Carl Sagan

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

It pays to keep an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out.
– Carl Sagan

The nuclear arms race is like two sworn enemies standing waist deep in gasoline, one with
three matches, the other with five.
– Carl Sagan

It is of interest to note that while some dolphins are reported to have learned English – up to fifty words used in correct context – no human being has been reported to have learned dolphinese.
– Carl Sagan

Every thinking person fears nuclear war and every technological nation plans for it. Everyone knows it’s madness, and every country has an excuse.
– Carl Sagan

If we can’t think for ourselves, if we’re unwilling to question authority, then we’re just putty in the hands of those in power. But if the citizens are educated and form their own opinions, then those in power work for us.
– Carl Sagan

Who are we? 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.
– Carl Sagan

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

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.
– Carl Sagan

But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
– Carl Sagan

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.
– Carl Sagan

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.
– Carl Sagan

You’re an interesting species. An interesting mix. You’re capable of such beautiful dreams, and such horrible nightmares. You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you’re not. See, in all our searching, the only thing we’ve found that makes the emptiness bearable, is each other.
– Carl Sagan

In science it often happens that scientists say, “You know that’s a really good argument; my position is mistaken,” and then they actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn’t happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.
– Carl Sagan

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

We have designed our civilization based on science and technology and at the same time
arranged things so that almost no one understands anything at all about science and
technology. This is a clear prescription for disaster.
– Carl Sagan

Not explaining science seems to me perverse. When you’re in love, you want to tell the world.
– Carl Sagan

The politicians and the religious leaders and the weapons scientists have been at it for a long time and they’ve made a thorough mess of it. I mean, we’re in deep trouble.
– Carl Sagan

We have found that scientific laws pervade all of nature, that the same rules apply on Earth as in the skies, that we can find a resonance, a harmony, between the way we think and the way the world works.
– Carl Sagan

An organism at war with itself is doomed.
– Carl Sagan

The question (Do you believe in God?) has a peculiar structure. If I say no, do I mean I’m
convinced God doesn’t exist, or do I mean I’m not convinced he does exist? Those are two
very different questions.
– Carl Sagan

My view is that if there is no evidence for it, then forget about it. An agnostic is somebody
who doesn’t believe in something until there is evidence for it, so I’m agnostic.
– Carl Sagan

Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.
– Carl Sagan

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.
– Carl Sagan

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

In a democracy, opinions that upset everyone are sometimes exactly what we need. We
should be teaching our children the scientific method and the Bill of Rights.
– Carl Sagan

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.
– Carl Sagan

Since, in the long run, every planetary society will be endangered by impacts from space,
every surviving civilization is obliged to become space faring – not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: Staying alive.
– Carl Sagan

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

It’s a lazy Saturday afternoon, there’s a couple lying naked in bed reading Encyclopedia
Brittannica to each other, and arguing about whether the Andromeda Galaxy is more
“numinous” than the Ressurection. Do they know how to have a good time, or don’t they?
– Carl Sagan

In the vastness of the Cosmos there must be other civilizations far older and more advanced  than ours.
– Carl Sagan

Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.
– Carl Sagan

You can’t convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it’s based on a deep seated need to believe.
– Carl Sagan

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.
– Carl Sagan

History is full of people who out of fear or ignorance or the lust for power have destroyed
treasures of immeasurable value which truly belong to all of us. We must not let it happen
again.
– Carl Sagan

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

The evidence, so far at least and laws of Nature aside, does not require a Designer. Maybe
there is one hiding, maddeningly unwilling to be revealed.
– Carl Sagan

The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion or in politics, but it is not the path to knowledge, and there’s no place for it in the endeavor of science. We do not know beforehand where fundamental insights will arise from about our mysterious and lovely solar system. The history of our study of our solar system shows us clearly that accepted and conventional ideas are often wrong, and that fundamental insights can arise from the most unexpected sources.
– Carl Sagan

The sky calls to us. If we do not destroy ourselves, we will one day venture to the stars.
– Carl Sagan

The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what’s true.
– Carl Sagan

In a cosmic perspective, most human concerns seem insignificant, even petty. And yet our
species is young and curious and brave and shows much promise.
– Carl Sagan

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: 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 is simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been so credulous.
– Carl Sagan

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

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
– Carl Sagan

A religion old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science, might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths. Sooner or later, such a religion will emerge.
– Carl Sagan

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate… Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
– Carl Sagan

There are no forbidden questions in science, no matters too sensitive or delicate to be
probed, no sacred truths.
– Carl Sagan

Look, all I’m asking is for you to just have the tiniest bit of vision. You know, to just sit back
for one minute and look at the big picture.
– Carl Sagan

The method of science is tried and true. It is not perfect, it’s just the best we have. And to
abandon it with its skeptical protocols is the pathway to a dark age.
– Carl Sagan

You could just as well say that an agnostic is a deeply religious person with at least a
rudimentary knowledge of human fallibility.
– Carl Sagan

Exactly the same technology can be used for good and for evil. It is as if there were a God
who said to us, “I set before you two ways: You can use your technology to destroy
yourselves or to carry you to the planets and the stars. It’s up to you.”
– Carl Sagan

Education on the value of free speech and the other freedoms reserved by the Bill of Rights, about what happens when you don’t have them, and about how to exercise and protect them, should be an essential prerequisite for being an American citizen.
– Carl Sagan

Atheism is more than just the knowledge that gods do not exist, and that religion is either a mistake or a fraud. Atheism is an attitude, a frame of mind that looks at the world
objectively, fearlessly, always trying to understand all things as a part of nature.
– Carl Sagan

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

One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.
– Carl Sagan

Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth. Our obligation to survive is owed not just to ourselves but also to that Cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring.
– Carl Sagan

You have to know the past to understand the present.
– Carl Sagan

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
The idea that God is an oversized white male with a flowing beard who sits in the sky and
tallies the fall of every sparrow is ludicrous. But if by God one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally
unsatisfying… it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.
– Carl Sagan

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

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.
– Carl Sagan

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

I consider it an extremely dangerous doctrine, because the more likely we are to assume that the solution comes from the outside, the less likely we are to solve our problems ourselves.
– Carl Sagan

By exploring other worlds we safeguard this one. By itself, I think this fact more than justifies the money our species has spent in sending ships to other worlds. It is our fate to live during one of the most perilous and, at the same time, one of the most hopeful chapters in human history.
– Carl Sagan

The visions we offer our children shape the future.
– Carl Sagan

Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic
understanding of how the world works.
– Carl Sagan

Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.
– Carl Sagan

We wish to find the truth, no matter where it lies. But to find the truth we need imagination and skepticism both. We will not be afraid to speculate, but we will be careful to distinguish speculation from fact.
– Carl Sagan

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

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.
– Carl Sagan

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