Science & Tech Quote by Ann Druyan

Science doesn’t get to be a private hobby in Ann Druyan’s telling; it’s a moral instrument, a bracing slap that returns us to reality. The hook is that she refuses the prestige definition of science as mere accumulation of knowledge. “All of science to me” starts as a personal credo, then widens into a cultural indictment: we’ve learned a lot, and yet we remain weirdly committed to delusion, tribal fantasy, and self-soothing stories. Her yardstick is bluntly human: knowledge matters “to the extent” that it changes how we perceive, not how many facts we can recite.

“Brings us to our senses” is the key phrase, because it’s doing double duty. On one level it’s literal: science is the disciplined extension of the senses, a set of tools that corrects bias and wishful thinking. On another, it’s corrective in the psychological sense: come to your senses, stop acting foolish. That phrasing smuggles in Druyan’s larger project, familiar from her work with Carl Sagan and her public-facing science writing: wonder is not an escape hatch from modernity, it’s a pathway out of superstition and into responsibility.

The subtext is impatience with science as status symbol or technological vending machine. If “everything that we have learned” doesn’t recalibrate our judgment about climate, war, fragility, and shared fate, then it’s trivia with a lab coat. Druyan’s intent isn’t to shrink science; it’s to aim it. Knowledge, in her frame, is only fully itself when it makes us saner.