Carl Sagan

Carl Sagan

"Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere."
155 Quotes
"Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere."
Carl Sagan
"Personally, I would be delighted if there were a life after death, especially if it permitted me to continue to learn about this world and others, if it gave me a chance to discover how history turns out."
Carl Sagan
"I am often amazed at how much more capability and enthusiasm for science there is among elementary school youngsters than among college students."
Carl Sagan
"We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology."
Carl Sagan
"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
"Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense."
Carl Sagan
"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
"For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love."
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
"We are a way for the cosmos to know itself."
Carl Sagan Cosmos
"I don't want to believe. I want to know."
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
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