We've tended in our cosmologies to make things familiar. Despite all our best efforts, we've not been very inventive. In the West, Heaven is placid and fluffy, and Hell is like the inside of a volcano. In many stories, both realms are governed by dominance hierarchies headed by gods or devils. Monotheists talked about the king of kings. In every culture we imagined something like our own political system running the Universe. Few found the similarity suspicious.
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p. 46Carl Sagan
I see no faults in the Church, and therefore let me be resurrected with the Saints, whether I ascend to heaven or descend to hell, or go to any other place. And if we go to hell, we will turn the devils out of doors and make a heaven of it.
Joseph Smith
Your entire universe will not be enough to make me guilty. You are the king of the Gods, Jupiter, the king of the stones and of the stars, the king of the waves of the sea. But you are not the king of men.
Jean-Paul Sartre
Always, Bill talked about being and becoming a writer, of all the stories and ideas inside him that had to come out.
We knew he had been sending out stories all along and collecting rejection slips but the day in 1934 when Joe Danysh and I arrived at the front door of the gallery and found the envelope addressed to us both, we knew it had really begun. Inside were two one dollar bills, two street car transfers and a card which read "One for the, money / one for the show / one For Virginia / and one for Joe." Signed William Shakespeare.William Saroyan
If the immediate creator of the universe be he who is proclaimed by Moses, then we hold nobler beliefs concerning him, inasmuch as we consider him to be the master of all things in general, but that there are besides national gods who are subordinate to him and are like viceroys of a king, each administering separately his own province; and, moreover, we do not make him the sectional rival of the gods whose station is subordinate to his. But if Moses first pays honour to a sectional god, and then makes the lordship of the whole universe contrast with his power, then it is better to believe as we do, and to recognise the God of the All, though not without apprehending also the God of Moses; this is better, I say, than to honour one who has been assigned the lordship over a very small portion, instead of the creator of all things.
Julian (Emperor)
The gods spend the wealth the universe gathers, they scan the wonders and fling them to nothingness. That’s why they’re the gods! I told you they were devils.
Fritz Leiber
Sagan, Carl
Sagan, Francoise
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