Carl Sagan Quotes

402 Sourced Quotes

Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works.

Carl Sagan
Do we, holding that the gods exist,
deceive ourselves with insubstantial dreams
and lies, while random careless chance and
change alone control the world?

Carl Sagan
The fact is that far more crime and child abuse has been committed by zealots in the name of God, Jesus and Mohammed than has ever been committed in the name of Satan. Many people don't like that statement, but few can argue with it.

Carl Sagan
The hole in the ozone layer is a kind of skywriting. At first it seemed to spell out our continuing complacency before a witch's brew of deadly perils. But perhaps it really tells of a newfound talent to work together to protect the global environment.

Carl Sagan
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.

Carl Sagan
In science it often happens that scientists say, "You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken," and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.

Carl Sagan
I try not to think with my gut. If I'm serious about understanding the world, thinking with anything besides my brain, as tempting as that might be, is likely to get me into trouble. Really, it's okay to reserve judgment until the evidence is in.

Carl Sagan
If we are to survive, our loyalties must be broadened further, to include the whole human community, the entire planet Earth. Many of those who run the nations will find this idea unpleasant.

Carl Sagan
The Platonists and their Christian successors held the peculiar notion that the Earth was tainted and somehow nasty, while the heavens were perfect and divine. The fundamental idea that the Earth is a planet, that we are citizens of the Universe, was rejected and forgotten.

Carl Sagan
For a long time the human instinct to understand was thwarted by facile religious explanations.

Carl Sagan
Projected upon the natural world... is the idea of privilege.... Ever since the invention of civilization, there have been privileged classes... some groups that oppress others and that work to maintain these heirarchies of power. The children of the privileged grow up expecting that, through no particular effort of their own, they will retain a privileged position.

Carl Sagan
It is sometimes said that scientists are unromantic, that their passion to figure out robs the world of beauty and mystery. But is it not stirring to understand how the world actually works — that white light is made of colors, that color is the way we perceive the wavelengths of light, that transparent air reflects light, that in so doing it discriminates among the waves, and that the sky is blue for the same reason that the sunset is red? It does no harm to the romance of the sunset to know a little bit about it.

Carl Sagan
Every kid starts out as a natural-born scientist, and then we beat it out of them. A few trickle through the system with their wonder and enthusiasm for science intact.

Carl Sagan
I consider it an extremely dangerous doctrine, because the more likely we are to assume that the solution comes from the outside, the less likely we are to solve our problems ourselves.

Carl Sagan
Because it is clear from the fossil record that almost every species that has ever existed is extinct; extinction is the rule, survival is the exception.

Carl Sagan
There are no forbidden questions in science, no matters too sensitive or delicate to be probed, no sacred truths.

Carl Sagan
I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue. But much as I want to believe that, and despite the ancient and worldwide cultural traditions that assert an afterlife, I know of nothing to suggest that it is more than wishful thinking.
The world is so exquisite with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there's little good evidence. Far better it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides.

Carl Sagan
There are huge advertising budgets only when there's no difference between the products. If the products really were different, people would buy the one that's better. Advertising teaches people not to trust their judgment. Advertising teaches people to be stupid.

Carl Sagan
The amount of organic matter that could have been produced in the first few hundred million years of Earth history was sufficient to have produced in the present ocean a several-percent solution of organic matter. This is just about the dilution of Knorr's chicken soup, and not that different from the composition either. And chicken soup is widely known to be good for life.

Carl Sagan
Books are like seeds. They can lie dormant for centuries and then flower in the most unpromising soil.

Carl Sagan
It goes with a courageous intent to greet the universe as it really is, not to foist our emotional predispositions on it but to courageously accept what our explorations tell us.

Carl Sagan
It means nothing to be open to a proposition we don't understand.

Carl Sagan
At birth all of us imagine that we are the universe, and we don't distinguish the boundaries between ourselves and those around us.... in some social situations, there is the sense that we are central, important.... there was a natural projection of those attitudes upon the universe.

Carl Sagan
Our intelligence is imperfect, surely, and newly arisen; the ease with which it can be sweet-talked, overwhelmed, or subverted by other hardwired propensities - sometimes themselves disguised as the cool light of reason - is worrisome.

Carl Sagan
Superstition is marked not by its pretension to a body of knowledge but by its method of seeking truth.

Carl Sagan
We are at a crossroads in human history. Never before has there been a moment so simultaneously perilous and promising. We are the first species to have taken evolution into our own hands.

Carl Sagan
Humans are very good at dreaming, although you'd never know it from your television.

Carl Sagan
Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.

Carl Sagan
The vast distances that separate the stars are providential. Beings and worlds are quarantined from one another. The quarantine is lifted only for those with sufficient self-knowledge and judgement to have safely traveled from star to star.

Carl Sagan
We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it's forever.

Carl Sagan