Carl Sagan
"We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology."
149 Quotes
"We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology."
Carl Sagan
"It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring."
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
"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
"One of the great commandments of science is, "Mistrust arguments from authority." (Scientists, being primates, and thus given to dominance hierarchies, of course do not always follow this commandment.) Too many such arguments have proved too painfully wrong. Authorities must prove their contentions like everybody else. This independence of science, its occasional unwillingness to accept conventional wisdom, makes it dangerous to doctrines less self critical, or with pretensions of certitude."
Carl Sagan
"But if the Bible is not everywhere literally true, which parts are divinely inspired and which are merely fallible and human? As soon as we admit that there are scriptural mistakes (or concessions to the ignorance of the times), then how can the Bible be an inerrant guide to ethics and morals? Might sects and individuals now accept as authentic the parts of the Bible they like, and reject those that are inconvenient or burdensome?"
Carl Sagan
"Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception."
Carl Sagan
The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God
"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
"The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together."
Carl Sagan
Cosmos
"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
"What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.[Cosmos, Part 11: The Persistence of Memory (1980)]"
Carl Sagan
Cosmos
"We all have a thirst for wonder. It's a deeply human quality. Science and religion are both bound up with it. What I'm saying is, you don't have to make stories up, you don't have to exaggerate. There's wonder and awe enough in the real world. Nature's a lot better at inventing wonders than we are."
Carl Sagan
Contact
"In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would 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
"Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light‐years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual. So are our emotions in the presence of great art or music or literature, or acts of exemplary selfless courage such as those of Mohandas Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. The notion that science and spirituality are somehow mutually exclusive does a disservice to both."
Carl Sagan
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
"Major scientific insights are characteristically intuitive, and equally characteristically described in scientific papers by linear analytical arguments. There is no anomaly in this: it is, rather, just as it should be. The creative act has major right-hemisphere components. But arguments on thevalidity of the result are largely left-hemisphere functions."
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
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