Carl Sagan Quotes

402 Sourced Quotes

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
Human beings grew up in forests; we have a natural affinity for them. How lovely a tree is, straining toward the sky.

Carl Sagan
Once we overcome our fear of being tiny, we find ourselves on the threshold of a vast and awesome Universe that utterly dwarfs — in time, in space, and in potential — the tidy anthropocentric proscenium of our ancestors.

Carl Sagan
Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge. Its goal is to find out how the world works, to seek what regularities there may be, to penetrate to the connections of things-from subatomic particles, which may be the constituents of all matter, to living organisms, the human social community, and thence to the cosmos as a whole.

Carl Sagan
Science arouses a soaring sense of wonder. But so does pseudoscience. Sparse and poor popularizations of science abandon ecological niches that pseudoscience promptly fills. If it were widely understood that claims to knowledge require adequate evidence before they can be accepted, there would be no room for pseudoscience...

Carl Sagan
If you know something only qualitatively, you know it no more than vaguely. If you know it quantitatively — grasping some numerical measure that distinguishes it from an infinite number of other possibilities — you are beginning to know it deeply.

Carl Sagan
Much of human history can, I think, be described as a gradual and sometimes painful liberation from provincialism, the emerging awareness that there is more to the world than was generally believed by our ancestors.

Carl Sagan
Indeed the reasoned criticism of a prevailing belief is a service to the proponents of that belief; if they are incapable of defending it, they are well advised to abandon it. This self-questioning and error-correcting aspect of the scientific method is its most striking property.

Carl Sagan
If we continue to accumulate only power and not wisdom, we will surely destroy ourselves.

Carl Sagan
The chief deficiency I see in the skeptical movement is its polarization: Us vs. Them - the sense that we have a monopoly on the truth; that those other people who believe in all these stupid doctrines are morons; that if you're sensible, you'll listen to us; and if not, to hell with you. This is nonconstructive. It does not get our message across. It condemns us to permanent minority status.

Carl Sagan
The cure for a fallacious argument is a better argument, not the suppression of ideas.

Carl Sagan
At a few hundred kilometers altitude, the Earth fills half your sky, and the band of blue that stretches from Mindanao to Bombay, which your eye encompasses in a single glance, can break your heart with its beauty. Home you think. Home. This is my world. This is where I come from. Everyone I know, everyone I ever heard of, grew up down there, under that relentless and exquisite blue.

Carl Sagan
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
The Earth is a place. It is by no means the only place. It is not even a typical place.

Carl Sagan
After the earth dies, some 5 billion years from now, after it's burned to a crisp, or even swallowed by the Sun, there will be other worlds and stars and galaxies coming into being - and they will know nothing of a place once called Earth.

Carl Sagan
Centuries hence, when current social and political problems may seem as remote as the problems of the Thirty Years' War are to us, our age may be remembered chiefly for one fact: It was the time when the inhabitants of the earth first made contact with the vast cosmos in which their small planet is embedded.

Carl Sagan
What's the harm of a little mystification? It sure beats boring statistical analyses.

Carl Sagan
But amid much elegance and precision, the details of life and the Universe also exhibit haphazard, jury-rigged arrangements and much poor planning. What shall we make of this: an edifice abandoned early in construction by the architect?

Carl Sagan
[Science is not popular] is... the fault of the educational system. We do not teach how to think. This is a very serious failure that may even, in a world rigged with 60,000 nuclear weapons, compromise the human future.

Carl Sagan
If we do not speak for Earth, who will? If we are not committed to our own survival, who will be?

Carl Sagan
To seek the beings of other worlds is the rarest of adventures — an adventure we will all be fortunate enough to share.

Carl Sagan
Hiding between all the ordinary numbers was an infinity of transcendental numbers whose presence you would never have guessed until you looked deeply into mathematics.

Carl Sagan
Reasoned disputation is the lifeblood of science — as is, sadly, infrequently the case in the intellectually more anemic arena of politics.

Carl Sagan
After I give lectures — on almost any subject — I am often asked, "Do you believe in UFOs?." I'm always struck by how the question is phrased, the suggestion that this is a matter of belief and not evidence. I'm almost never asked, "How good is the evidence that UFOs are alien spaceships?"

Carl Sagan
What began in deadly competition has helped us to see that global cooperation is the essential precondition for our survival. Travel is broadening. It's time to hit the road again.

Carl Sagan
If we teach only the findings and products of science - no matter how useful and even inspiring they may be - without communicating its critical method, how can the average person possibly distinguish science from pseudoscience?

Carl Sagan
The scientific world view works so well, explains so much and resonates so harmoniously with the most advanced parts of our brains that in time, I think, virtually every culture on the Earth, left to its own devices, would have discovered science.

Carl Sagan
In our time, we have sifted the sands of Mars, we have established a presence there, we have fulfilled a century of dreams!

Carl Sagan
Scientists do not seek to impose their needs and wants on Nature, but instead humbly interrogate Nature and take seriously what they find.

Carl Sagan
In the night sky, when the air is clear, there is a cosmic Rorschach test awaiting us. Thousands of stars, bright and faint, near and far, in a glittering variety of colors, are peppered across the canopy of night. The eye, irritated by randomness, seeking order, tends to organize into patterns these separate and distinct points of light.

Carl Sagan