Quotes About Carl Sagan

#1. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of magic.

Carl Sagan

#2. The nature of life on Earth and the search for life elsewhere are two sides of the same question - the search for who we are.

Carl Sagan

#3. Sailors on a becalmed sea, we sense the stirring of a breeze.

Carl Sagan

#4. There is perhaps no better a demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world.

Carl Sagan

#5. If chimpanzees have consciousness, if they are capable of abstractions, do they not have what until now has been described as 'human rights'? How smart does a chimp have to be before killing him constitutes murder?

Carl Sagan

#6. If there is as a continuum from self-reproducing molecules, such as DNA, to microbes, and an evolutionary sequence continuum from microbes to humans, why should we imagine that continuum to stop at humans?

Carl Sagan

#7. We have begun to contemplate our origins: starstuff pondering the stars; organized assemblages of ten billion billion billion atoms considering the evolution of atoms; tracing the long journey by which, here at least, consciousness arose.

Carl Sagan

#8. The chance of receiving a signal from a civilization exactly as advanced as we are should be minuscule. If they were even a little behind us, they would lack the technological capability to communicate with us at all. So the most likely signal would come from a civilization much more advanced.

Carl Sagan

#9. Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.

Carl Sagan

#10. I hold that popularization of science is successful if, at first, it does no more than spark the sense of wonder.

Carl Sagan

#11. I don't know the answer. Maybe no one knows. Maybe when you grow up, you'll be the first to find out.

Carl Sagan

#12. All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value.

Carl Sagan

#13. Nothing disturbs me more than the glorification of stupidity.

Carl Sagan

#14. Something very strange is going on in the depths of space.

Carl Sagan

#15. When we look up at night and view the stars, everything we see is shinning because of distant nuclear fusion.

Carl Sagan

#16. Because men, compared to male chimps, have such relatively small testicles (large testicles indicate a species where many males mate, one after the other, with the same female), we might guess that promiscuous societies were uncommon in the immediate human past.

Carl Sagan

#17. For a long time the human instinct to understand was thwarted by facile religious explanations.

Carl Sagan

#18. If constellations had been named in the 20th century, I suppose we would see bicycles.

Carl Sagan

#19. The cosmos is full beyond measure of elegant truths / of exquisite interrelationships / of the awesome machinery of nature

Carl Sagan

#20. In any case, we do not advance the human cause by refusing to consider ideas that make us frightened.

Carl Sagan

#21. The words "question" and "quest" are cognates. Only through inquiry can we discover truth.

Carl Sagan

#22. The sacred truth of science is that there are no sacred truths.

Carl Sagan

#23. Absolute certainty will always elude us. We will always be mired in error. The most each generation can hope for is to reduce the error ...

Carl Sagan

#24. Perhaps the depth of love can be calibrated by the number of different selves that are actively involved in a given relationship.

Carl Sagan

#25. Modern Roman Catholicism has no quarrel with the Big Bang, with a Universe 15 billion or so years old, with the first living things arising from prebiological molecules, or with humans evolving

Carl Sagan

#26. 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

#27. People are not stupid. They believe things for reasons. The last way for skeptics to get the attention of bright, curious, intelligent people is to belittle or condescend or to show arrogance toward their beliefs.

Carl Sagan

#28. 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

#29. Would the Gardners and the workers at the Yerkes Primate Center be remembered dimly as legendary folk heroes or gods of another species? Would there be myths, like those of Prometheus, Thoth, or Cannes, about divine beings who had given the gift of language to the apes?

Carl Sagan

#30. But if they called everything divine which they do not understand, why, there would be no end of divine beings.

Carl Sagan

#31. The Platonists and their Christian successors held the peculiar notion that the Earth was tainted and somehow nasty, while the heavens were perfect and divine. The fundamental idea that the Earth is a planet, that we are citizens of the Universe, was rejected and forgotten.

Carl Sagan

#32. Some evidence suggests the left-handers are more likely to have problems with such left-hemisphere functions as reading, writing, speaking and arithmetic; and to be more adept at such right -hemisphere functions as imagination, pattern recognition and general creativity.

Carl Sagan

#33. Na Arean sat alone in space as a cloud that floats in nothingness. He slept not, for there was no sleep; he hungered not, for as yet there was no hunger. So he remained for a great while, until a thought came to his mind. He said to himself, I will make a thing.

Carl Sagan

#34. If the greenhouse effect is a blanket in which we wrap ourselves to keep warm, nuclear winter kicks the blanket off.

Carl Sagan

#35. I've always thought an agnostic is an atheist without the courage of his convictions.

Carl Sagan

#36. The prediction of nuclear winter is drawn not, of course, from any direct experience with the consequences of global nuclear war, but rather from an investigation of the governing physics.

Carl Sagan

#37. We are too small and our statecraft is too feeble to be seen by a spacecraft between the Earth and the Moon. From this vantage point, our obsession with nationalism is nowhere in evidence.

Carl Sagan

#38. Our children long for realistic maps of the future that they can be proud of. Where are the cartographers of human purpose?

Carl Sagan

#39. Civilization is a product of the cerebral cortex.

Carl Sagan

#40. In the year 540 B.C. or thereabouts, on the island of Samos, there came to power a tyrant named Polycrates. He seems to have started as a caterer and then gone on to international piracy.

Carl Sagan

#41. You could just as well say that an agnostic is a deeply religious person with at least a rudimentary knowledge of human fallibility.

Carl Sagan

#42. Each time it happens we're tempted to infer the direct intervention of a Maker.

Carl Sagan

#43. It's hard to kill a creature once it lets you see its consciousness.

Carl Sagan

#44. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries you could travel from Holland to China in a year or two, the time it has taken Voyager to travel from Earth to Jupiter.

Carl Sagan

#45. We wish to find the truth, no matter where it lies. But to find the truth we need imagination and skepticism both. We will not be afraid to speculate, but we will be careful to distinguish speculation from fact.

Carl Sagan

#46. The great radio telescopes of the world are constructed in remote locations for the same reason Paul Gauguin sailed to Tahiti: For them to work well they must be far from civilization.

Carl Sagan

#47. Atheism is more than just the knowledge that gods do not exist, and that religion is either a mistake or a fraud. Atheism is an attitude, a frame of mind that looks at the world objectively, fearlessly, always trying to understand all things as a part of nature.

Emmett F. Fields

#48. To live in the hearts of others is to never die in those we leave behind.

Carl Sagan

#49. Billions and billions.

Carl Sagan

#50. Intellectual capacity is no guarantee against being dead wrong.

Carl Sagan

#51. Extraordinary observations require extraordinary evidence to make them believable.

Carl Sagan

#52. Intuitive: The word conveys, I think, a diffuse annoyance at our inability to understand how we come by such knowledge.

Carl Sagan

#53. A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.

Carl Sagan

#54. Those are some of the things that molecules do, given four billion years of evolution

Carl Sagan

#55. 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

#56. Predictions of surprising events always prove more accurate if not set down on paper beforehand.

Carl Sagan

#57. We are one species. We are starstuff.

Carl Sagan

#58. Mars has become a kind of mythic arena onto which we have projected our earthly hopes and fears. But our psychological predispositions pro or con must not mislead us. All that matters is the evidence, and the evidence is not yet in.

Carl Sagan

#59. Since much of the ocean floor remains unexplored (except perhaps for still-classified data acquired by the U.S. and Soviet navies), we may know more about the surface topography of Venus than about any other planet, Earth included.

Carl Sagan

#60. Otto Warburg had, half a century before, proposed that oxidation was the cause of many cancers.

Carl Sagan

#61. One of the greatest gifts adults can give - to their offspring and to their society - is to read to children.

Carl Sagan

#62. 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

#63. One trend that bothers me is the glorification of stupidity, that the media is reassuring people it's alright not to know anything. That to me is far more dangerous than a little pornography on the Internet.

Carl Sagan

#64. Any sufficiently crisp question can be answered by a single binary digit-0 or 1, yes or no.

Carl Sagan

#65. There are lots of ways to communicate what we know, but few ways to communicate what we feel. Music is one way to communicate emotions.

Carl Sagan

#66. People's feelings are as strong as they always were, and skepticism is probably as unfashionable today as in any other age. Accordingly,

Carl Sagan

#67. If we say that God has always been, why not save a step and conclude that the universe has always been?

Carl Sagan

#68. It will not be we who reach Alpha Centauri, and the other nearby stars. It will be a species very like us - but with more of our strengths and fewer of our weaknesses.

Carl Sagan

#69. It is the tension between creativity and skepticism that has produced the stunning and unexpected findings of science.

Carl Sagan

#70. You're capable of such beautiful dreams and such horrible nightmares ...

Carl Sagan

#71. The politicians and the religious leaders and the weapons scientists have been at it for a long time and they've made a thorough mess of it. I mean, we're in deep trouble.

Carl Sagan

#72. Better the hard truth, I say, than the comforting fantasy.

Carl Sagan

#73. A new generation gladly abandons its critical and skeptical faculties. Old slogans and hatreds are dusted off. What was only recently muttered guiltily is now offered as political axiom and agenda.

Carl Sagan

#74. 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

#75. 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

#76. I would be very ashamed of my civilization if we did not try to find out if there is life in outer space.

Carl Sagan

#77. 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

#78. 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

#79. Do whales know each other's names? Can they recognise each other as individuals by sounds alone? We have cut the whales off from themselves. Creatures that communicated for tens of millions of years have now effectively been silenced.

Carl Sagan

#80. 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

#81. Ours is the first generation that has grown up with science-fiction ideas.

Carl Sagan

#82. There is no single ultimate truth to be achieved, after which all the scientists can retire. And because this is so, the world is far more interesting, both

Carl Sagan

#83. Valid criticism does you a favor.

Carl Sagan

#84. A universe that is unknowable is no fit place for a thinking being. The ideal universe for us is one very much like the universe we inhabit.

Carl Sagan

#85. To live in the hearts we leave behind is to live forever.

Carl Sagan

#86. [Kepler] preferred the hard truth to his dearest illusions, and that is the heart of science.

Carl Sagan

#87. If there is life, then I believe we should do nothing to disturb that life.
Mars then, belongs to the Martians, even if they are microbes.

Carl Sagan

#88. Perhaps the locale of the subjunctive mood will
one day be found. Will Latins turn out to be extravagantly endowed and English-speaking peoples significantly short-changed in this minor piece of brain anatomy?

Carl Sagan

#89. The total amount of energy from outside the solar system ever received by all the radio telescopes on the planet Earth is less than the energy of a single snowflake striking the ground.

Carl Sagan

#90. On the day that we do discover that we are not alone, our society may begin to evolve and transform in some incredible and wondrous new ways.

Carl Sagan

#91. Knee-deep in the cosmic overwhelm, I'm stricken
by the ricochet wonder of it all: the plain
everythingness of everything, in cahoots
with the everythingness of everything else.
- From Diffraction (for Carl Sagan)

Diane Ackerman

#92. The known is finite, the unknown infinite; intellectually we stand on an islet in the midst of an illimitable ocean of inexplicability. Our business in every generation is to reclaim a little more land. - T. H. Huxley,

Carl Sagan

#93. 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

#94. If the Earth were as old as a person, a typical organism would be born, live and die in a sliver of a second. We are fleeting, transitional creatures, snowflakes fallen on the hearth fire.

Carl Sagan

#95. Frederick Douglass taught that literacy is the path from slavery to freedom. There are many kinds of slavery and many kinds of freedom, but reading is still the path.

Carl Sagan

#96. Each of us is a tiny being, permitted to ride on the outermost skin of one of the smaller planets for a few dozen trips around the local star.

Carl Sagan

#97. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

Carl Sagan

#98. The sleeping style of each organism is exquisitely
adapted to the ecology of the animal. It is conceivable that animals who are too stupid to be quiet on their own initiative are, during periods of high risk, immobilized by the implacable arm of sleep.

Carl Sagan

#99. Our species has discovered a way to communicate through the dark, to transcend immense distances. No means of communication is faster or cheaper or reaches out farther. It's called radio.

Carl Sagan

#100. In addition to Ameslan, chimpanzees and other nonhuman primates are being taught a variety of other gestural languages. And it is just this transition from tongue to hand that has permitted humans to regain the ability-lost, according to Josephus, since Eden-to communicate with the animals.

Carl Sagan