Carl Sagan Quotes
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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.
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There is no question that religions have historically played the role of making people contented with their lot. ...such a doctrine would be very appealing to the ruling classes of a society. ...Many societies, for this reason alone, encourage the contentment with your lot that the religious premise of heaven affords.
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In the vastness of the Cosmos there must be other civilizations far older and more advanced than ours.
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Most of the people that I deal with are human. So I've had a lot of experience with that.
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Something dreadful happens to students between first and twelfth grades, and it's not just puberty.
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We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it's forever.
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I think people in power have a vested interest to oppose critical thinking.
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Astronomically, the U. S. S. R. and the United States are the same place.
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Every thinking person fears nuclear war and every technological nation plans for it. Everyone knows it's madness, and every country has an excuse.
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If a marker were to be erected today, it might read, in homage to his scientific courage: 'He preferred the hard truth to his dearest illusions.'
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The history of science-especially physics-has in part been the tension between the natural tendency to project our everyday experience on the universe and the universe's noncompliance...
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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.
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No other planet in the solar system is a suitable home for human beings; it's this world or nothing. That's a very powerful perception.
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If there's nothing in here but atoms, does that make us less or does that make matter more?
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We are the representatives of the cosmos; we are an example of what hydrogen atoms can do, given 15 billion years of cosmic evolution.
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The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion and politics, but it is not the path to knowledge; it has no place in the endeavor of science.
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A tiny blue dot set in a sunbeam. Here it is. That's where we live. That's home. We humans are one species and this is our world. It is our responsibility to cherish it. Of all the worlds in our solar system, the only one so far as we know, graced by life.
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A googolplex is precisely as far from infinity as is the number 1... no matter what number you have in mind, infinity is larger still.
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If we crave some cosmic purpose, then let us find ourselves a worthy goal.
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This is Phobos... Its mean density is known, and it is consistent with organic matter. Deimos... same story.
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Carbonaceous meteorites that fall to the Earth... have several percent to as much as 10 percent of complex organic matter in them.
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This image of four spectra is taken from one of Huggins's publications. ...You can see that the Comet Winnecke resembles olive oil more than it does Comet Brorsen.
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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. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark.
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It’s hard to kill a creature once it lets you see its consciousness.