Quotes About Carl Sagan

#1. 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

#2. Carl Sagan's 'Pale Blue Dot' is where I got the title 'Momentary Masters.'

Albert Hammond Jr.

#3. Mythology is about Good VS Evil, is it not? We can pretend runes and astrology and reading tea leaves ... But to whom do we pray when we are terrified? Carl Sagan's essays?

John Steakley

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. I agree, along with Carl Sagan, that we should eventually become a two planet species. Life is too precious to place on a single planet.

Michio Kaku

#7. As astronomer Carl Sagan once aptly put it, you do not want to keep your mind so open that your brain is likely to fall out.

Massimo Pigliucci

#8. I want Carl Sagan to explain the sky to me.

Whoopi Goldberg

#9. If you look up at the Milky Way through the eyes of Carl Sagan, you get a feeling in your chest of something greater than yourself. And it is. But it's not supernatural.

Richard Dawkins

#10. By my reckoning, I'm about 100 kilometers from Pathfinder. Technically it's called "Carl Sagan Memorial Station." But with all due respect to Carl, I can call it whatever the hell I want. I'm the King of Mars.

Andy Weir

#11. In a slick manifesto called Cosmos, Carl Sagan artfully packaged his own creed: The Cosmos is all there is, or was, or ever will be.

Charles W. Colson

#12. Skeptical scientists often point out, as Carl Sagan has, that the wonders of real science far surpass the supposed wonders of fringe science. I think it is possible to invert that idea, and to say that the wonders of real consciousness far surpass what conventional science admits can exist.

Michael Crichton

#13. Carl Sagan spoke fluently between biology and geology and astrophysics and physics. If you move fluently across those boundaries, you realize that science is everywhere; science is not something you can step around or sweep under the rug.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson

#14. When I was in my teens, Yehudi Menuhin, who was at work on his project 'The Music of Man,' introduced me to the great astronomer Carl Sagan. It was Sagan who first opened my eyes to the magnitude of the universe, and essentially to the notion of 'music of the spheres.'

Daniel Hope

#15. My fundamental premise about the brain is that its workings - what we sometimes call "mind" - are a consequence of its anatomy and physiology, and nothing more. - CARL SAGAN

Michio Kaku

#16. In the 1970s, we had Carl Sagan, and he was so suave with his turtleneck and his tweed jacket. And he was, you know, he made science look cool. And in punk rock, we haven't had that. We haven't had the Carl Sagan of punk.

Greg Graffin

#17. 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

#18. 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

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

Carl Sagan

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

Carl Sagan

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. 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

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

Carl Sagan

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

Carl Sagan

#27. 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

#28. 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

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

Carl Sagan

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

Carl Sagan

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

Carl Sagan

#32. 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

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

Carl Sagan

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

Carl Sagan

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

Carl Sagan

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

Carl Sagan

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

Carl Sagan

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

Carl Sagan

#39. 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

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

Carl Sagan

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. 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

#44. 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

#45. 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

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

Carl Sagan

#47. 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

#48. 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

#49. 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

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

Carl Sagan

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

Carl Sagan

#52. 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

#53. 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

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

Carl Sagan

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

Carl Sagan

#56. 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

#57. 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

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

Carl Sagan

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

Carl Sagan

#60. 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

#61. 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

#62. 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

#63. 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

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

Carl Sagan

#65. Billions and billions.

Carl Sagan

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

Carl Sagan

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

Carl Sagan

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

Carl Sagan

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

Carl Sagan

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

Carl Sagan

#71. 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

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

Carl Sagan

#73. We are one species. We are starstuff.

Carl Sagan

#74. 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

#75. 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

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

Carl Sagan

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

Carl Sagan

#78. 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

#79. 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

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

Carl Sagan

#81. 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

#82. 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

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

Carl Sagan

#84. 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

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

Carl Sagan

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

Carl Sagan

#87. 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

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

Carl Sagan

#89. 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

#90. 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

#91. 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

#92. 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

#93. 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

#94. 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

#95. 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

#96. 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

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

Carl Sagan

#98. 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

#99. Valid criticism does you a favor.

Carl Sagan

#100. 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