Carl Sagan Quotes

402 Sourced Quotes

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
We seem, these days, much more willing to recognize the perils before us than we were even a decade ago. The newly recognized dangers threaten all of us, equally. No one can say how it will turn out down here. But this is also, we may note, the first time that a species has become able to journey to the planets and the stars. Sailors on a becalmed sea, we sense a stirring of the breeze.

Carl Sagan
I find science so much more fascinating than science fiction. It also has the advantage of being true.

Carl Sagan
Each of us is a tiny being, permitted to ride on the outermost skin of one of the smaller planets for a few dozen trips around the local star.

Carl Sagan
The Apollo pictures of the whole Earth conveyed to multitudes something well known to astronomers: On the scale of the worlds - to say nothing of stars or galaxies - humans are inconsequential, a thin film of life on an obscure and solitary lump of rock and metal

Carl Sagan
It is a supreme challenge for the popularizer of science to make clear the actual, tortuous history of its great discoveries and the misapprehensions and occasional stubborn refusal by its practitioners to change course.

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
Societies will, of course, wish to exercise prudence in deciding which technologies that is, which applications of science are to be pursued and which not. But without funding basic research, without supporting the acquisition of knowledge for its own sake, our options become dangerously limited.

Carl Sagan
The Bill of Rights decoupled religion from the state, in part because so many religions were steeped in an absolutist frame of mind - each convinced that it alone had a monopoly on the truth and therefore eager for the state to impose this truth on others.

Carl Sagan
It's sometimes easier to reject strong evidence than to admit that we've been wrong, this is information about ourselves worth having.

Carl Sagan
The total amount of energy from outside the solar system ever received by all the radio telescopes on the planet Earth is less than the energy of a single snowflake striking the ground.

Carl Sagan
I had become friendly with a group of people who occasionally smoked cannabis, irregularly, but with evident pleasure. Initially I was unwilling to partake, but the apparent euphoria that cannabis produced and the fact that there was no physiological addiction to the plant eventually persuaded me to try. My initial experiences were entirely disappointing; there was no effect at all, and I began to entertain a variety of hypotheses about cannabis being a placebo which worked by expectation and hyperventilation rather than by chemistry. After about five or six unsuccessful attempts, however, it happened.

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

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

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

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

Carl Sagan
Nature does not always conform to our predispositions and preferences, to what we deem comfortable and easy to understand.

Carl Sagan
The evidence, so far at least and laws of Nature aside, does not require a Designer. Maybe there is one hiding, maddeningly unwilling to be revealed.

Carl Sagan
Even today the most jaded city dweller can be unexpectedly moved upon encountering a clear night sky studded with thousands of twinkling stars. When it happens to me after all these years it still takes my breath away.

Carl Sagan
When theory is not adequate in science, the only realistic approach is experimental. Experiment is the touchstone of science on which the theories are framed. It is the court of last resort.

Carl Sagan
All over the world there are enormous numbers of smart, even gifted, people who harbor a passion for science. But that passion is unrequited. Surveys suggest that some 95% of Americans are "scientifically illiterate." That's...the same fraction...of slaves who were illiterate before the Civil War...

Carl Sagan
The wind whips through the canyons of the American Southwest, and there is no one to hear it but us - a reminder of the 40,000 generations of thinking men and women who preceded us, about whom we know almost nothing, upon whom our civilization is based.

Carl Sagan
Any sufficiently crisp question can be answered by a single binary digit-0 or 1, yes or no.

Carl Sagan