Carl Sagan - Contact (1985)

34 Sourced Quotes

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A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.

Carl Sagan
For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.

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

Carl Sagan
Skepticism is the chastity of the intellect, and it is shameful to surrender it too soon or to the first comer; there is nobility in preserving it coolly and proudly through long youth, until at last, in the ripeness of instinct and discretion, it can be safely exchanged for fidelity and happiness.

Carl Sagan
If God is omnipotent and omniscient, why didn't he start the universe out in the first place so it would come out the way he wants? Why's he constantly repairing and complaining? No, there's one thing the Bible makes clear: The biblical God is a sloppy manufacturer. He's not good at design, he's not good at execution. He'd be out of business, if there was any competition.

Carl Sagan
What I'm saying is, if God wanted to send us a message, and ancient writings were the only way he could think of doing it, he could have done a better job.

Carl Sagan
You mustn't think of the Universe as a wilderness. It hasn't been that for billions of years," he said. "Think of it more as.....cultivated.

Carl Sagan
Jingoistic rhetoric and puerile self-congratulatory nationalism.

Carl Sagan
Many harebrained interpretations were also widely available, especially in weekly newspapers.

Carl Sagan
We all have a thirst for wonder. It's a deeply human quality. Science and religion are both bound up with it. What I'm saying is, you don't have to make stories up, you don't have to exaggerate. There's wonder and awe enough in the real world. Nature's a lot better at inventing wonders than we are.

Carl Sagan
In the fabric of space and in the nature of matter, as in a great work of art, there is, written small, the artist's signature.

Carl Sagan
It's hard to kill a creature once it lets you see its consciousness.

Carl Sagan
This planet is run by crazy people. Remember what they have to do to get where they are. Their perspective is so narrow, so... brief. A few years. In the best of them a few decades. They care only about the time they are in power.

Carl Sagan
You can't convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it's based on a deep seated need to believe.

Carl Sagan
At a few hundred kilometers altitude, the Earth fills half your sky, and the band of blue that stretches from Mindanao to Bombay, which your eye encompasses in a single glance, can break your heart with its beauty. Home you think. Home. This is my world. This is where I come from. Everyone I know, everyone I ever heard of, grew up down there, under that relentless and exquisite blue.

Carl Sagan
Hiding between all the ordinary numbers was an infinity of transcendental numbers whose presence you would never have guessed until you looked deeply into mathematics.

Carl Sagan
Perhaps the depth of love can be calibrated by the number of different selves that are actively involved in a given relationship.

Carl Sagan
Any faith that admires truth, that strives to know God, must be brave enough to accommodate the universe.

Carl Sagan
The major religions on the Earth contradict each other left and right. You can't all be correct. And what if all of you are wrong? It's a possibility, you know. You must care about the truth, right? Well, the way to winnow through all the differing contentions is to be skeptical. I'm not any more skeptical about your religious beliefs than I am about every new scientific idea I hear about. But in my line of work, they're called hypotheses, not inspiration and not revelation.

Carl Sagan
Let's see if I've got this straight, he returned. It was a phrase of hers that he had adopted It's a lazy Saturday afternoon, and there's this couple lying naked in bed reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica to each other, and arguing about whether the Andromeda Galaxy is more 'numinous' than the Resurrection. Do they know how to have a good time or don't they?

Carl Sagan
That it will never come again
Is what makes life so sweet.

Carl Sagan
Anything you don't understand, Mr. Rankin, you attribute to God. God for you is where you sweep away all the mysteries of the world, all the challenges to our intelligence. You simply turn your mind off and say God did it.

Carl Sagan
If we like them, they're freedom fighters, she thought. If we don't like them, they're terrorists. In the unlikely case we can't make up our minds, they're temporarily only guerrillas.

Carl Sagan
She too had found the experience transforming. How could she not? A demon had been exorcised. Several. And just when she felt more capable of love than she had ever been, she found herself alone.

Carl Sagan
In Mozambique, the story goes, monkeys do not talk, because they know if they utter even a single word some man will come and put them to work.

Carl Sagan
Humans are good, she knew, at discerning subtle patterns that are really there, but equally so at imagining them when they are altogether absent.

Carl Sagan
Your religion assumes that people are children and need a boogeyman so they'll behave. You want people to believe in God so they'll obey the law. That's the only means that occurs to you: a strict secular police force, and the threat of punishment by an all-seeing God for whatever the police overlook. You sell human beings short.

Carl Sagan
Do you understand what's going on?
Not at all, he shouted back. I can almost prove this can't be happening.

Carl Sagan