Carl Sagan Quotes

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For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.

Carl Sagan
Some part of our being knows this is where we came from. We long to return. And we can. Because the cosmos is also within us. We're made of star-stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.

Carl Sagan
The fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

Carl Sagan
Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.

Carl Sagan
In the vastness of space and the immensity of time, it is my joy to share a planet and an epoch with Annie.

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

Carl Sagan
Personally, I would be delighted if there were a life after death, especially if it permitted me to continue to learn about this world and others, if it gave me a chance to discover how history turns out.

Carl Sagan
A religion old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science, might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. Sooner or later such a religion will emerge.

Carl Sagan
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
Science — pure science, science not for any practical application but for its own sake — is a deeply emotional matter for those who practice it, as well as for those nonscientists who every now and then dip in to see what's been discovered lately.

Carl Sagan
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
In a complex universe, in a society undergoing unprecedented change, how can we find the truth if we are not willing to question everything and to give a fair hearing to everything?

Carl Sagan
In Mozambique, the story goes, monkeys do not talk, because they know if they utter even a single word some man will come and put them to work.

Carl Sagan
All my life, I've wondered about life beyond the earth. On those countless other planets that we think circle other suns, is there also life? Might the beings of other worlds resemble us, or would they be astonishingly different? What would they be made of? In the vast Milky Way galaxy, how common is what we call life? The nature of life on earth and the quest for life elsewhere are the two sides of the same question: the search for who we are.

Carl Sagan
We on Earth have just awakened to the great oceans of space and time from which we have emerged. We are the legacy of 15 billion years of cosmic evolution. We have a choice: We can enhance life and come to know the universe that made us, or we can squander our 15 billion-year heritage in meaningless self-destruction. What happens in the first second of the next cosmic year depends on what we do, here and now, with our intelligence and our knowledge of the cosmos.

Carl Sagan
We are an intelligent species and the use of our intelligence quite properly gives us pleasure. In this respect the brain is like a muscle. When it is in use we feel very good. Understanding is joyous.

Carl Sagan
Philosophers and scientists confidently offer up traits said to be uniquely human, and the monkeys and apes casually knock them down — toppling the pretension that humans constitute some sort of biological aristocracy among the beings on Earth.

Carl Sagan
Your religion assumes that people are children and need a boogeyman so they'll behave. You want people to believe in God so they'll obey the law. That's the only means that occurs to you: a strict secular police force, and the threat of punishment by an all-seeing God for whatever the police overlook. You sell human beings short.

Carl Sagan
The assumption that technical civilizations must necessarily make an appearance, even after many billions of years of biological evolution, implies that the ultimate purpose, or goal, in the formation of stars and planets is the production of intelligent beings and technical civilizations - an idealistic and teleological view.

Carl Sagan
Black holes may be apertures to elsewhen. Were we to plunge down a black hole, we would re-emerge, it is conjectured, in a different part of the universe and in another epoch of time.... Black holes may be the entrances to Wonderland. But are there Alices or white rabbits?

Carl Sagan
Books are like seeds. They can lie dormant for centuries and then flower in the most unpromising soil.

Carl Sagan
Knowing a great deal is not the same as being smart; intelligence is not information alone but also judgement, the manner in which information is coordinated and used.

Carl Sagan
While our behavior is still significantly controlled by our genetic inheritance, we have, through our brains, a much richer opportunity to blaze new behavioral and cultural pathways on short timescales.

Carl Sagan
Science is much more than a body of knowledge. It is a way of thinking. This is central to its success. Science invites us to let the facts in, even when they don't conform to our preconceptions. It counsels us to carry alternative hypotheses in our heads and see which ones best match the facts. It urges on us a fine balance between no-holds-barred openness to new ideas, however heretical, and the most rigorous skeptical scrutiny of everything — new ideas and established wisdom. We need wide appreciation of this kind of thinking. It works. It's an essential tool for a democracy in an age of change. Our task is not just to train more scientists but also to deepen public understanding of science.

Carl Sagan
I think the most significant creative activities of our or any other human culture — legal and ethical systems, art and music, science and technology — were made possible only through the collaborative work of the left and right cerebral hemispheres...We might say that human culture is the function of corpus callosum.

Carl Sagan