Top 100 Carl Sagan Science Quotes
#1. Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.
Carl Sagan
#2. I hold that popularization of science is successful if, at first, it does no more than spark the sense of wonder.
Carl Sagan
#3. When we look up at night and view the stars, everything we see is shinning because of distant nuclear fusion.
Carl Sagan
#4. The sacred truth of science is that there are no sacred truths.
Carl Sagan
#5. Scientists make mistakes. Accordingly, it is the job of the scientist to recognize our weakness, to examine the widest range of opinions, to be ruthlessly self-critical. Science is a collective enterprise with the error-correction machinery often running smoothly.
Carl Sagan
#6. Often, superstition and injustice are imposed by the same ecclesiastical and secular authorities, working hand in glove. It is no surprise that political revolutions, scepticism about religion, and the rise of science might go together,
Carl Sagan
#7. If the greenhouse effect is a blanket in which we wrap ourselves to keep warm, nuclear winter kicks the blanket off.
Carl Sagan
#8. A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.
Carl Sagan
#9. Those are some of the things that molecules do, given four billion years of evolution
Carl Sagan
#10. It was difficult to hold Broca's brain without wondering whether in some sense Broca was still in there - his wit, his skeptical mien, his abrupt gesticulations when he talked, his quiet and sentimental moments.
Carl Sagan
#11. The theologian Meric Casaubon argued - in his 1668 book, Of Credulity and Incredulity - that witches must exist because, after all, everyone believes in them. Anything that a large number of people believe must be true.
Carl Sagan
#12. It is the tension between creativity and skepticism that has produced the stunning and unexpected findings of science.
Carl Sagan
#13. I know of no significant advance in science that did not require major inputs from both cerebral hemispheres. This is not true for art, where apparently there are no experiments by which capable, dedicated and unbiased observers can determine to their mutual satisfaction which works are great.
Carl Sagan
#14. We are the only species on the planet, so far as we know, to have invented a communal memory stored neither in our genes nor in our brains. The warehouse of this memory is called the library
Carl Sagan
#15. The impediment to scientific thinking is not, I think, the difficulty of the subject. Complex intellectual feats have been mainstays even of oppressed cultures. Shamans, magicians and theologians are highly skilled in their intricate and arcane arts. No, the impediment is political and hierarchical.
Carl Sagan
#16. The way to find out about our place in the universe is by examining the universe and by examining ourselves - without preconceptions, with as unbiased a mind as we can muster.
Carl Sagan
#17. Science is not perfect. It's often misused; it's only a tool, but it's the best tool we have. Self-correcting , ever changing, applicable to everything: with this tool, we vanquish the impossible.
Carl Sagan
#18. Ours is the first generation that has grown up with science-fiction ideas.
Carl Sagan
#19. [Kepler] preferred the hard truth to his dearest illusions, and that is the heart of science.
Carl Sagan
#20. The whole idea of a democratic application of skepticism is that everyone should have the essential tools to effectively and constructively evaluate claims to knowledge.
Carl Sagan
#21. The lifetime of a human being is measured by decades, the lifetime of the Sun is a hundred million times longer. Compared to a star, we are like mayflies, fleeting ephemeral creatures who live out their lives in the course of a single day.
Carl Sagan
#22. We live in a complex age where many of the problems we face can, whatever their origins, only have solutions that involve a deep understanding of science and technology.
Carl Sagan
#23. When you're in love, you want to tell the world. My lifelong love affair with science
Carl Sagan
#24. Once we lose our fear of being tiny, we find ourselves on the threshold of a vast and awesome Universe which dwarfs
in time, in space, and in potential
the tidy anthropocentric proscenium of our ancestors.
Carl Sagan
#25. 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.)
Carl Sagan
#26. But in introducing me simultaneously to skepticism and to wonder, they taught me the two uneasily cohabiting modes of thought that are central to the scientific method.
Carl Sagan
#27. I am often amazed at how much more capability and enthusiasm for science there is among elementary school youngsters than among college students.
Carl Sagan
#28. Any faith that admires truth, that strives to know God, must be brave enough to accommodate the universe.
Carl Sagan
#29. The values of science and the values of democracy are concordant, in many cases indistinguishable.
Carl Sagan
#30. I don't want to believe. I want to know.
Carl Sagan
#31. In the vastness of space and the immensity of time, it is my joy to share a planet and an epoch with Annie.
[Dedication to Sagan's wife, Ann Druyan, in Cosmos]
Carl Sagan
#32. Science gropes and staggers toward improved understanding.
Carl Sagan
#33. If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits?
Carl Sagan
#34. It's a lazy Saturday afternoon, there's a couple lying naked in bed reading Encyclopediea Brittannica to each other, and arguing about whether the Andromeda Galaxy is more 'numinous' than the Ressurection. Do they know how to have a good time, or don't they?
Carl Sagan
#35. The same few dozen organic molecules are used over and over again in biology for the widest variety of functions.
Carl Sagan
#36. On Titan the molecules that have been raining down like manna from heaven for the last 4 billion years might still be there largely unaltered deep-frozen awaiting the chemists from Earth
Carl Sagan
#37. If you want to save your child from polio, you can pray or you can inoculate ... Choose science.
Carl Sagan
#38. The secrets of evolution, are time and death.
There's an unbroken thread that stretches from those first cells to us.
Carl Sagan
#40. And you are made of a hundred trillion cells. We are, each of us, a multitude.
Carl Sagan
#41. The fact that so little of the findings of modern science is prefigured in Scripture to my mind casts further doubt on it divine inspiration.
Carl Sagan
#42. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.
Carl Sagan
#44. If we long for our planet to be important, there is something we can do about it. We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers.
Carl Sagan
#45. Pseudoscience is embraced, it might be argued, in exact proportion as real science is misunderstood.
Carl Sagan
#46. Advances in medicine and agriculture have saved vastly more lives than have been lost in all the wars in history.
Carl Sagan
#47. The American and Russian capabilities in space science and technology mesh; they interdigitate. Each is strong where the other is weak. This is a marriage made in heaven - but one that has been surprisingly difficult to consummate.
Carl Sagan
#48. There is much that science doesn't understand, many mysteries still to be resolved. In a Universe tens of billions of light-years across and some ten or fifteen billion years old, this may be the case forever. We are constantly stumbling on new surprises
Carl Sagan
#49. Let's see if I got this right," she would say to herself. "I've taken an inert gas that's in the air, made it into a liquid, put some impurities in a ruby, attached a magnet, and detected the fires of creation.
Carl Sagan
#50. All inquiries carry with them some element of risk.
Carl Sagan
#51. Might it be possible at some future time, when neurophysiology has advanced substantially, to reconstruct the memories or insight of someone long dead? ... It would be the ultimate breach of privacy.
Carl Sagan
#52. And if the world does not in all respects correspond to our wishes, is this the fault of science, or of those who would impose their wishes on the world?
Carl Sagan
#53. Science is a way to not fool ourselves.
Carl Sagan
#54. It may be that there are kernels of truth in a few of these doctrines, but their widespread acceptance
betokens a lack of intellectual rigor, an absence of skepticism, a need to replace experiments by desires.
Carl Sagan
#55. Adolf Hitler! Ken, it makes me furious. Forty million people die to defeat that megalomaniac, and he's the star of the first broadcast to another civilization? He's representing us. And them. It's that madman's dream come true.
Carl Sagan
#56. We can judge our progress by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers, our willingness to embrace what is true rather than what feels good.
Carl Sagan
#57. All civilizations become either spacefaring or extinct.
Carl Sagan
#58. We are star stuff which has taken its destiny into its own hands.
Carl Sagan
#59. Perhaps for the first time in any medium, the person teaching you science - Carl Sagan - cared about the tangled mental roadways that can rob a person of rational thought.
Carl Sagan
#60. All science asks is to employ the same levels of skepticism we use in buying a used car or in judging the quality of analgesics or beer from their television commercials.
Carl Sagan
#61. By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out. -this quote is actually found in Carl Sagan's book The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, where he attributes it to engineer James Oberg, who says he stole it from someone else.
Richard Dawkins
#62. Had Jupiter been several dozen times more massive, the matter in its interior would have undergone thermonuclear reactions, and Jupiter would have begun to shine by its own light. The largest planet is a star that failed.
Carl Sagan
#63. Science is merely an extremely powerful method of winnowing what's true from what feels good.
Carl Sagan
#64. Huygens was, of course, a citizen of his time. Who of us is not? He claimed science as his religion and then argued that the planets must be inhabited because otherwise God had made worlds for nothing.
Carl Sagan
#65. There are many hypotheses in science that are wrong. That's perfectly alright; it's the aperture to finding out what's right. Science is a self-correcting process. To be accepted, new ideas must survive the most rigorous standards of evidence and scrutiny.
Carl Sagan
#66. Science is only a Latin word for knowledge
Carl Sagan
#67. But I try not to think with my gut. If I'm serious about understanding the world, thinking with anything besides my brain, as tempting as that might be, is likely to get me into trouble.
Carl Sagan
#68. Black holes collect problems faster than they collect matter.
Carl Sagan
#69. Every kid starts out as a natural-born scientist, and then we beat it out of them. A few trickle through the system with their wonder and enthusiasm for science intact.
Carl Sagan
#70. The method of science is tried and true. It is not perfect, it's just the best we have. And to abandon it, with its skeptical protocols, is the pathway to a dark age.
Carl Sagan
#71. The prediction I can make with the highest confidence is that the most amazing discoveries will be the ones we are not today wise enough to foresee.
Carl Sagan
#72. Probably a dozen times since their death I've heard my mother or father, in an ordinary conversational tone of voice, call my name. They had called my name often during my life with them ... It doesn't seem strange to me.
Carl Sagan
#73. All of us long for a competent, uncorrupt, charismtatic leader. We will leap at the opportunity to support, to believe, to feel good.
Carl Sagan
#74. Science is a collaborative enterprise, spanning the generations. When it permits us to see the far side of some new horizon, we remember those who prepared the way - seeing for them also.
Carl Sagan
#75. It is the responsibility of scientists never to suppress knowledge, no matter how awkward that knowledge is, no matter how it may bother those in power; we are not smart enough to decide which pieces of knowledge are permissible, and which are not. ...
Carl Sagan
#76. If we teach only the findings and products of science - no matter how useful and even inspiring they may be - without communicating its critical method, how can the average person possibly distinguish science from pseudoscience?
Carl Sagan
#77. Liberation from superstition is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for science.
Carl Sagan
#78. We can't help it. Life looks for life.
Carl Sagan
#79. So those who wished for some central cosmic purpose for us, or at least our world, or at least our solar system, or at least our galaxy, have been disappointed, progressively disappointed. The universe is not responsive to our ambitious expectations.
Carl Sagan
#80. Cutting off fundamental, curiosity-driven science is like eating the seed corn. We may have a little more to eat next winter but what will we plant so we and our children will have enough to get through the winters to come?
Carl Sagan
#81. Societies will, of course, wish to exercise prudence in deciding which technologies that is, which applications of science are to be pursued and which not. But without funding basic research, without supporting the acquisition of knowledge for its own sake, our options become dangerously limited.
Carl Sagan
#82. Especially where the implications of what we think we are seeing seem to be profound, we may not exercise adequate self-discipline and self-criticism.
Carl Sagan
#83. 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.
Carl Sagan
#84. Significant change might require those who are now high in the hierarchy to move downward many steps. This seems to them undesirable and is resisted.
Carl Sagan
#85. If we are merely matter intricately assembled, is this really demeaning? If there's nothing here but atoms, does that make us less or does that make matter more?
Carl Sagan
#86. I consider it an extremely dangerous doctrine, because the more likely we are to assume that the solution comes from the outside, the less likely we are to solve our problems ourselves.
Carl Sagan
#87. Science is a way to call the bluff of those who only pretend to knowledge. It is a bulwark against mysticism, against superstition, against religion misapplied to where it has no business being.
Carl Sagan
#88. These days there seems to be nowhere left to explore, at least on the land area of the Earth. Victims of their very success, the explorers now pretty much stay home.
Carl Sagan
#89. Science is an attempt, largely successful, to understand the world, to get a grip on things, to get hold of ourselves, to steer a safe course. Microbiology and meteorology now explain what only a few centuries ago was considered sufficient cause to burn women to death.
Carl Sagan
#90. We grow up in isolation. Only slowly do we teach ourselves the Cosmos.
Carl Sagan
#91. I maintain there is much more wonder in science than in pseudoscience. And in addition, to whatever measure this term has any meaning, science has the additional virtue, and it is not an inconsiderable one, of being true.
Carl Sagan
#92. Science cuts two ways, of course; its products can be used for both good and evil. But there's no turning back from science. The early warnings about technological dangers also come from science.
Carl Sagan
#93. A central lesson of science is that to understand complex issues (or even simple ones), we must try to free our minds of dogma and to guarantee the freedom to publish, to contradict, and to experiment. Arguments from authority are unacceptable.
Carl Sagan
#94. It is certainly true that all beliefs and all myths are worthy of a respectful hearing. It is not true that all folk beliefs are equally valid - if we're talking not about an internal mindset, but about understanding of the external reality.
Carl Sagan
#95. Christiaan Huygens became simultaneously adept in languages, drawing, law, science, engineering, mathematics and music. His interests and allegiances were broad. "The world is my country," he said, "science my religion.
Carl Sagan
#96. Would not a rational society spend more on understanding and preventing, than on preparing for, the next war?
Carl Sagan
#97. Whatever their neurological and molecular antecedents, hallucinations feel real. They are sought out in many cultures and considered a sign of spiritual enlightenment.
Carl Sagan
#98. The lure of the marvelous blunts our critical faculties.
Carl Sagan
#99. Except for hydrogen, all the atoms that make each of us up - the iron in our blood, the calcium in our bones, the carbon in our brains - were manufactured in red giant stars thousands of light-years away in space and billions of years ago in time. We are, as I like to say, starstuff.
Carl Sagan
#100. Science ... looks skeptically at all claims to knowledge, old and new. It teaches not blind obedience to those in authority but to vigorous debate, and in many respects that's the secret of its success.
Carl Sagan
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