Carl Sagan famous quotes

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

#Life #Art #Motivation

If you look at Earth from space you see a dot, that's here. That's home. That's us. It underscores the responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
-- Carl Sagan

#Home #Responsibility #Blue

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

#Positive #Waiting #Incredibles

The brain is like a muscle. When it is in use we feel very good. Understanding is joyous.
-- Carl Sagan

#Wisdom #Understanding #Brain

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.
-- Carl Sagan

#Motivational #Science #Technology

It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
-- Carl Sagan

#Death #Witty #Atheist

Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense.
-- Carl Sagan

#Atheist #Mean #Science

Who are we, if not measured by our impact on others?
-- Carl Sagan

#Impact

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

#Love #Inspirational #Perspective

The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both.
-- Carl Sagan

#Science #Doe #Spirituality

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

#God #Spiritual #Philosophy

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

#Education #Atheist #Thinking

Our ancestors worshipped the Sun, and they were not that foolish. It makes sense to revere the Sun and the stars, for we are their children.
-- Carl Sagan

#Stars #Children #Sun

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

#Love #Inspirational #Life

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

#Knowledge #Science #Thinking

For me, the most ironic token of [the first human moon landing] is the plaque signed by President Richard M. Nixon that Apollo 11 took to the moon. It reads, ‘We came in peace for all Mankind.’ As the United States was dropping seven and a half megatons of conventional explosives on small nations in Southeast Asia, we congratulated ourselves on our humanity. We would harm no one on a lifeless rock.
-- Carl Sagan

#Moon #Rocks #Humanity

Humans — who enslave, castrate, experiment on, and fillet other animals — have had an understandable penchant for pretending animals do not feel pain. A sharp distinction between humans and 'animals' is essential if we are to bend them to our will, make them work for us, wear them, eat them — without any disquieting tinges of guilt or regret. It is unseemly of us, who often behave so unfeelingly toward other animals, to contend that only humans can suffer. The behavior of other animals renders such pretensions specious. They are just too much like us.
-- Carl Sagan

#Pain #Regret #Animal

Think of how many religions attempt to validate themselves with prophecy. Think of how many people rely on these prophecies, however vague, however unfulfilled, to support or prop up their beliefs. Yet has there ever been a religion with the prophetic accuracy and reliability of science? ... No other human institution comes close.
-- Carl Sagan

#Science #Thinking #People

A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called "leaves") imprinted with dark pigmented squiggles. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. 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

#Inspirational #Funny #Book

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

#Stars #Dna #Blood

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

#Ambition #Science #Perfect

Every star may be a sun to someone.
-- Carl Sagan

#Stars #May #Sun

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.
-- Carl Sagan

#Respect #Thinking #Intelligent

My fundamental premise about the brain is that its workings - what we sometimes call "mind" - are a consequence of its anatomy and physiology, and nothing more.
-- Carl Sagan

#Brain #Mind #Fundamentals

Every kid starts out as a natural-born scientist, and then we beat it out of them. A few trickle through the system with their wonder and enthusiasm for science intact.
-- Carl Sagan

#Children #Kids #Science

we make our world significant by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers
-- Carl Sagan

#Patience #Our World #Depth

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

#Lonely #War #Ocean

In the way that scepticism is sometimes applied to issues of public concern, there is a tendency to belittle, to condescend, to ignore the fact that, deluded or not, supporters of superstition and pseudoscience are human beings with real feelings, who, like the sceptics, are trying to figure out how the world works and what our role in it might be. Their motives are in many cases consonant with science. If their culture has not given them all the tools they need to pursue this great quest, let us temper our criticism with kindness. None of us comes fully equipped.
-- Carl Sagan

#Kindness #Fear #Real

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

#Destruction #Deserve

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

#Book #Magic #Proof

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

#Atheist #Science #Judging

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

#Science #Thinking #Understanding

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

#Atheist #Science #Ideas

We seem, these days, much more willing to recognize the perils before us than we were even a decade ago. The newly recognized dangers threaten all of us, equally. No one can say how it will turn out down here. But this is also, we may note, the first time that a species has become able to journey to the planets and the stars. Sailors on a becalmed sea, we sense a stirring of the breeze.
-- Carl Sagan

#Stars #Journey #Sea

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

#Beautiful #Dream #Cutting

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

#Philosophy #Religion #Doctrine

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?
-- Carl Sagan

#Inspirational #Life #Truth

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

#Funny #Brother #Laughter

The illegality of cannabis is outrageous, an impediment to full utilization of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship so desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world.
-- Carl Sagan

#Weed #Marijuana #Mad

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.
-- Carl Sagan

#Ignorance #Technology #Blow

Science is an attempt, largely successful, to understand the world, to get a grip on things, to get hold of ourselves, to steer a safe course. Microbiology and meteorology now explain what only a few centuries ago was considered sufficient cause to burn women to death.
-- Carl Sagan

#Successful #Meteorology #World

The significance of our lives and our fragile planet is then determined only by our own wisdom and courage. We are the custodians of life's meaning. We long for a Parent to care for us, to forgive us our errors, to save us from our childish mistakes. But knowledge is preferable to ignorance. Better by far to embrace the hard truth than a reassuring fable. If we crave some cosmic purpose, then let us find ourselves a worthy goal.
-- Carl Sagan

#Mistake #Ignorance #Errors

The cosmos is full beyond measure of elegant truths / of exquisite interrelationships / of the awesome machinery of nature
-- Carl Sagan

#Cosmos #Machinery #Exquisite

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

#Knowledge #Past #Political

A still more glorious dawn awaits / not a sunrise, but a galaxy-rise / a morning filled with 400 billion suns / the rising of the milky way
-- Carl Sagan

#Morning #Sunrise #Dawn

If constellations had been named in the 20th century, I suppose we would see bicycles.
-- Carl Sagan

#Century #Constellations #20th Century

The old appeals to racial, sexual and religious chauvinism to rabid nationalist fervor, are beginning not to work.
-- Carl Sagan

#Religious #Appeals #Chauvinism

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

#Stupid #Believe #Intelligent

History is full of people who out of fear, or ignorance, or lust for power has destroyed knowledge of immeasurable value which truly belongs to us all. We must not let it happen again.
-- Carl Sagan

#Ignorance #People #Lust

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

#Years #Events #Would Be

In many cultures it is customary to answer that God created the universe out of nothing. But this is mere temporizing. If we wish courageously to pursue the question, we must, of course ask next where God comes from? And if we decide this to be unanswerable, why not save a step and conclude that the universe has always existed?
-- Carl Sagan

#Atheist #Wish #Culture

If you want to save your child from polio, you can pray or you can inoculate....Try science.
-- Carl Sagan

#Atheist #Children #Trying

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

#Wise #Discovery #Today

Recent research shows that many children who do not have enough to eat wind up with diminished capacity to understand and learn. Children don't have to be starving for this to happen. Even mild undernutrition - the kind most common among poor people in America - can do it.
-- Carl Sagan

#Children #Wind #America

I believe that in every person is a kind of circuit which resonates to intellectual discovery-and the idea is to make that resonance work
-- Carl Sagan

#Believe #Discovery #Ideas

The cosmos is within us. We are made of star stuff
-- Carl Sagan

#Stars #Cosmos #Stuff

What counts is not what sounds plausible, not what we would like to believe, not what one or two witnesses claim, but only what is supported by hard evidence rigorously and skeptically examined. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
-- Carl Sagan

#Believe #Two #Sound

Your religion assumes that people are children and need a boogeyman so they'll behave. You want people to believe in God so they'll obey the law. That's the only means that occurs to you: a strict secular police force, and the threat of punishment by an all-seeing God for whatever the police overlook. You sell human beings short.
-- Carl Sagan

#Children #Believe #Mean

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?
-- Carl Sagan

#Doe #Atoms #Matter

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

#Thinking #Civilization #Support

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

#Fun #Science #People

The sacred truth of science is that there are no sacred truths.
-- Carl Sagan

#Sacred

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

#Happiness #Strong #Fool

In the fabric of space and in the nature of matter, as in a great work of art, there is, written small, the artist's signature.
-- Carl Sagan

#Art #Space #Signatures

Every aspect of Nature reveals a deep mystery and touches our sense of wonder and awe. Those afraid of the universe as it really is, those who pretend to nonexistent knowledge and envision a Cosmos centered on human beings will prefer the fleeting comforts of superstition. They avoid rather than confront the world. But those with the courage to explore the weave and structure of the Cosmos, even where it differs profoundly from their wishes and prejudices, will penetrate its deepest mysteries.
-- Carl Sagan

#Knowledge #Science #Wish

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

#War

Every cell is a triumph of natural selection, and we’re made of trillions of cells. Within us, is a little universe.
-- Carl Sagan

#Cells #Littles #Triumph

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.
-- Carl Sagan

#Light #Self #Pale

Science is not perfect. It's often misused; it's only a tool, but it's the best tool we have. Self-correcting , ever changing, applicable to everything: with this tool, we vanquish the impossible.
-- Carl Sagan

#Self #Perfect #Tools

One of the greatest gifts adults can give - to their offspring and to their society - is to read to children.
-- Carl Sagan

#Children #Educational #Giving

There is today-in a time when old beliefs are withering-a kind of philosophical hunger, a need to know who we are and how we got here. It is an on-going search, often unconscious, for a cosmic perspective for humanity
-- Carl Sagan

#Philosophical #Perspective #Humanity

Our passion for learning ... is our tool for survival.
-- Carl Sagan

#Passion #Survival #Tools

We are rare and precious because we are alive, because we can think as well as we can. We are privileged to influence and perhaps control our future. I believe we have an obligation to fight for life on Earth - not just for ourselves, but for all those, humans and others, who came before us, and to whom we are beholden, and for all those who, if we are wise enough, will come after.
-- Carl Sagan

#Wise #Believe #Fighting

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’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.
-- Carl Sagan

#Taken #Science #Long

Even Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel, and Albert Einstein made serious mistakes. But the scientific enterprise arranges things so that teamwork prevails: What one of us, even the most brilliant among us, misses, another of us, even someone much less celebrated and capable, may detect and rectify.
-- Carl Sagan

#Teamwork #Mistake #Missing

Who are we, if not measured by our impact on others? That’s who we are! We’re not who we say we are, we’re not who we want to be - we are the sum of the influence and impact that we have, in our lives, on others.
-- Carl Sagan

#Impact #Want #Who We Are

There is every reason to think that in the coming years Mars and its mysteries will become increasingly familiar to the inhabitants of the Planet Earth.
-- Carl Sagan

#Thinking #Years #Mars

Be grateful everyday for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides.
-- Carl Sagan

#Grateful #Opportunity #Everyday

But nature is always more subtle, more intricate, more elegant than what we are able to imagine.
-- Carl Sagan

#Able #Imagine #Subtle

Imagine we could accelerate continuously at 1 g-what we're comfortable with on good old terra firma-to the midpoint of our voyage, and decelerate continuously at 1 g until we arrive at our destination. It would take a day to get to Mars, a week and a half to Pluto, a year to the Oort Cloud, and a few years to the nearest stars.
-- Carl Sagan

#Stars #Years #Space

A general problem with much of Western theology in my view is that the god portrayed is too small. It is a god of a tiny world and not a god of a galaxy much less of a universe.
-- Carl Sagan

#Views #World #Tiny

But down deep, at the molecular heart of life we're essentially identical to trees.
-- Carl Sagan

#Heart #Tree #Identical

Better by far to embrace the hard truth than a reassuring fable. If we crave some cosmic purpose, then let us find ourselves a worthy goal.
-- Carl Sagan

#Goal #Purpose #Fables

Not all birds can fly. What separates the flyers from the walkers is the ability to take off.
-- Carl Sagan

#Bird #Aviation #Flyers

If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you.
-- Carl Sagan

#Science #Ideas #Skeptical

For all our failings, despite our limitations and fallibilities, we humans are capable of greatness.
-- Carl Sagan

#Greatness #Failing #Fallibility

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

#Attitude #Mistake #Mind

I also wish that the Pledge of Allegiance were directed at the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, as it is when the President takes his oath of office, rather than to the flag and the nation
-- Carl Sagan

#Rights #Office #Wish

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.
-- Carl Sagan

#Opportunity #Brain #Pathways

Humans - who enslave, castrate, experiment on, and fillet other animals - have had an understandable penchant for pretending animals do not feel pain.
-- Carl Sagan

#Inspirational #Pain #Animal

We are the product of 4.5 billion years of fortuitous, slow biological evolution. There is no reason to think that the evolutionary process has stopped. Man is a transitional animal. He is not the climax of creation.
-- Carl Sagan

#Animal #Men #Thinking

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

#Humility #Home #Waiting

The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home.
-- Carl Sagan

#Home #Understanding #Age

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.
-- Carl Sagan

#War #Earth #Consciousness

If we say that God has always been, why not save a step and conclude that the universe has always been?
-- Carl Sagan

#Atheist #Why Not #Steps

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
-- Carl Sagan

#Humility #Thinking #Blood

Anything else you're interested in is not going to happen if you can't breathe the air and drink the water. Don't sit this one out. Do something. You are by accident of fate alive at an absolutely critical moment in the history of our planet.
-- Carl Sagan

#Fate #Air #Water

If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you. You become a crotchety old person convinced that nonsense is ruling the world. (There is, of course, much data to support you.) But every now and then, a new idea turns out to be on the mark, valid and wonderful. If you are too much in the habit of being skeptical about everything, you are going to miss or resent it, and either way you will be standing in the way of understanding and progress.
-- Carl Sagan

#Science #Data #Ideas

I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudo-science and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive.
-- Carl Sagan

#Song #Years #Worry

I believe that the extraordinary should be pursued. But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
-- Carl Sagan

#Believe #Science #Claims