Authors
Topics
Lists
Pictures
Resources
More about Carl Sagan
Carl Sagan -
Science
Quotes
67 Sourced Quotes
View all Carl Sagan Quotes
Source
Report...
Reasoned disputation is the lifeblood of science — as is, sadly, infrequently the case in the intellectually more anemic arena of politics.
Carl Sagan
Source
Report...
We've arranged a global civilization in which the most crucial elements — transportation, communications, and all other industries; agriculture, medicine, education, entertainment, protecting the environment; and even the key democratic institution of voting, profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.
Carl Sagan
Source
Report...
We've arranged a society based on science and technology, in which nobody understands anything about science and technology. And this combustible mixture of ignorance and power, sooner or later, is going to blow up in our faces. Who is running the science and technology in a democracy if the people don't know anything about it?
Carl Sagan
Source
Report...
The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion and politics, but it is not the path to knowledge; it has no place in the endeavor of science.
Carl Sagan
Source
Report...
If the press descended, the science would surely suffer.
Carl Sagan
Source
Report...
The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.
Carl Sagan
Source
Report...
Science is far from a perfect instrument of knowledge. It's just the best we have.
Carl Sagan
Source
Report...
The enterprise of knowledge is consistent surely with science; it should be with religion, and it is essential for the welfare of the human species.
Carl Sagan
Source
Report...
Pseudoscience is embraced, it might be argued, in exact proportion as real science is misunderstood.
Carl Sagan
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
It is the tension between creativity and skepticism that has produced the stunning and unexpected findings of science.
Carl Sagan
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
Science is based on experiment, on a willingness to challenge old dogma, on an openness to see the universe as it really is. Accordingly, science sometimes requires courage - at the very least the courage to question the conventional wisdom.
Carl Sagan
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
At the heart of science is an essential balance between two seemingly contradictory attitudes - an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive, and the most ruthlessly skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new. This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense. The collective enterprise of creative thinking and skeptical thinking, working together, keeps the field on track. Those two seemingly contradictory attitudes are, though, in some tension.
Carl Sagan
Source
Report...
Science is an attempt, largely successful, to understand the world, to get a grip on things, to get hold of ourselves, to steer a safe course. Microbiology and meteorology now explain what only a few centuries ago was considered sufficient cause to burn women to death.
Carl Sagan
Source
Report...
One of the great commandments of science is, 'Mistrust arguments from authority' (Scientists, being primates, and thus given to dominance hierarchies, of course do not always follow this commandment.)
Carl Sagan
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
There is no other species on the Earth that does science. It is, so far, entirely a human invention, evolved by natural selection in the cerebral cortex for one simple reason: it works. It is not perfect. It can be misused. It is only a tool. But it is by far the best tool we have, self-correcting, ongoing, applicable to everything. It has two rules. First: there are no sacred truths; all assumptions must be critically examined; arguments from authority are worthless. Second: whatever is inconsistent with the facts must be discarded or revised. We must understand the Cosmos as it is and not confuse how it is with how we wish it to be.
Carl Sagan
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
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
Source
Report...
If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits?
Carl Sagan
Source
Report...
A central lesson of science is that to understand complex issues (or even simple ones), we must try to free our minds of dogma and to guarantee the freedom to publish, to contradict, and to experiment. Arguments from authority are unacceptable.
Carl Sagan
Source
Report...
Instead of wanting everyone to share and know of their discoveries the Pythagoreans suppressed the square root of two and the dodecahedron. The outside world was not to know. The Pythagoreans had discovered, in the mathematical underpinnings of nature, one of the two most powerful scientific tools, the other of course is experiment, but instead of using their insight to advance the collective voyage of human discovery they made of it little more than the hocus-pocus of a mystery cult. Science and mathematics were to be removed from the hands of the merchants and the artisans.
Carl Sagan
Source
Report...
Once upon a time, the best minds of the human species believed that the planets were attached to crystal spheres.... Both in classic and in medieval times, it was prominently speculated that gods or angels propelled them, gave them a twirl every now and then. The Newtonian gravitational superstructure replaced angels with GMm/r2... as science advances, there seems to be less and less for God to do.
Carl Sagan
1
2
3
Quote of the day
No longer shall I paint interiors with men reading and women knitting. I will paint living people who breathe and feel and suffer and love.
Edvard Munch
Carl Sagan
Born:
November 9, 1934
Died:
December 20, 1996
(aged 62)
More about Carl Sagan...
Featured Authors
Lists
Predictions that didn't happen
If it's on the Internet it must be true
Remarkable Last Words (or Near-Last Words)
Picture Quotes
Confucius
Philip James Bailey
Eleanor Roosevelt
Letitia Elizabeth Landon
Popular Topics
life
love
nature
time
god
power
human
mind
work
art
heart
thought
men
day
×
Lib Quotes