Carl Sagan Quotes

The chief deficiency I see in the skeptical movement is its polarization: Us vs. Them — the sense that we have a monopoly on the truth; that those other people who believe in all these stupid doctrines are morons; that if you're sensible, you'll listen to us; and if not, to hell with you. This is nonconstructive. It does not get our message across. It condemns us to permanent minority status.

~ Carl Sagan

The reappearance of the crescent moon after the new moon; the return of the Sun after a total eclipse, the rising of the Sun in the morning after its troublesome absence at night were noted by people around the world; these phenomena spoke to our ancestors of the possibility of surviving death. Up there in the skies was also a metaphor of immortality.

~ Carl Sagan

Once we lose our fear of being tiny, we find ourselves on the threshold of a vast and awesome Universe which dwarfs -- in time, in space, and in potential -- the tidy anthropocentric proscenium of our ancestors.

~ Carl Sagan

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.

~ Carl Sagan

You can get into a habit of thought in which you enjoy making fun of all those other people who don't see things as clearly as you do. We have to guard carefully against it.

~ Carl Sagan

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

~ Carl Sagan

Life is but a momentary glimpse of the wonder of this astounding universe, and it is sad to see so many dreaming it away on spiritual fantasy.

~ Carl Sagan

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?

~ Carl Sagan

At the very moment that humans discovered the scale of the universe and found that their most unconstrained fancies were in fact dwarfed by the true dimensions of even the Milky Way Galaxy, they took steps that ensured that their descendants would be unable to see the stars at all. For a million years humans had grown up with a personal daily knowledge of the vault of heaven. In the last few thousand years they began building and emigrating to the cities. In the last few decades, a major fraction of the human population has abandoned a rustic way of life. As technology developed and the cities were polluted, the nights became starless. New generations grew to maturity wholly ignorant of the sky that had transfixed their ancestors and that had stimulated the modern age of science and technology. Without even noticing, just as astronomy entered a golden age most people cut themselves off from the sky, a cosmic isolationism that ended only with the dawn of space exploration.

~ Carl Sagan

There are many hypotheses in science which are wrong. That’s perfectly all right: it’s the aperture to finding out what’s right. Science is a self-correcting process.

~ Carl Sagan

The prediction I can make with the highest confidence is that the most amazing discoveries will be the ones we are not today wise enough to foresee.

~ Carl Sagan

But 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.

~ Carl Sagan

I don't think science is hard to teach because humans aren't ready for it, or because it arose only through a fluke, or because, by and large, we don't have the brainpower to grapple with it. Instead, the enormous zest for science that I see in first-graders and the lesson from the remnant hunter-gatherers both speak eloquently: A proclivity for science is embedded deeply within us, in all times, places, and cultures. It has been the means for our survival. It is our birthright. When, through indifference, inattention, incompetence, or fear of skepticism, we discourage children from science, we are disenfranchising them, taking from them the tools needed to manage their future.

~ Carl Sagan

Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value the may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder.

~ Carl Sagan

What a marvelous cooperative arrangement - plants and animals each inhaling each other's exhalations, a kind of planet-wide mutual mouth-to-stoma resuscitation, the entire elegant cycle powered by a star 150 million kilometers away.

~ Carl Sagan

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. One of the great revelations of the age of space exploration is the image of the earth finite and lonely, somehow vulnerable, bearing the entire human species through the oceans of space and time.

~ Carl Sagan

Some information is classified legitimately; as with military hardware, secrecy sometimes really is in the national interest. Further, military, political, and intelligence communities tend to value secrecy for its own sake. It's a way of silencing critics and evading responsibility - for incompetence or worse. It generates an elite, a band of brothers in whom the national confidence can be reliably vested, unlike the great mass of citizenry on whose behalf the information is presumably made secret in the first place. With a few exceptions, secrecy is deeply incompatible with democracy and with science.

~ Carl Sagan

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.

~ Carl Sagan

In college, in the early 1950s, I began to learn a little about how science works, the secrets of its great success, how rigorous the standards of evidence must be if we are really to know something is true, how many false starts and dead ends have plagued human thinking, how our biases can colour our interpretation of evidence, and how often belief systems widely held and supported by the political, religious and academic hierarchies turn out to be not just slightly in error, but grotesquely wrong.

~ Carl Sagan

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.

~ Carl Sagan

The near side of a galaxy is tens of thousands of light-years closer to us than the far side; thus we see the front as it was tens of thousands of years before the back. But typical events in galactic dynamics occupy tens of millions of years, so the error in thinking of an image of a galaxy as frozen in one moment of time is small.

~ Carl Sagan

Science is a way to call the bluff of those who only pretend to knowledge. It is a bulwark against mysticism, against superstition, against religion misapplied to where it has no business being.

~ Carl Sagan

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

~ Carl Sagan

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

~ Carl Sagan

These days there seems to be nowhere left to explore, at least on the land area of the Earth. Victims of their very success, the explorers now pretty much stay home.

~ Carl Sagan

On Titan the molecules that have been raining down like manna from heaven for the last 4 billion years might still be there largely unaltered deep-frozen awaiting the chemists from Earth

~ Carl Sagan

We must understand the Cosmos as it is and not confuse how it is with how we wish it to be.

~ Carl Sagan

The others would then fall silent and she would continue about doped gallium arsenide detectors, or the ethanol content of the galactic cloud W-3. The quantity of 200-proof alcohol in this single interstellar cloud was more than enough to maintain the present population of the Earth, if every adult were a dedicated alcoholic, for the age of the solar system. The tamada had appreciated the remark.

~ Carl Sagan

Science cuts two ways, of course; its products can be used for both good and evil. But there's no turning back from science.

~ Carl Sagan

We tend to hear much more about the splendors returned than the ships that brought them or the shipwrights. It has always been that way. Even those history books enamored of the voyages of Christopher Columbus do not tell much about the builders of the Nina the Pinta and the Santa Maria or about the principle of the caravel. These spacecraft their designers builders navigators and controllers are examples of what science and engineering set free for well-defined peaceful purposes can accomplish. Those scientists and engineers should be role models for an America seeking excellence and international competitiveness. They should be on our stamps.

~ Carl Sagan

Another glorious feature of many modern science museums is a movie theater showing IMAX or OMNIMAX films. In some cases the screen is ten stories tall and wraps around you. The Smithsonian's National Air & Space Museu, the popular museum on Earth, has premiered in its Langley Theater some of the best of these films. 'To Fly' brings a catch to my throat even after five or six viewings. I've seen religious leaders of many denominations witness 'Blue Planet' and be converted on the spot to the need to protect the Earth's environment

~ Carl Sagan

The Man in the Moon is in fact a record of ancient catastrophes--most of which took place before humans, before mammals, and probably even before life arose on Earth. It is a characteristic conceit of our species to put a human face on random cosmic violence.

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

~ Carl Sagan

We have examined the universe in space and seen that we live on a mote of dust circling a humdrum star in the remotest corner of an obscure galaxy. And if we are a speck in the immensity of space, we also occupy an instant in the expanse of ages.

~ Carl Sagan

It is now almost possible to assign color combinations, based on the colors of clouds and sky, to every planet in the Solar System—from the sulfur-stained skies of Venus and the rusty skies of Mars to the aquamarine of Uranus and the hypnotic and unearthly blue of Neptune. Sacre-jaunt, sacre-rouge, sacre-vert. Perhaps they will one day adorn the flags of distant human outposts in the Solar System, in that time when the new frontiers are sweeping out from the Sun to the stars, and the explorers are surrounded by the endless black of space. Sacre-noir.

~ Carl Sagan

Observation: I can’t see a thing.Conclusion: Dinosaurs.

~ Carl Sagan

Significant change might require those who are now high in the hierarchy to move downward many steps. This seems to them undesirable and is resisted.

~ Carl Sagan

It may be that there are kernels of truth in a few of these doctrines, but their widespread acceptancebetokens a lack of intellectual rigor, an absence of skepticism, a need to replace experiments by desires.

~ Carl Sagan

For ages men had used sticks to club and spear each other—Anaximander of Miletus used the stick to measure time.

~ Carl Sagan

Adolf Hitler! Ken, it makes me furious. Forty million people die to defeat that megalomaniac, and he's the star of the first broadcast to another civilization? He's representing us. And them. It's that madman's dream come true.

~ Carl Sagan