Quotes by Carl Sagan (Page 3 of 3)

The cure for a fallacious argument is a better argument, not the suppression of ideas.

Science is more than a body of knowledge. It's a way of thinking: a way of skeptically interrogating the universe.

Even through your hardest days, remember we are all made of stardust.

The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.

Your god is too small for my universe.

If it can be destroyed by the truth, it deserves to be destroyed by the truth.

You are made of a hundred trillion cells. We are, each of us, a multitude.

We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.

We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.

We are alive and we resonate with idea of life elsewhere, but only careful accumulation and assessment of the evidence can tell us whether a given world is inhabited.

Paid product endorsements, especially by real or purported experts, constitute a steady rainfall of deception. They betray contempt for the intelligence of their customers. They introduce an insidious corruption of popular attitudes about scientific objectivity.

All inquiries carry with them some element of risk.

Arguments from authority carry little weight -- authorities have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts.

We are star stuff harvesting sunlight.

There is a wide, yawning black infinity. In every direction, the extension is endless; the sensation of depth is overwhelming. And the darkness is immortal. Where light exists, it is pure, blazing, fierce; but light exists almost nowhere, and the blackness itself is also pure and blazing and fierce.

The universe is a pretty big place. If it's just us, seems like an awful waste of space.

People are not stupid. They believe things for reasons. The last way for skeptics to get the attention of bright, curious, intelligent people is to belittle or condescend or to show arrogance toward their beliefs.

We can judge our progress by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers, our willingness to embrace what is true rather than what feels good.

I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture, and our concern for the future, can all be tested by how well we support our libraries.

For all its material advantages, the sedentary life has left us edgy, unfulfilled, even after 400 generations in villages and cities, we haven't forgotten: The open road still softly calls like a nearly forgotten song of childhood.

Cutting off fundamental, curiosity-driven science is like eating the seed corn. We may have a little more to eat next winter but what will we plant so we and our children will have enough to get through the winters to come?

The very act of understanding is a celebration of joining, merging, even if on a very modest scale, with the magnificence of the Cosmos.

A single message from space will show that it is possible to live through technological adolescence... It is possible that the future of human civilization depends on the receipt of interstellar messages.

A new consciousness is developing which sees the earth as a single organism and recognizes that an organism at war with itself is doomed. We are one planet.

A blade of grass is a commonplace on Earth; it would be a miracle on Mars. Our descendants on Mars will know the value of a patch of green. And if a blade of grass is priceless, what is the value of a human being?

The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean.

While our behavior is still significantly controlled by our genetic inheritance, we have, through our brains, a much richer opportunity to blaze new behavioral and cultural pathways on short timescales.

Where we have strong emotions, we're liable to fool ourselves.

I think the discomfort that some people feel in going to the monkey cages at the zoo is a warning sign.

When you look more generally at life on Earth, you find that it is all the same kind of life. There are not many different kinds; there's only one kind. It uses about fifty fundamental biological building blocks, organic molecules.

If we are merely matter intricately assembled, is this really demeaning? If there's nothing here but atoms, does that make us less or does that make matter more?

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.

Stars are phoenixes, rising from their own ashes.

We are one species. We are starstuff.

We are all star stuff.

The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.

Advances in medicine and agriculture have saved vastly more lives than have been lost in all the wars in history.

Like it or not, we humans are bound up with our fellows, and with the other plants and animals all over the world.
Our lives are intertwined.

It's perilous and foolhardy for the average citizen to remain ignorant about global warming, say, or ozone depletion, air pollution, toxic and radioactive wastes, acid rain, topsoil erosion, tropical deforestation, exponential population growth. Jobs and wages depend on science and technology.

For all I know we may be visited by a different extraterrestrial civilization every second Tuesday, but there's no support for this appealing idea. The extraordinary claims are not supported by extraordinary evidence.

Scientists make mistakes. Accordingly, it is the job of the scientist to recognize our weakness, to examine the widest range of opinions, to be ruthlessly self-critical. Science is a collective enterprise with the error-correction machinery often running smoothly.

Science is only a Latin word for knowledge.

Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.

It is clear that the nations of the world now can only rise and fall together. It is not a question of one nation winning at the expense of another. We must all help one another or all perish together.

Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark.

Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever the universe has to teach us, or somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved?

We are an intelligent species and the use of our intelligence quite properly gives us pleasure. In this respect the brain is like a muscle. When we think well, we feel good. Understanding is a kind of ecstasy.

We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.

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

Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth.

All civilizations become either spacefaring or extinct.

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.

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.

By looking far out into space we are also looking far back into time, back toward the horizon of the universe, back toward the epoch of the Big Bang.

Sailors on a becalmed sea, we sense the stirring of a breeze.

Across the sea of space, the stars are other suns.

If our long-term survival is at stake, we have a basic responsibility to our species to venture to other worlds. Sailors on a becalmed sea, we sense the stirring of a breeze.

You have to know the past to understand the present.

The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together.

The visions we offer our children shape the future.

A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.

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.

For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

I am often amazed at how much more capability and enthusiasm for science there is among elementary school youngsters than among college students.

Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.

The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.

All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value.

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

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

We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology.

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

When you make the finding yourself -- even if you're the last person on Earth to see the light -- you'll never forget it.

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.