Quotes by Carl Sagan
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Organic as a dandelion seed, the ship of our imagination will carry us to worlds of dreams and worlds of facts.

The fact that so little of the findings of modern science is prefigured in Scripture to my mind casts further doubt on it divine inspiration.

The dumbing down of America is evident in the slow decay of substantive content, a kind of celebration of ignorance.

An atheist is someone who is certain that God does not exist, someone who has compelling evidence against the existence of God. I know of no such compelling evidence.

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.

Frederick Douglas taught that literacy is the path from slavery to freedom. There are many kinds of slavery and many kinds of freedom, but reading is still the path.

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 in trouble. Really, it's okay to reserve judgment until the evidence is in.

Better the hard truth, I say, than the comforting fantasy.

The theologian Meric Casaubon argued--in his 1668 book, Of Credulity and Incredulity--that witches must exist because, after all, everyone believes in them. Anything that a large number of people believe must be true.

There may be such intelligences and such starships, but pulsars are not their signature. Instead, they are the doleful reminders that nothing lasts forever; that stars also die.

Once intelligent beings achieve technology and the capacity for self-destruction of their species, the selective advantage of intelligence becomes more uncertain.

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

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.

If some good evidence for life after death were announced, I'd be eager to examine it; but it would have to be real scientific data, not mere anecdote. As with the face on Mars and alien abductions, better the hard truth, I say, than the comforting fantasy.

It is all a matter of time scale. An event that would be unthinkable in a hundred years may be inevitable in a hundred million.

The lifetime of a human being is measured by decades, the lifetime of the Sun is a hundred million times longer. Compared to a star, we are like mayflies, fleeting ephemeral creatures who live out their lives in the course of a single day.

History is full of people who out of fear, or ignorance, or lust for power has destroyed knowledge of immeasurable value which truly belongs to us all. We must not let it happen again.

It would be wryly interesting if in human history the cultivation of marijuana led generally to the invention of agriculture, and thereby to civilization.

We are...capable of using our compassion and our intelligence, our technology and our wealth, to make an abundant and meaningful life for every inhabitant of this planet. To enhance enormously our understanding of the Universe, and to carry us to the stars.

Writing a novel is like trying to solve a very long mathematical equation. Changing anything can change everything else.

I believe our future depends powerfully on how well we understand this cosmos in which we float, like a mote of dust in the morning sky.

This oak tree and me, we're made of the same stuff.

Is mankind alone in the universe? Or are there somewhere other intelligent beings looking up into their night sky from very different worlds and asking the same kind of question?

Be grateful everyday for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides.

There is perhaps no better a demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world.

Science ... looks skeptically at all claims to knowledge, old and new. It teaches not blind obedience to those in authority but to vigorous debate, and in many respects that's the secret of its success.

Our perceptions are fallible. We sometimes see what isn't there. We are prey to optical illusions. Occasionally we hallucinate. We are error-prone.

On the day that we do discover that we are not alone, our society may begin to evolve and transform in some incredible and wondrous new ways.

The prediction of nuclear winter is drawn not, of course, from any direct experience with the consequences of global nuclear war, but rather from an investigation of the governing physics.

But amid much elegance and precision, the details of life and the Universe also exhibit haphazard, jury-rigged arrangements and much poor planning. What shall we make of this: an edifice abandoned early in construction by the architect?

Widespread intellectual and moral docility may be convenient for leaders in the short term, but it is suicidal for nations in the long term.

If all the suns but ours collapsed tonight, how many lifetimes would it take us to realize that we were alone?

Why are there no nonhuman primates with an existing complex gestural language? One possible answer, it seems to me, is that humans have systematically exterminated those other primates who displayed signs of intelligence.

If stones could philosophize, I imagine Lithic Principles would be at the intellectual frontiers.

Much of human history can, I think, be described as a gradual and sometimes painful liberation from provincialism, the emerging awareness that there is more to the world than was generally believed by our ancestors.

At the extremes it is difficult to distinguish pseudoscience from rigid, doctrinaire religion.

Avoidable human misery is more often caused not so much by stupidity as by ignorance, particularly our ignorance about ourselves.

The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.

The method of science, as stodgy and grumpy as it may seem, is far more important than the findings of science.

I maintain there is much more wonder in science than in pseudoscience. And in addition, to whatever measure this term has any meaning, science has the additional virtue, and it is not an inconsiderable one, of being true.

The words question and quest are cognates. Only through inquiry can we discover truth.

One of the greatest gifts adults can give -- to their offspring and to their society -- is to read to children.

If we long for our planet to be important, there is something we can do about it. We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers.

Modern Darwinism makes it abundantly clear that many less ruthless traits, some not always admired by robber barons and Fuhrers -- altruism, general intelligence, compassion -- may be the key to survival.

All science asks is to employ the same levels of skepticism we use in buying a used car or in judging the quality of analgesics or beer from their television commercials.

If you want to make a rhubarb pie from scratch, first you have to create the universe.

Those afraid of the universe as it really is, those who pretend to nonexistent knowledge and envision a Cosmos centered on human beings will prefer the fleeting comforts of superstition.

When we look up at night and view the stars, everything we see is shinning because of distant nuclear fusion.

Because men, compared to male chimps, have such relatively small testicles (large testicles indicate a species where many males mate, one after the other, with the same female), we might guess that promiscuous societies were uncommon in the immediate human past.

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.

Those who make uncritical observations or fraudulent claims lead us into error and deflect us from the major human goal of understanding how the world works. It is for this reason that playing fast and loose with the truth is a very serious matter.

This zest to explore and exploit, however thoughtless its agents may have been, has clear survival value. It is not restricted to any one nation or ethnic group. It is an endowment that all members of the human species hold in common.

Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors.

And after we returned to the savannahs and abandoned the trees, did we long for those great graceful leaps and ecstatic moments of weightlessness in the shafts of sunlight of the forest roof?

Who are we, if not measured by our impact on others? That's who we are! We're not who we say we are, we're not who we want to be -- we are the sum of the influence and impact that we have, in our lives, on others.

I think if we ever reach the point where we think we thoroughly understand who we are and where we came from, we will have failed.

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

The gears of poverty, ignorance, hopelessness and low self-esteem interact to create a kind of perpetual failure machine that grinds down dreams from generation to generation. We all bear the cost of keeping it running. Illiteracy is its linchpin.

Evolution is adventitious and not foresighted. Only through the deaths of an immense number of slightly maladapted organisms are we, brains and all, here today.

In addition, human beings have, in the most recent few tenths of a percent of our existence, invented not only extra-genetic but also extrasomatic knowledge: information stored outside our bodies, of which writing is the most notable example.

It is very difficult to evolve by altering the deep fabric of life; any change there is likely to be lethal. But fundamental change can be accomplished by the addition of new systems on top of old ones.

It is interesting that it is not the getting of any sort of knowledge that God has forbidden, but, specifically, the knowledge of the difference between good and evil-that is, abstract and moral judgments, which, if they reside anywhere, reside in the neocortex.

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

As in all such technological nightmares, the principal task is to foresee what is possible; to educate use and misuse; and to prevent its organizational, bureaucratic and governmental abuse.

Thus the recent rapid evolution of human intelligence is not only the cause of but also the only conceivable solution to the many serious problems that beset us.

I've written a number of books that have to do with the evolution of humans, human intelligence, human emotions.

The Big Bang is our modern scientific creation myth. It comes from the same human need to solve the cosmological riddle Where did the universe come from?

Accommodation to change, the thoughtful pursuit of alternative futures are keys to the survival of civilization and perhaps of the human species.

Virtually every major technological advance in the history of the human species -- back to the invention of stone tools and the domestication of fire -- has been ethically ambiguous.

In the long run, the aggressive civilizations destroy themselves, almost always. It's their nature. They can't help it.

Every time you look up at the sky, every one of those points of light is a reminder that fusion power is extractable from hydrogen and other light elements, and it is an everyday reality throughout the Milky Way Galaxy.