Carl Sagan Quotes

402 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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
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
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
If I were to propose to you that my arm could be in this position or in that position but it would be forbidden by the laws of nature to be in some intermediate position, that would likely strike you as absurd, as contrary to experience. And yet on the subatomic level, there is a quantization of energy and position and momentum. The reason that it seems counterintuitive is that is that we are not ordinarily down at the level of the very small, where quantum effects dominate.

Carl Sagan
Jingoistic rhetoric and puerile self-congratulatory nationalism.

Carl Sagan
In the vastness of the Cosmos there must be other civilizations far older and more advanced than ours.

Carl Sagan
Something dreadful happens to students between first and twelfth grades, and it's not just puberty.

Carl Sagan
If some good evidence for life after death were announced, I'd be eager to examine it; but it would have to be real scientific data, not mere anecdote. As with the face on Mars and alien abductions, better the hard truth, I say, than the comforting fantasy.

Carl Sagan
A googolplex is precisely as far from infinity as is the number 1... no matter what number you have in mind, infinity is larger still.

Carl Sagan
We can make a similar examination, but with greater uncertainty, of the extraterrestrial hypothesis that holds that a wide range of UFOs viewed on the planet Earth are space vehicles from planets of other stars.

Carl Sagan
This is Phobos... Its mean density is known, and it is consistent with organic matter. Deimos... same story.

Carl Sagan
For myself, I like a universe that, includes much that is unknown and, at the same time, much that is knowable. A universe in which everything is known would be static and dull, as boring as the heaven of some weak-minded theologians. 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. And I would guess that this is not really much of a coincidence.

Carl Sagan
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe are challenged by this point of pale light.

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
Many harebrained interpretations were also widely available, especially in weekly newspapers.

Carl Sagan
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
Imagine we could accelerate continuously at 1 g — what we're comfortable with on good old terra firma — to the midpoint of our voyage, and decelerate continuously at 1 g until we arrive at our destination. It would take a day to get to Mars, a week and a half to Pluto, a year to the Oort Cloud, and a few years to the nearest stars.

Carl Sagan
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
I think if we ever reach the point where we think we thoroughly understand who we are and where we came from, we will have failed.

Carl Sagan
We humans appear on the cosmic calendar so recently that our recorded history occupies only the last few seconds of the last minute of December 31st.

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
Let's say there's a molecule that produces a religious experience... a natural molecule that the body produces whose function it is to produce religious experiences, at least on occasion?... So let's call it "theophorin"... What could the selective advantage of theophorin be?... to suit us for the quest that was, according to Dostoyevsky, to strive for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship and obey.

Carl Sagan
But why had science lost its way in the first place? What appeal could these teachings of Pythagoras and Plato have had for their contemporaries? They provided, I believe, an intellectually respectable justification for a corrupt social order. The mercantile tradition that had led to Ionian science also led to a slave economy. You could get richer if you owned a lot of slaves. Athens in the time of Plato and Aristotle had a vast slave population. All that brave Athenian talk about democracy applied only to a privileged few.

Carl Sagan
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
Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the 'Momentary' masters of a 'Fraction' of a 'Dot'

Carl Sagan