weapons of destruction, ... train their sons and daughters to kill and periodically send them off to slaughter..[and] that humans could improve their lot provided only that they do all of these things, he would ridicule the scheme as having not the slightest chance of success, and even less of being accepted by rational beings. Yet this is precisely what humankind has been led to accept in the case of war. It has proven willing to abandon virtually everything worth living for, to do things all agree are abhorrent, for reasons few understand, and for ends (such as peace) that history shows cannot be secured by these means."