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Carl Sagan quotes
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“absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”
Carl Sagan
,
The Demon-Haunted World
“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
“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
“If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.”
Carl Sagan
,
Cosmos
“The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent to the concerns of such puny creatures as we.”
Carl Sagan
,
Cosmos
“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.”
Carl Sagan
,
Cosmos
“Your religion assumes that people are children and need a boogeyman so they'll behave.”
Carl Sagan
,
Contact
“the cure for a fallacious argument is a better argument, not the suppression of ideas.”
Carl Sagan
,
The Demon-Haunted World
“We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers.”
Carl Sagan
,
Cosmos
“We have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.”
Carl Sagan
,
Cosmos
“if your God wanted to convince us, he could have done a much better job.”
Carl Sagan
,
Contact
“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
“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
“Nature's a lot better at inventing wonders than we are.”
Carl Sagan
,
Contact
“Across the sea of space the stars are other suns.”
Carl Sagan
,
Cosmos
“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 a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.”
Carl Sagan
,
Cosmos
“Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it, we go nowhere.”
Carl Sagan
,
Cosmos
“Atoms are mainly empty space. Matter is composed chiefly of nothing.”
Carl Sagan
,
Cosmos
“Thus 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.”
Carl Sagan
,
Cosmos
“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
“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
“We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever.”
Carl Sagan
,
Cosmos
“Civilization is a product of the cerebral cortex.”
Carl Sagan
,
Cosmos
“Modern science has been a voyage into the unknown, with a lesson in humility waiting at every stop. Many passengers would rather have stayed home.”
Carl Sagan
,
Pale Blue Dot
“There are no forbidden questions in science, no matters too sensitive or delicate to be probed, no sacred truths.”
Carl Sagan
,
The Demon-Haunted World
“You have to know the past to understand the present.”
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
“We grow up in isolation. Only slowly do we teach ourselves the Cosmos.”
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
“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
“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
“There are wonders enough out there without our inventing any.”
Carl Sagan
,
The Demon-Haunted World
“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
“Religions are often the state-protected nurseries of pseudoscience”
Carl Sagan
,
The Demon-Haunted World
“It's hard to kill a creature once it lets you see its consciousness.”
Carl Sagan
,
Contact
“it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there is no ground whatever for supposing it true.”
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
“Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.”
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
“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
“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
“If you're only sceptical, then no new ideas make it through to you.”
Carl Sagan
,
The Demon-Haunted World
“The power which a man's imagination has over his body to heal it or make it sick is a force which none of us is born without.”
Carl Sagan
,
The Demon-Haunted World
“Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors. ”
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
“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives.”
Carl Sagan
,
Pale Blue Dot
“The visions we offer our children shape the future.”
Carl Sagan
,
Pale Blue Dot
“Every star may be a sun to someone.”
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
view all 68 quotes
Related topics
science
religion
universe
humanity
books
stars
invention
knowledge
nature
earth
truth
time
imagination
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space
God
reality
fear
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understanding
Related sources
Cosmos
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Contact
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The Demon-Haunted World
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Pale Blue Dot
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