Carl Sagan Quotes

402 Sourced Quotes

Thus the recent rapid evolution of human intelligence is not only the cause of but also the only conceivable solution to the many serious problems that beset us.

Carl Sagan
Football is a thinly disguised re-enactment of hunting; we played it before we were human.

Carl Sagan
When permitted to listen to alternative opinions and engage in substantive debate, people have been known to change their minds. It can happen.

Carl Sagan
Both the Freudian and the Platonic metaphors emphasize the considerable independence of and tension among the constituent parts of the psyche, a point that characterizes the human condition.

Carl Sagan
The discovery of life on some other world will, among many things, be for us a humbling experience.

Carl Sagan
It is useless to search for that which cannot exist.

Carl Sagan
Ours is the first generation that has grown up with science-fiction ideas.

Carl Sagan
The open road still softly calls, like a nearly forgotten song of childhood

Carl Sagan
We are rare and precious because we are alive, because we can think as well as we can. We are privileged to influence and perhaps control our future. I believe we have an obligation to fight for life on Earth - not just for ourselves, but for all those, humans and others, who came before us, and to whom we are beholden, and for all those who, if we are wise enough, will come after.

Carl Sagan
Someone has to propose ideas at the boundaries of the plausible, in order to so annoy the experimentalists or observationalists that they'll be motivated to disprove the idea.

Carl Sagan
A being quite like us, but with a small physiological difference — a third eye, say or blue hair covering the nose and forehead — somehow evokes feelings of revulsion. Such feelings may have had adaptive value at one time in defending our small tribe against the beasts and neighbors. But in our time such feelings are obsolete and dangerous.

Carl Sagan
If you want to know when the next eclipse of the Sun will be, you might try magicians or mystics, but you'll do much better with scientists.

Carl Sagan
The Universe forces those who live in it to understand it. Those creatures who find everyday experience a muddled jumble of events with no predictability, no regularity, are in grave peril. The Universe belongs to those who, at least to some degree, have figured it out.

Carl Sagan
There are a million other civilizations, all fabulously ugly, and all a lot smarter than us. Knowing this seems to me to be a useful and character-building experience for mankind.

Carl Sagan
The well-meaning contention that all ideas have equal merit seems to me little different from the disastrous contention that no ideas have any merit.

Carl Sagan
Science may be hard to understand. It may challenge cherished beliefs. When its products are placed at the disposal of politicians or industrialists, it may lead to weapons of mass destruction and grave threats to the environment. But one thing you have to say about it. It delivers the goods.

Carl Sagan
Those who seek power at any price detect a societal weakness, a fear that they can ride into office.

Carl Sagan
Next to nature there is nothing more wonderful than man's gradual understanding of it.

Carl Sagan
Our ancestors lived out of doors. They were as familiar with the night sky as most of us are with our favorite television programs.

Carl Sagan
Maybe it's a little early. Maybe the time is not quite yet. But those other worlds - promising untold opportunities - beckon. Silently, they orbit the Sun, waiting.

Carl Sagan
After centuries of muddy surmise, unfettered speculation, stodgy conservatism, and unimaginative disinterest, the subject of extraterrestrial life has finally come of age.

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
Goddard represented a unique combination of visionary dedication and technological brilliance. He studied physics because he needed physics to get to Mars. In reading the notebooks of Robert Goddard, I am struck by how powerful his exploratory and scientific motivations were - and how influental speculative ideas, even erroneous ones, can be on the shaping of the future.

Carl Sagan
Organisms die but their genes pass on — often mutated and redistributed, it is true, but genes nevertheless; and it is difficult, therefore, to escape the conclusion that the design of the organism is merely to provide for gene multiplication and survival.

Carl Sagan
Quantify. If whatever it is you're explaining has some measure, some numerical quantity attached to it, you'll be much better able to discriminate among competing hypotheses. What is vague and qualitative is open to many explanations.

Carl Sagan
In the deepest sense the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is a search for ourselves.

Carl Sagan
The so-called generation gap is a consequence of the rate of social and technological change. Even within a human lifetime, the change is so great that many people are alienated from their own society. Margaret Mead had described older people as involuntary immigrants from the past to the present.

Carl Sagan
Cutting off fundamental, curiosity-driven science is like eating the seed corn. We may have a little more to eat next winter, but what will we plant so we and our children will have enough to get through the winters to come?

Carl Sagan
I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote. I love to sail forbidden seas...

Carl Sagan
Hidden within every astronomical investigation, sometimes so deeply buried that the researcher himself is unaware of its presence, lies a kernel of awe.

Carl Sagan