Top 40 Ann Druyan Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Ten long trips around the sun since I last saw that smile, but only joy and thankfulness that on a tiny world in the vastness, for a couple of moments in the immensity of time, we were one.”

— Ann Druyan

2. “A lot of people have this ego need that makes them want to believe that Earth is the center of the universe and humans are the most important species, the supreme expression of creation.”

— Ann Druyan

3. “Science is nothing more than a neverending search for the truth.”

— Ann Druyan

4. “My knowledge of science came from being with Carl, not from formal academic training. Carl gave me a thrilling tutorial in science and math that lasted the 20 years we were together.”

— Ann Druyan

5. “Knowing a deep thing well, which is what science asks of its practitioners, is an empowerment that is very profound. It’s a liberation.”

— Ann Druyan

6. “If you have a beating heart, that’s good enough.”

— Ann Druyan

7. “As a species, we tend to lie quite a bit – to ourselves and to each other. It’s a primate thing. So, a reason to go into a career in science and technology, or to learn more about these subjects, is to become a more powerful person.”

— Ann Druyan

8. “Science has carried us to the gateway to the universe. And yet our conception of our surroundings remains the disproportionate view of the still-small child. We are spiritually and culturally paralyzed, unable to face the vastness, to embrace our lack of centrality and find out actual place in the fabric of nature.”

— Ann Druyan

9. “I don’t have any faith, but I have a lot of hope, and I have a lot of dreams of what we could do with our intelligence if we had the will and the leadership and the understanding of how we could take all of our intelligence and our resources and create a world for our kids that is hopeful.”

— Ann Druyan

10. “The greatest thing that science teaches you is the law of unintended consequences.”

— Ann Druyan

11. “The Universe revealed by science is one of far more awesome grandeur than any religion has ever posited.”

— Ann Druyan

12. “And what greater might do we possess as human beings than our capacity to question and to learn?”

— Ann Druyan

13. “Our stars are not where we last admired them. Our homes crumble and we don’t know which place to long for.”

— Ann Druyan

14. “Carl took on the military-industrial complex. He campaigned around the world for an end to the production of weapons of mass destruction. To him it was a perversion of science.”

— Ann Druyan

15. “It takes a fearless, unflinching love and deep humility to accept the universe as it is. The most effective way he knew to accomplish that, the most powerful tool at his disposal, was the scientific method, which over time winnows out deception. It can’t give you absolute truth because science is a permanent revolution, always subject to revision, but it can give you successive approximations of reality.”

— Ann Druyan

16. “It is a great tragedy that science, this wonderful process for finding out what is true, has ceded the spiritual uplift of its central revelations: the vastness of the universe, the immensity of time, the relatedness of all life, and life’s preciousness on our tiny planet.”

— Ann Druyan

17. “All of science to me, everything that we have learned, is important to the extent that it brings us to our senses.”

— Ann Druyan

18. “The only gratification that science denies to us is deception.”

— Ann Druyan

19. “A world that tiny cannot possibly be the center of a cosmos of all that is, let alone the sole focus of its creator. The pale blue dot is a silent rebuke to the fundamentalist, the nationalist, the militarist, the polluter – to anyone who does not put above all other things the protection of our little planet and the life that it sustains in the vast cold darkness.”

— Ann Druyan

20. “For most of the history of our species we were helpless to understand how nature works. We took every storm, drought, illness and comet personally. We created myths and spirits in an attempt to explain the patterns of nature.”

— Ann Druyan

21. “We batter this planet as if we had someplace else to go.”

— Ann Druyan

22. “I’m just at the age when time speeds up in an odd way. Do you know what I mean? The winters come closer together and you learn to accept that you’re not special anymore.”

— Ann Druyan

23. “In the 1970s, I think that there was probably a higher degree of respect for science, of hope about the future, and the future-oriented vision.”

— Ann Druyan

24. “Science has the cold facts, but lacks religion’s social organization and ability to inspire that moves people to act.”

— Ann Druyan

25. “If you are searching for sacred knowledge and not just a palliative for your fears, then you will train yourself to be a good skeptic.”

— Ann Druyan

26. “I’ve been thinking about the distorted view of science that prevails in our culture. I’ve been wondering about this, because our civilization is completely dependent on science and high technology, yet most of us are alienated from science.”

— Ann Druyan

27. “However, he never understood why anyone would want to separate science, which is just a way of searching for what is true, from what we hold sacred, which are those truths that inspire love and awe.”

— Ann Druyan

28. “No single step in the persuit of enlightenment should ever be considered sacred; only the search was.”

— Ann Druyan

29. “This planet seems to be in such sorry shape. And I can’t ever think about the rest of the universe without coming back home and thinking what the implications for life here would be if we were to really have some definitive proof of extraterrestrial life.”

— Ann Druyan

30. “This is one of the things I love about science. When the evidence for a slightly older universe was discovered, there were no scientists who sought to suppress it. As soon as the new data were verified, this revision in our understanding was embraced by the whole scientific community. That permanently revolutionary attitude, that openness to change, at the heart of science is what makes it so effective.”

— Ann Druyan

31. “The aspirations of democracy are based on the notion of an informed citizenry, capable of making wise decisions. The choices we are asked to make become increasingly complex. They require the longer-term thinking and greater tolerance for ambiguity that science fosters. The new economy is predicated on a continuous pipeline of scientific and technological innovation. It can not exist without workers and consumers who are mathematically and scientifically literate.”

— Ann Druyan

32. “Well, I actually grew up in the sixties. I feel very lucky, actually, that that was my slice of time that I was dealt. Let’s remember that the real motivation in the sixties, and even in the fifties, was the Cold War.”

— Ann Druyan

33. “As I looked out at the glittering waters of the Pacific I was seeing for Carl. He knew that it’s not for any one generation to see the completed picture. That’s the point. The picture is never completed. There is always so much more that remains to be discovered.”

— Ann Druyan

34. “People think that if you are a scientist you have to give up that joy of discovery, that passion, that sense of the great romance of life. I say thats completely opposite of the truth.”

— Ann Druyan

35. “We may be living at that moment, on the cusp, when we go from being a species that feels a kind of loneliness in the cosmos to actually one sometime in the not too distant future being able to confirm the existence of other intelligent life.”

— Ann Druyan

36. “I found that it was easiest to convey the information in the context of the life of the scientist or in the context of our own personal experience, and there was no idea that was too complicated that couldn’t be explained clearly and directly.”

— Ann Druyan

37. “Ramona wasn’t at home anywhere. She felt like a spy in life and the ending of every great book and each orgasm, and the sight of every homeless shopping bag lady infected her with a titanic yearning for the world to make an unscheduled stop.”

— Ann Druyan

38. “Science reserves the highest reward for those of you who disprove our most cherished beliefs. At any moment someone from any walk of life could come forward and be responsible for a complete revision of our view of everything.”

— Ann Druyan

39. “It’s not for any one generation to see the completed picture. That’s the point. The picture is never completed. There is always so much more that remains to be discovered.”

— Ann Druyan

40. “I guess I so desperately want to see us put this planet right. It’s so horrifying to me that a fifth of us are starving every night, and that forty thousand children die every single day.”

— Ann Druyan

41. “What distant star had to explode to seed our world with inspiration?”

— Ann Druyan

42. “To know what is real, one must subject one’s ideas to the rigorous, error-correcting mechanism of science, seeking verification that can be expressed mathematically.”

— Ann Druyan

43. “This is the essence of emergence: tiny units of matter operating collectively to become something much more than themselves, to enable the cosmos to know itself.”

— Ann Druyan

44. “Is DNA destiny?”

— Ann Druyan

45. “What I love about science is that it demands of us a tolerance for ambiguity. It requires us to live with humility regarding our ignorance, withholding judgment until the evidence comes in. That needn’t prevent us from using the little we do know to search for and decrypt new languages of reality.”

— Ann Druyan

46. “Lethal heat waves, droughts, and runaway wildfires of unprecedented magnitude, check. The scientists warned us. The corporations with vested interests in the fossil fuel industry and the governments they supported acted just like the tobacco companies. They pretended the science was unsettled and stalled for precious years.”

— Ann Druyan

47. “What good is it to know of a danger if you don’t do anything about it? Maybe it’s better not to know. Knowing can be a curse.”

— Ann Druyan