Carl Sagan Quotes

402 Sourced Quotes

Human history can be viewed as a slowly dawning awareness that we are members of a larger group.

Carl Sagan
UFOs: The reliable cases are uninteresting and the interesting cases are unreliable.

Carl Sagan
We have entered, almost without noticing, an age of exploration and discovery unparalleled since the Renaissance.

Carl Sagan
These are the snows of yesteryear, the pristine remnants of the origin of the solar system, waiting frozen in the interstellar dark.

Carl Sagan
A stars rich in europium; of distant galaxies analyzed through the collective light of a hundred billion constituent stars. Astronomical spectroscopy is an almost magical technique. It amazes me still. Auguste Comte picked a particularly unfortunate example.

Carl Sagan
I don?t feel rejected by the sky. I?m a part of it- tiny, to be sure, but everything is tiny compared to that overwhelming immensity.

Carl Sagan
Science requires the most vigorous and uncompromising skepticism, because the vast majority of ideas are simply wrong, and the only way to winnow the wheat from the chaff is by critical experiment and analysis.

Carl Sagan
Religions are tough. Either they make no contentions which are subject to disproof or they quickly redesign doctrine after disproof.... near the core of the religious experience is something remarkably resistant to rational inquiry.

Carl Sagan
Apart from an understanding of the solar system as a whole, it is becoming clear that information about any planet or satellite illuminates our knowledge of the others. In particular, if we are to understand the Earth, we must have a comprehensive knowledge of the other planets.

Carl Sagan
In a way, science might be described as paranoid thinking applied to Nature: we are looking for natural conspiracies, for connections among apparently disparate data.

Carl Sagan
We need to reduce military budgets; raise living standards; engender respect for learning; support science, scholarship, invention, and industry; promote free inquiry; reduce domestic coercion; involve the workers more in managerial decisions; and promote genuine respect and understanding derived from an acknowledgement of our common humanity and our common jeopardy.

Carl Sagan
This is also a book about God ... or perhaps about the absence of God. The word God fills these pages. Hawking embarks on a quest to answer Einstein's famous question about whether God had any choice in creating the universe. Hawking is attempting, as he explicitly states, to understand the mind of God. And this makes all the more unexpected the conclusion of the effort, at least so far: a universe with no edge in space, no beginning or end in time, and nothing for a Creator to do.

Carl Sagan