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Carl Sagan quotes
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“The Hindu religion is the only one of the world’s great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths. It is the only religion in which the time scales correspond, no...”
Carl Sagan
,
Cosmos
“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...”
Carl Sagan
,
Contact
“if we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we've been...”
Carl Sagan
,
The Demon-Haunted World
“Your religion assumes that people are children and need a boogeyman so they'll behave.”
Carl Sagan
,
Contact
“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.”
Carl Sagan
,
Cosmos
“Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it, we go nowhere.”
Carl Sagan
,
Cosmos
“We are the only species on the planet, so far as we know, to have invented a communal memory stored neither in our genes nor in our brains. The warehouse of that memory is called the library.”
Carl Sagan
,
Cosmos
“We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost between two spiral arms in the outskirts of a galaxy which is a member of a sparse cluster of galaxies, tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are...”
Carl Sagan
,
Cosmos
“Every star may be a sun to someone.”
Carl Sagan
,
Cosmos
“If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.”
Carl Sagan
,
Cosmos
“You have to know the past to understand the present.”
Carl Sagan
,
Cosmos
“Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors. ”
Carl Sagan
,
Cosmos
“Knowing a great deal is not the same as being smart; intelligence is not information alone but also judgment, the manner in which information is coordinated and used.”
Carl Sagan
,
Cosmos
“If our long-term survival is at stake, we have a basic responsibility to our species venture to other worlds. Sailors on a becalmed sea, we sense the stirring of a breeze.”
Carl Sagan
,
Pale Blue Dot
“Cosmos is a Greek word for the order of the universe. It is, in a way, the opposite of Chaos.”
Carl Sagan
,
Cosmos
“It does no harm to the romance of the sunset to know a little bit about it.”
Carl Sagan
,
Pale Blue Dot
“The truth may be puzzling or counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held beliefs. Experiment is how we get a handle on it.”
Carl Sagan
,
The Demon-Haunted World
“The visions we offer our children shape the future.”
Carl Sagan
,
Pale Blue Dot
“We've arranged a global civilization in which most crucial elements . . . 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.”
Carl Sagan
,
The Demon-Haunted World
“Avoidable human misery is more often caused not so much by stupidity as by ignorance, particularly our ignorance about ourselves.”
Carl Sagan
,
The Demon-Haunted World
“We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.”
Carl Sagan
,
Cosmos
“The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent to the concerns of such puny creatures as we.”
Carl Sagan
,
Cosmos
“absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”
Carl Sagan
,
The Demon-Haunted World
“nature is always more subtle, more intricate, more elegant than what we are able to imagine.”
Carl Sagan
,
The Demon-Haunted World
“Civilization is a product of the cerebral cortex.”
Carl Sagan
,
Cosmos
“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
Carl Sagan
,
Cosmos
“We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers.”
Carl Sagan
,
Cosmos
“the history of science . . . teaches that the most we can hope for is successive improvement in our understanding, learning from our mistakes, an asymptotic approach to the Universe, but with the proviso that absolute certainty will always elude us.”
Carl Sagan
,
The Demon-Haunted World
“But science is a self-correcting enterprise. To be accepted, all new ideas must survive rigorous standards of evidence.”
Carl Sagan
,
Cosmos
“It is said that men may not be the dreams of the gods, but rather that the gods are the dreams of men.”
Carl Sagan
,
Cosmos
“Where are the cartographers of human purpose? Where are the visions of hopeful futures, of technology as a tool for human betterment and not a gun on hair trigger pointed at our heads?”
Carl Sagan
,
Pale Blue Dot
“There are wonders enough out there without our inventing any.”
Carl Sagan
,
The Demon-Haunted World
“the cure for a fallacious argument is a better argument, not the suppression of ideas.”
Carl Sagan
,
The Demon-Haunted World
“Religions are often the state-protected nurseries of pseudoscience”
Carl Sagan
,
The Demon-Haunted World
“Across the sea of space the stars are other suns.”
Carl Sagan
,
Cosmos
“Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.”
Carl Sagan
,
The Demon-Haunted World
“Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time, proof that humans can work magic.”
Carl Sagan
,
Cosmos
“If I finish a book a week, I will read only a few thousand books in my lifetime, about a tenth of a percent of the contents of the greatest libraries of our time. The trick is to know which books to read.”
Carl Sagan
,
Cosmos
“We have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.”
Carl Sagan
,
Cosmos
“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.”
Carl Sagan
,
Cosmos
“For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.”
Carl Sagan
,
The Demon-Haunted World
“Fanatical ethnic or religious or national chauvinisms are a little difficult to maintain when we see our planet as a fragile blue crescent fading to become an inconspicuous point of light against the bastion and citadel of the stars.”
Carl Sagan
,
Cosmos
“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.”
Carl Sagan
,
Cosmos
“Books are like seeds. They can lie dormant for centuries and then flower in the most unpromising soil.”
Carl Sagan
,
Cosmos
“It is essential as a matter of simple survival for us to understand science. In addition, science is a delight; evolution has arranged that we take pleasure in understanding—those who understand are more likely to survive.”
Carl Sagan
,
Cosmos
“It's hard to kill a creature once it lets you see its consciousness.”
Carl Sagan
,
Contact
“if your God wanted to convince us, he could have done a much better job.”
Carl Sagan
,
Contact
“Every thinking person fears nuclear war, and every technological state plans for it. Everyone knows it is madness, and every nation has an excuse.”
Carl Sagan
,
Cosmos
“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?”
Carl Sagan
,
Pale Blue Dot
“We believe there is a common language that all technical civilizations, no matter how different, must have. That common language is science and mathematics.”
Carl Sagan
,
Cosmos
view all 68 quotes
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Related sources
Cosmos
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