The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into i... - Carl Sagan, Cosmos

"The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together."

"The fossil record implies trial and error, the inability to anticipate the future, features inconsistent with a Great Designer (though not a Designer of a more remote and indirect temperament.)"

"One glance at (a book) and you hear the voice of another person - perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millenia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time."

"The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us -- there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries."

"By looking far out into space we are also looking far back into time, back toward the horizon of the universe, back toward the epoch of the Big Bang."