Sagan Quotes

#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. Sagan is an astronomer with one eye on the stars, another on history, and a third - his mind's - on the human condition. ...

Carl Sagan

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. My protag likes to play with matches. Then she finds out she doesn't need the matches.'
"I would totally totally TBR that," Sagan said.

Scott Westerfeld

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. 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

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

Whoopi Goldberg

#12. 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

#13. 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

#14. The proportions of these salts and minerals in our tissues are uncannily similar to those in sea water - we sweat and cry sea water, as Margulis and Sagan have put it - but curiously we cannot tolerate them as an input.

Bill Bryson

#15. Interviewer: Didn't Sagan want to believe?
Druyan: he didn't want to believe. he wanted to know.

Ann Druyan

#16. 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

#17. [When a religious couple wrote to Sagan about fulfilled prophecies, he wrote back in May 1996:]

If 'fulfilled prophecy' is your criterion, why do you not believe in materialistic science, which has an unparalleled record of fulfilled prophecy? Consider, for example, eclipses.

Carl Sagan

#18. 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

#19. 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

#20. Everything's a game,' Sagan said. 'When you get down to it. Everything in life is ultimately some kind of strategy. If you have a better strategy than the other guy, he's going down.

R.A. Nelson

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. 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

#24. When you reached the point of losing your reasoning, that's called falling in love. Actually, those who have lost their reasoning chase blindly without thinking about the risks. They run and run like confused wild pigs. That's why, most of the time, they end up getting hurt. -- Sagan

Yuuri Eda

#25. 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

#26. 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

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

Carl Sagan

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

Carl Sagan

#29. 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

#30. 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

#31. 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

#32. 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

#33. He was stabbed by memory, that tyrant which impinges upon our dreams and leaps at out throat as soon as we awaken.

Francoise Sagan

#34. You 'mustn't' nothing in your life. I don't 'must' nothing in the life, just die. It's important, yeah, but I have also a future in front of me.

Peter Sagan

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

Carl Sagan

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

Carl Sagan

#37. 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

#38. 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

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

Carl Sagan

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

Carl Sagan

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

Carl Sagan

#42. 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

#43. I like men to behave like men. I like them strong and childish.

Francoise Sagan

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

Carl Sagan

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

Carl Sagan

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

Carl Sagan

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

Carl Sagan

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

Carl Sagan

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

Carl Sagan

#50. 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

#51. Usually I avoided college students, whom I considered brutal, wrapped up in themselves, particularly in their youth, in which they found material for drama or an excuse for their own boredom. I did not care for young people.

Francoise Sagan

#52. Looking for pleasure is the best way to ensure you won't find it.

Francoise Sagan

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

Carl Sagan

#54. 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

#55. 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

#56. 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

#57. 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

#58. 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

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

Carl Sagan

#60. 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

#61. 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

#62. 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

#63. We always want someone we've treated badly to be gay. It's less upsetting.

Francoise Sagan

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

Carl Sagan

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

Carl Sagan

#66. 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

#67. 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

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

Carl Sagan

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

Carl Sagan

#70. 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

#71. Writing is just having a sheet of paper, a pen and not a shadow of an idea of what you are going to say.

Francoise Sagan

#72. Every little girl knows about love. It is only her capacity to suffer from it that increases.

Francoise Sagan

#73. 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

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

Carl Sagan

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

Carl Sagan

#76. 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

#77. The happiness of people who are in love and who are loved shows in their faces. They have an expression that's at once very far away and very much part of the present.

Francoise Sagan

#78. 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

#79. 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

#80. 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

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

Carl Sagan

#82. Billions and billions.

Carl Sagan

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

Carl Sagan

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

Carl Sagan

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

Carl Sagan

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

Carl Sagan

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

Carl Sagan

#88. 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

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

Carl Sagan

#90. We are one species. We are starstuff.

Carl Sagan

#91. 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

#92. 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

#93. Illness is the opposite of freedom. It makes everything impossible.

Francoise Sagan

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

Carl Sagan

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

Carl Sagan

#96. 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

#97. 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

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

Carl Sagan

#99. 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

#100. 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