Carl Sagan

Quotes

• “If we are to prevent this climactic danger from working its worst, we will simply all have to work together, and for a l...”
• “We are the local embodiment of a Cosmos grown to selfawareness. We have begun to contemplate our origins: starstuff pond...”
• “At the heart of science is an essential balance between two seemingly contradictory attitudes - an openness to new ideas...”
• “The major religions on the Earth contradict each other left and right. You can't all be correct. And what if all of you ...”
• “If I were to propose to you that my arm could be in this position or in that position but it would be forbidden by the l...”
• “What distinguishes our species is thought. The cerebral cortex is in a way a liberation. We need no longer be trapped in...”
• “Imagine, a room, awash in gasoline. And there are two implacable enemies in that room. One of them has 9,000 matches. Th...”
• “The idea that a God or gods is necessary to effect one or more of these origins has been under repeated attack over the ...”
• “Very few scientists actually plunge into the murky waters of testing or challenging borderline or pseudo-scientific beli...”
• “Without these experimental tests, very few physicists would have accepted general relativity. There are many hypotheses ...”
• “If such things were fated by the stars then perhaps there were hidden patterns underlying the unpredictable chaos of dai...”
• “Eratosthenes was the director of the great library of Alexandria, the Centre of science and learning in the ancient worl...”
• “We on Earth have just awakened to the great oceans of space and time from which we have emerged. We are the legacy of 15...”
• “We've tended in our cosmologies to make things familiar. Despite all our best efforts, we've not been very inventive. In...”
• “St. Anselm argued that since we can imagine a perfect being, he must exist-because he would not be perfect without the a...”
• “There is no way to tell whether the patterns extracted by the right hemisphere are real or imagined without subjecting t...”
• “Humans may crave absolute certainty; they may aspire to it; they may pretend, as partisans of certain religions do, to h...”
• “There is in the lovely Martian landscape not a footprint, not an artifact, not even an old beer can, not a blade of gras...”
• “All my life, I've wondered about life beyond the earth. On those countless other planets that we think circle other suns...”
• “In science it often happens that scientists say, "You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken," and ...”
• “The inhibitions placed on the irresponsible use of technology are weak, often half-hearted, and almost always, worldwide...”
• “Let's say there's a molecule that produces a religious experience... a natural molecule that the body produces whose fun...”
• “I wish to propose a doctrine which may, I fear, appear wildly paradoxical and subversive. The doctrine in question is th...”
• “The idea that as I walk in this direction my watch goes slightly slower and I am contracted in the direction of motion a...”
• “Vigorous criticism is more constructive in science than in some other areas of human endeavor because in science there a...”
• “I sit surrounded by cartons of mail from people all over the planet who mourn Carl's loss. Many of them credit him with ...”
• “The entire recent history of biology shows that we are, to a remarkable degree, the results of the interactions of an ex...”
• “A scientific colleague tells me about a recent trip to the New Guinea highlands where she visited a stone age culture ha...”
• “Those afraid of the universe as it really is, those who pretend to nonexistent knowledge and envision a Cosmos centered ...”
• “The way to find out about our place in the universe is by examining the universe and by examining ourselves-without prec...”
• “There is no doubt that right-hemisphere intuitive thinking may perceive patterns and connections too difficult for the l...”
• “Once upon a time, the best minds of the human species believed that the planets were attached to crystal spheres. ...Bot...”
• “In some respects, science has far surpassed religion in delivering awe. How is it that hardly any major religion has loo...”
• “For many people, the shoddily thought out doctrines of borderline science are the closest approximation to comprehensibl...”
• “The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together. Information dis...”
• “And we who embody the local eyes and ears and thoughts and feelings of the cosmos we've begun, at last, to wonder about ...”
• “We are ignorant about the complex mutual dependencies of the beings on earth, and what the sequential consequences will ...”
• “The amount of organic matter that could have been produced in the first few hundred million years of Earth history was s...”
• “Natural selection has served as a kind of intellectual sieve, producing brains and intelligences increasingly competent ...”
• “Society corrupts the best of us. It is a little unfair, I think, to criticize a person for not sharing the enlightenment...”
• “We embarked on our journey to the stars with a question first framed in the childhood of our species and in each generat...”
• “A central lesson of science is that to understand complex issues (or even simple ones), we must try to free our minds of...”
• “One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of t...”
• “The most significant aspect of the DNA story is that the fundamental processes of life now seem fully understandable in ...”
• “Projected upon the natural world... is the idea of privilege. ...Ever since the invention of civilization, there have be...”
• “That in nonarithmetic operations the small and slow human brain can still do so much better than the large and fast elec...”
• “Cannabis also enhances the enjoyment of sex - on the one hand it gives an exquisite sensitivity, but on the other hand i...”
• “Let's see if I've got this straight," he returned. It was a phrase of hers that he had adopted "It's a lazy Saturday aft...”
• “Many religions lay out a set of precepts... and claim that these instructions were given by a god or gods. For example, ...”
• “I do not regard the late Carl Sagan as any kind of authority. On the contrary, as this book will show, I regard him in m...”